Last week, the Prime Minister repeated his and the Coalition Government’s commitment to the Big Society.

The Prime Minister said that “..the Big Society is about a huge culture change where people in their every day lives, in their homes, in their neighbourhoods, in their work places – don’t always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face but instead feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities”.

The Prime Minister went on to say that the Big Society is “..about saying if we want real change for the long term, we need people to come together and work together”.

And the Prime Minister made clear that:

“…the success of the Big Society will depend on the daily decisions of millions of people – on them giving their time, effort, even money, to causes around them”.

My whole political life has been predated on the basis that we will only make progress if we all accept responsibility so far as possible for ourselves, our families, and the communities in which we live and I share responsibility for the communities in which we live and don’t simply expect that “the State” will solve all our problems for us.

However, I am concerned at what appears to be a potential and, I suspect, entirely unintended and unwitting conflict between the Coalition Government’s very understandable desire on the one hand to promote the Big Society and the Coalition Government’s necessity to cut the budget deficit.

All around the country, there are carers’ centres.

In my constituency in Banbury we have the North and West Oxfordshire Carers’ Centre.

This is a Carers’ Centre which has now been open for some 19 years.

It was originally a pilot Carers’ Centre for the Princess Royal Trust for Carers.

It was so successful that it has been running now for nearly two decades.

And such has been the dedication and commitment of the volunteers that the centre has won the Queen’s Award for unsung heroes.

- one of very few such awards in Oxfordshire,

The Banbury Carers’ Centre like the Oxford and South Oxfordshire Carers’ Centres are comprised of a mixture of experienced volunteers and some paid staff.

The Banbury Carers’ Centre is a registered charity in its own right.

The Banbury Carers’ Centre raises each year by its own fund-raising a not insignificant amount of money, so for example every year for as long as I can recall, the Banbury business community have generously supported a Charity Golf Day in support of the Banbury Carers’ Centre and every year for as long as I can remember, I have bought and donated a case of House of Commons whisky as one of the auction prizes for the Charity Golf Day.

But that is just one of many fund-raising events undertaken by the Banbury Carers’ Centre.

They help train carers.

They provide outreach services for carers.

They provide a place where carers and different types of carers can come and meet, share experiences, unwind and support each other.

As we all know, carers come in many kinds from young carers to very elderly spouses still looking after a much loved husband or wife.

In undertaking this valuable work, for many years the Banbury Carers’ Centre has received funds from Oxfordshire County Council to deliver specific agreed services to carers.

I had always considered it axiomatic that the reason the County Council was procuring these services from the volunteer carers’ centres was exactly the reasons set out in the arguments put forward by the Prime Minister in support of “the Big Society” that carers’ centres and their volunteers were exactly the people who were making a difference, were informed and in contact with other carers and were in the best position to understand articulate and meet carers’ needs.

Volunteers who are exactly the people that the Prime Minister is describing. People who come together and work together to affect social change and to improve life for carers.

Obviously in respect of any funds allocated by the County Council, that is public money and there have always been agreed objectives with the Carers’ Centres and as far as I am aware there has never been a scintilla of a suggestion that the Banbury Carers’ Centre or any of the other carers’ centres in Oxfordshire have failed to meet the objectives with which they have agreed with the County Council.

However, Oxfordshire County Council, like every other local authority, is having to make savings in their budget.

They are having to make a number of in-year savings.

As I understand it, as a consequence of a need to make savings, they are proposing withdrawing their funding from the carers’ centres in Oxfordshire and replacing that service by a telephone call centre, almost certainly run from outside of the county to which carers will be able to call.

Part of the justification of this move, in addition to the need to save money, is an assertion that it will help them reach more carers. However, there doesn’t appear to have been any or any real discussion with the existing carers’ centres as to the number of carers that they are already reaching and with great respect to the officers of the County Council involved in this work, the Banbury Carers’ Centre has now very effectively been running for twenty years, reaching out to more and more carers in the north and west of Oxfordshire.

I would suggest the issue here is not with the ability or the capacity of carers’ centres to reach out, it is that many people who are carers simply don’t recognise themselves as being carers and if they don’t recognise themselves as being carers, they are no more likely to ring a carers’ telephone hotline.

As I have said on numerous occasions and speeches in the House of Commons, we need to have a collective effort to help carers voluntary register as carers so they see themselves as being carers, so that the community understands that they are carers.

So that they are recognised as being carers by GPs or if young carers, that they are recognised as being carers by their schools but one does not need to withdraw funding from carers’ centres to achieve that objective, it requires a sustained campaign in GPs surgeries, in the schools, and in the media to make people ask the question “are you a carer?” – and if you are a carer, to what help and support should you be receiving?

I suspect that for many years, GPs haven’t been asking the question of whether someone is a carer, simply because there has been realistically very little that they could do to support them. However, now that PCTs have funds to support respite care, GPs are in a position to refer carers for respite care and short holiday breaks and for that reason alone, one would hope that every GP practice would know which of their registered patients are also carers.

I think the reality is as follows:

that for many years central government has used local government to support a whole range of social interventions.

It has obviously made administrative sense for central government to distribute funds to local government to bring about social or policy changes that central government would wish to see.

So not unsurprisingly money for carers’ breaks is given in part to PCTs and given in part to local Councils.

However, and very often, this has been done through general powers without any specific statutory provision.

If so, when local government is obliged to retrench to save money, cut back, make their contribution towards tackling the deficit, they perfectly understandably start by retrenching and reducing funding from those organisations and activities for which they have no immediate responsibility.

However, there are a whole number of key services in any local area from carers’ centres to citizens’ advice bureaux, which over the years have come to expect a certain level of public funding, simply because for every year, there has been a consistent level of public funding. And there are a very large number of voluntary groups, active citizens, already undertaking hours and hours worth of constructive voluntary work within our community who to a certain extent depend on some funding from local government, although in almost every instance they themselves in addition to being volunteers also raise considerable amounts of money themselves and there is a risk that such good work can inadvertently be undermined by their budgets being cut.

The alternative of course is to allow organisations such as the Banbury Carers’ Centre to bid direct to central government to provide carers’ services.

Here we appear to be somewhat bedevilled that Oxfordshire County Council, for example, has decided to bundle up all its carers’ contracts into a single contract, thus bringing it within the parameters of the EU procurement directives and requiring compulsory tendering, which again has the almost certain potential that it makes it much more difficult for local voluntary organisations effectively to bid or put charities that are at a national level in the position that the only way in which they can support local carers’ centres is that they as national organisations have to bid effectively for county or regional franchises.

But this would appear to run completely counter to the desire for localism and such provision and services and activity to start locally and bottom up rather than having been delivered by top down national organisations.

I think we all have to accept that these are particularly difficult and unusual times.

No peace time government has had to tackle a similar financial deficit.

We need to develop the Big Society.

We need to tackle the national deficit.

We need to see how we can best reconcile these two policy objectives.

We have to accept that local government is facing difficult decisions.

We have got to work through this.

However, to start with we have to recognise and acknowledge that there are some real tensions here that need to be worked through.