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This chapter charts the relationships between the state and the voluntary sector under the 1997–2010 Labour governments. The period inaugurated a new stage in the social welfare role of voluntary action, which has developed since the nineteenth century from leading provision, through complementarity and supplementarity with regards to state welfare programmes in the twentieth century, and into the partnership seen at the start of the twenty-first century. Charting the various initiatives and institutional innovations of these years, the chapter makes the case for a ‘strategic unity’ amongst all the key agents and agencies, who had a collective interest in maintaining and developing the third sector as a space for policy intervention and forward planning. Overall, it demonstrates the significance of adaptation and renewal within the sector, rather than decline or co-option.

This introductory chapter provides the historical background to the rise of the Big Society, surveying the history of voluntarism over the last century. Politicians and commentators have long bemoaned the supposed decline of civic life, fretting about its health and its future. In fact, the real story of voluntarism over the last hundred years has not been decline, but constant evolution and change. Whether the terms charity, philanthropy, civil society, non-governmental organisations, the third sector or the Big Society are used, voluntary endeavour is one of the most vibrant and dynamic areas of British public life. Voluntarism not only continues to thrive, but is also far larger than any political agenda that may be imposed upon it.

This chapter deals with how the Korean state has been ruled through a less well-known partnership of government and civil society, in the form of voluntary agencies. Along with a symbiotic partnership with big business, it has also depended from the outset on a second and intrinsic coalition with voluntary agencies, for its effective provision of social services. Over time, voluntary counterparts have been altered, ranging from foreign relief agencies in the period of aid economy, through quasi-voluntary organisations during the period of authoritarian developmentalism, to advocacy civic groups in the post-democratization era. Government has relied on a combination of legal and institutional strategies to tie voluntarism with social accountability for service provision. Voluntary agencies marshaled national networks to challenge or cooperate with state policies. Mixed governance has been shifting, depending on the capacity of voluntarism to influence state policies and the power balance between hard state and soft voluntarism.

This chapter explores the heightened professionalism of the voluntary sector as it adapted to the emergence of a new form of activist, as a way of analysing the utility of different methodological approaches. Using the case-study of voluntary action around smoking and illegal drugs, it demonstrates that the distinctions between old and new politics, between insider and outsider groups, simply ‘melt away’ when closely examined. Instead, the chapter pays attention on the ‘in between spaces’ of the oppositional models, where organisations merged counter-cultural presentation and thought with more traditional pressure-group and service-provision activity, and combined policy challenge with partnership-working, a balancing act enabled by a surprisingly permissive statutory funding regime.

This chapter discusses the evolution of voluntary sector counselling in Scotland that led up to the picture summarised in the 1989 directory in the framework of shifts that have characterized the voluntary sector. It explains how and why counselling was eagerly taken up by voluntary sector organisations in the 1980s and considers how and why counselling was redefined in rather narrower terms in the 1990s. Despite the progressive reduction in grants available for social welfare interventions, as the British government shifted the emphasis of urban policy to economic initiatives, the appeal of counselling continued to grow through the 1980s and into the 1990s. One factor was the use of a flexible definition of counselling that allowed it to be assimilated into a wide range of services, and another was a broadly sympathetic cultural and political context. The chapter also explains the changing geography and the changing role of volunteering in voluntary sector counselling provision in Scotland. It illustrates how processes at work within the voluntary sector in general — especially those associated with professionalisation — are played out within one arena of voluntary sector action.

Successive UK governments have sought to promote the role of the voluntary sector in criminal justice, a field traditionally dominated by public sector provision. A new wave of reform launched by the Conservative-led Coalition government sought to outsource probation services and introduce a ‘payment by results’ model to reward success in reducing reoffending rates. A new market for rehabilitation services has thus been under construction, based on ‘prime’ contractors and supply chains of sub-contracted providers. How would voluntary sector organisations fare in such a market? This chapter provides a review of these developments, offering an in-depth examination of the voluntary sector’s position in an unsettled criminal justice field at a crucial early stage of market shaping. The chapter assesses the attempts by voluntary sector advocates, and voluntary sector organisations themselves, to establish and maintain a viable footing in the emerging landscape of criminal justice.

Governance dynamics such as contracting, partnerships, networks and privatization have transformed the policy system into complex mix of networks and providers from the public, private and voluntary sectors. This chapter examines how voluntary organizations are contributing to policy in this new governance context and whether they have the policy capacity to sustain that contribution. The integration and realignment of service delivery systems holds great promise for voluntary organizations to balance their service delivery role with the democratic role of representation (which has too often been neglected over the years). User-centred and place-based models legitimize experiential evidence recognises the importance of the representation of interests in the very design and evaluation of programs. The challenge will continue to be the lack of stable and sustainable financing sources to support the capacity of voluntary organizations.

The voluntary sector is deeply implicated in and influenced by neoliberalism. The voluntary sector owes some of its growth to neoliberalism while acting as a substitute for the Keynesian welfare state, unable to match the latter’s scope, scale, coverage and universality. Rather, the voluntary sector is far more ad hoc, uncoordinated, asymmetrical and uneven, reflecting the vicarious nature of voluntary action and state support. So if the clustering of the voluntary sector in service hubs was Keynesian or even pre-Keynesian, the agents themselves have a complex relationship to both previous systems and the incompletely consolidating neoliberal one. The very complexity of this relationship animates two viewpoints on the voluntary sector: the dismissive, which sees it as a neoliberal stooge thoroughly enrolled in its projects, and the ambivalent to hopeful, which sees it as quasi-independent of the current governance structure, resilient and an important enabler of social resilience. This second viewpoint valorizes agency. This agency has led to very specific forms of spatial resilience and service hub geography, enabling both centrality and accessibility.

This chapter addresses the development of the concept of ‘enabling authority’. It examines the narrow version of enabling, involving the introduction of competitive tendering before looking at the more recent broader aspects, such as partnership with voluntary and private bodies and local quangos. The discussion shows how ideas of how a local authority should relate to the community have changed radically in two decades. The notion of ‘enabling’, with an emphasis on the means by which services were provided, has given way to the idea of community leadership.

Jewish voluntary sector care homes generally have a good reputation among local Jewish communities and the facilities that most provide are arguably among the best in the country. These homes have a long history of both financial and volunteer support by local Jewish communities, and are seen as key components of the Jewish voluntary sector. This chapter discusses the difference that voluntary sector organisations can make to the lived environments of older people in long-term institutional care. It argues that that critical to the added value of Jewish voluntary sector care homes is that they are able to foster a sense of home and ownership. These facilities are able to mitigate the loss of private space — associated with the move to almost any institution — by generating a shared sense of Jewish collective space. Given increasing regulatory requirements and the financial realities of providing services in a highly competitive long-term care market, the chapter considers what extra dimensions the voluntary sector can still offer to highly vulnerable older people.

This chapter discusses a substantial policy area where the basic principles of policies have largely remained the same throughout the UK. This includes the voluntary sector, housing, aspects of health and children's services. Also in this category are components of policy areas and examples discussed are direct payments, anti-poverty, child poverty and social inclusion strategies, early years and child care strategies, children's services, overall health strategies, the regulation of social care and housing policies and strategies. This incremental change and low-level differences in the basic principles of policies in the UK indicates that there may be less difference than some of the rhetoric labels surrounding policy and strategic initiatives indicate. This chapter argues that the main reasons for incremental differences depend on the degrees of innovative thinking, variation in needs, different priorities and administrative structures.

This chapter examines the role of faith-based organisations in British urban governance from the 1990s onwards. It determines whether faith-based organisations have characteristics that set them apart from voluntary and community sector (VCS). The chapter begins with a short review of the policy and research context as it applies to faith and VCS engagement in urban governance and civil society. After discussing the definitional and conceptual issues, the chapter weighs the contributions and experiences of faith-based organisations against the contributions and experiences of secular VCS organisations in urban governance. Urban governance refers to the engagement of statutory and non-governmental partners in the creation and delivery of public policies and services in the creation and delivery of public policies and services. The chapter ends by arguing that there are several similarities in the general contribution and experiences of secular VCS organisations and faith-based organisations in this context. However, there are also differences to the extent and nature of links to a faith tradition.

The introduction sets out the themes of the book, in particular the recent historical and policy context in the UK. It sets out the book’s overall aim of providing a concise and up-to-date overview of the third sector’s role in England’s public services. It provides a detailed definition of the third sector, introducing some of the main theories of the voluntary sector. It goes on to outline the key policy context, particularly the important New Labour partnership era. It also scrutinizes the important state-sector relationship at the heart of public service delivery. Finally, it highlights the contents of the book.

This chapter contends that analysis of British democracy, associational life, and political participation has been characterized by worry: worry about an ever-powerful state crowding out civil society; worry about increasingly apathetic citizens failing to engage with the world around them; and worry that social bonds themselves were weakening, undermining the foundations of democracy. This worry has led to a long line of political initiatives—the ‘Big Society’ being the latest—which seek to fix these supposed problems, providing solutions rooted in a normative understanding of the past. Instead of surrendering to pessimism, this chapter highlights the wide-ranging evidence base that suggests that civic life is in a constant state of qualitative and quantitative flux. As there is no ‘normal’ state of civic engagement, it is impossible to state conclusively whether there has been a decline or a renewal in our democratic life. Change, instead, is the key.

This chapter traces key changes and continuities in public policy and political ideology, mapping influences on voluntary sector change in the UK for over a century, while emphasising recent developments. There has been a tendency for research to examine British social welfare policy in terms of statutory services, treating the voluntary sector as an addendum. Yet historically, welfare provision has relied on a combination of public, private and voluntary sector agencies, alongside individual voluntary action, and the chapter considers the voluntary sector's long history of providing humanitarian welfare and its role in social action. The chapter also introduces theoretical frameworks through which changes discussed in this and subsequent chapters can be better understood. The rationale for the development of the voluntary sector at various times has been as a response to both state and market failures to adequately address social welfare and the chapter critically examines the sector's growth over the last 25 years in this light. It considers the paradoxical influence of government agencies in both recognising voluntary sector expertise and also constraining independent models through arrangements associated with the marketisation of welfare, increased regulation and monitoring, and dominant managerial cultures.

This chapter tackles the question of group definitions and labels. On the one hand, new arrivals import elastic labels, and on the other, group scholars steadfastly defend interest group conventions. In both cases, scholarly progress is the casualty. The chapter starts by reviewing the labels in use and examining the ways in which they are deployed in the literature. Looking across disciplinary literatures, the chapter argues that one can find a core definitional base. And further, it argues that interest group scholars should be more ready to engage with their new intellectual neighbours operating in allied social movement, voluntary sector, global politics, and civil society literatures. The chapter settles on a ‘group’ definition, and then addresses areas of difference with other key terms used by social scientific scholars.