The Big Society: Moving from Romanticism to Reality

This position paper written by Sir Stephen Bubb is in response to David Cameron’s announcement of his Big Society programme. It put this ambition in its historical context, and laid out how we could best achieve this aim. It emphasised the need for organised civic action – in essence, a well prepared third sector – working in partnership with a strategically organised state, not one which simply retrenched and left charity to pick up the pieces. The paper laid out a detailed roadmap for the achievement of the aims of Big Society, including emphasising the importance of social investment, the urgent need for reform of commissioning processes and underlining the importance of ‘communities of interest’.