The Big Society is a “flimsy excuse to roll back the frontier of the state”, the shadow minister for civil society Anna Turley said yesterday.

In her first keynote speech as shadow charities minister, Turley said: “The tired promise of a 'Big Society' which was supposed to build a flourishing civic society outside the old constraints of the state" is now just a "hollow gesture”.

Turley told the audience of chief executives at Acevo’s annual conference that the replacement of state services with charity services was undertaken “without providing civic society the support and resource to flourish in its place”.

Austerity has hit the voluntary sector with a “triple whammy”, she said – including the drying up of grants and public sector finance and the struggle faced by voluntary organisations in getting access to public funding.

She also highlighted the reduction of preventative and non-statutory services – and the knock-on effect for charities that step in to “fill more gaps in the state provision without the means to do so”. 

Turley’s third point of the triple whammy was that “the impact of iniquitous policies such as the bedroom tax, low pay and insecure work has seen demand rise for services, as poverty and destitution have increased”. 

As a result, she said the role of charities was “now more important than ever” before.

Turley said her office “will fight for the sector in the spending review next week and will fight for the sector through the Charities Bill – pressing to give it more voice and more power to challenge our political decisions, more control and better governance.”