The Office for Civil Society has been left “gutted” and “hollowed out” following the recent spending review, and no longer carries out the functions it was created for, according to the chief executive of Acevo.
Sir Stephen Bubb, leader of the infrastructure body for charity chief executives, said that the OCS now appeared to only have resources dedicated to social impact bonds and the National Citizen Service.
“The OCS has been gutted,” Bubb said. “Everyone would have got angry if they had abolished it, but instead it has been hollowed out.
“Whether you can still even call it the Office for Civil Society is debateable. You have to ask whether it really still exists, or whether it’s just a name on a door. There are now only a handful of civil servants working on anything but NCS and social impact bonds.”
Bubb was speaking to Civil Society News following an announcement in the recent spending review that the OCS would both reduce the number of civil servants it employed and increase the amount of work it would do on social impact bonds and youth volunteering.
“The Office for Civil Society will continue to provide a range of support to the UK’s third sector, but it will reduce its headcount and widen the availability of social impact bonds,” the spending review document said.
Bubb, who advised on the creation of the OCS in 2006, when it was known as the Office for the Third Sector, said the department was intended to address a wide range of issues affecting charities, with particular emphasis on how charities could help government deliver better public services.
He said the OCS was intended to provide “a cross-Whitehall agenda on charities, driven from the heart of government”, particularly on the issue of public service delivery by charities.
“That’s been completely ditched,” he said. “There’s no cross-Whitehall working. There’s no funding or civil servant presence except for two areas – social investment and one youth volunteering programme. And those are important areas, but civil society is hugely bigger than that. There are much more pressing problems our sector faces than social impact bonds.”
A Cabinet Office spokeswoman said: "The spending review announcements reflect government’s priority to build a bigger and stronger society and a vibrant civil society. OCS is integral to the achievement of this vision. Like all parts of the civil service, the team will get smaller and need to work differently - but the important thing is that it’s here to stay."
OCS: the figures
The OCS last year had a budget of around £270m, but half of this was dedicated to funding the National Citizen Service, and much of the rest to one-off programmes outside the core budget, including the establishment of Access: the Foundation for Social Investment.
The last spending round provided an annual budget of £140m for NCS, and £56m for all other civil society programmes, in the year to March 2016.
The next spending round will see an additional £80m spent on social impact bonds, and up to £400m a year on the NCS.
The budget for all other civil society programmes is yet to be decided, although if OCS programme funding was cut in line with the rest of the Cabinet Office, the total budget will fall to £41m a year.
