Public Services (Social Enterprise and Social Value) Bill

It is my great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) in supporting my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White) and his Bill. I also pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears), who spoke about the Bill with her characteristic upbeat breeziness. She was absolutely right to do so. The Bill has three merits. First, it is a recognition of the coming of age of an institutional form. Secondly, it is a celebration of entrepreneurship. Thirdly, we must understand that the Bill is an enabler of very positive things that can be done to promote the support and funding of our social goods. It is therefore an absolute pleasure to support my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington. On the point about the history of institutions, I shall avoid too much philosophical musing. [Interruption.] Well, I shall do a little. Each of us as an individual has motivations: things that inspire us and push us to achieve our goals and objectives in life. But most of us are very reliant on institutions to enable us to achieve our goals. That may be our local Church, a programme run by a local council, a trade union that is there to defend us and motivate us in a particular way, a small business that we work for or an entrepreneurial leader whom we follow in order to create our own business. Historically, we have had to give something up in return—our motivations have to be shaped by the motivations of that institutional form. In the military, people cannot make things up as they go along; they have to follow orders to achieve their objectives. Similarly, in corporations, there are certain guidelines intended to achieve shareholder value. I am quite doctrinaire about this. I think that it is important that institutions are clear on their purpose, which is why I welcome and celebrate the growth of social enterprises as a new institutional form. Social enterprises overcome some of the concerns about trying to make for-profit companies adhere to non-commercial principles. I remember many years ago arguing with Professor Amitai Etzioni about the role of corporate and other organisations. I have not changed my opinion on that over the years. Subsequently we saw the growth of cause-related marketing and other factors that were trying to find a more creative way for for-profit companies to pursue their social objectives other than through traditional donations and sponsorships. Although those have their place, there has always been a gap for a new form of institution to play a role—one that social enterprises have come to play most forcefully over the last 20 or so years. That has helped in that our motivations can now have a different set of stabilisers rather than the straightforward ones of the past. The Bill is important because it recognises that role. Those of us who were here in the debate about growth last week will remember listening to the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) talking about how we can recognise different manifestations of growth and get beyond a pure statistic of GDP growth. That is another reason why these new forms are very important. I said that this was a coming of age—kind of a 21st birthday—mainly because it was about 21 years ago that I was trying to understand what we could do after the changes wrought both in this country under a Conservative Government and in the United States under President Reagan's Administration which had identified, certainly for Conservatives, the weakness in government, as an institution, in providing the social goods that many of us as individuals want. I am a firm believer that each of us has a view of fairness, and that we aggregate those views to come up with a collective view of what is fair, or what fairness represents for us as a society. We saw in the 1980s that people had misgivings about the weaknesses of the state and government in delivering, effectively and efficiently, those social goods and services that we wanted. For a period, for many of us there was a lack of balance. We were not enabling the provision of a sufficient number of social goods and services, not because we did not want them, but because we did not believe in the ability of the government structure to provide them on our behalf. That institutional failure has been addressed over the intervening 20 years, and I again pay tribute to the work of the last Labour Government in identifying that weakness and looking to stimulate alternative ways of providing those goods and services. Entrepreneurship is, to me, one of the most wonderful motivations that someone can have in life: one has a vision, a mission and an idea, and one wants to create and do something for society. That is extremely important. I am a firm believer in small businesses. I know that in my own community of Bedford and Kempston we rely on small businesses to create prosperity and jobs for the future. But entrepreneurship does not have to come from a profit motive; it can come from a social motive. The inspiration for a doctor is not making a lot of money; it is making people better. The inspiration for many entrepreneurs may not be a desire to maximise their personal wealth; it may well be that they want to have an impact in their local community. For organisations such as the Federation of Small Businesses we need to embrace that sense of different motivations that enable people to say, ““Here's my creativity. Here's my inspiration.”” I believe that the Bill will enable us to do that.