Financing the Big Society

Chris Cummings, CEO, TheCityUK

I’ve been invited to speak on this topic today at Reform’s ‘Building the Big Society’ event. It’s a vast subject and one in which I believe financial services, and associated professional services are already play a vital role in the communities they serve. This is not just about sponsoring events, supporting local sporting and cultural activities and important community good causes but it's also about helping our staff to use their expertise to make a real difference in society. It is through that service that the sector shows itself as being truly deep-rooted in the everyday lives of people and communities across the country. Too often it is suggested that financial services are not part of the ‘real economy’ – but they are in every part of the real economy and not apart from it. The same is true of civil society and we welcome the Big Society agenda as an opportunity to redress the sense of separation.

There are direct ways financial services can play an important role in contributing to a bigger, stronger society. They can work to invest a greater proportion of assets in social investments, while building the resources and expertise necessary to research and evaluate the opportunities presented by these assets. This will likely lead to the development of new products to open up that opportunity to a broader and better informed community.

Doing so will help toward the need for the industry to change its public perception to one built on the values of integrity, fairness and responsibility. Now is the time for the kind of exciting visions and strategies that can alter this perception and in turn drive forward the Big Society: empowering organisations beyond the state to take social action and in doing so, enabling them to be financially self-sustaining.

The fact that local issues are increasingly important to people is contrasted to the way decisions have been increasingly centralised – this is true in government and commerce. Subsidiarity can mean lots of small companies or it can mean systematically empowering the far reaches of a network. The latter looks more likely to succeed in a world where capital underpins financial strength and, importantly, we need a regulatory structure that allows for this.

There is clearly a need to ensure that all parts of civil society, individual and corporate, contribute and to be seen to be contributing. The financial services sector must step up the good work to bring money and skills to benefit the communities in which they are based. More work is underway than typically portrayed, but there is more to do. At TheCityUK we are seeking to assess this current work and looking to promote further work.

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