Introduction

It is reported that David Cameron first used the term ‘Big Society’ on the eve of the launch of the Conservative Party manifesto in 2010. This was before the general election that saw the establishment of the first Coalition government (in this case, between Conservatives and Liberal Democrats) since the Second World War.

While there are conflicting views on what Big Society is, the one point on which commentators, politicians (exemplified by Cameron's previous remark), the media and think tanks appear to agree is that Big Society is difficult to define. A project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Connecting Communities Programme and undertaken by the Centre for Research on Environment, Society and Health2 has sought to provide a ‘working definition’ of Big Society in order to develop ways of measuring it, namely, that Big Society is ‘a shift in the philosophy, power and practice of public service delivery’.

Their paper suggests that this involves: strengthening society and making public services serve the people who use them; decentralising power from central and local government to the community and the public; and passing the management and delivery of public services from the central and local state to private and voluntary sector providers, communities and individuals.

This latter point, of voluntary and community sector (VCS) providers along with the private and public sectors delivering reforms to the Criminal Justice System (CJS), appears to have been the conceptualisation of Big Society promoted in a Ministry of Justice Green Paper (MoJ, 2010a), in this case through:

• • the market-testing of rehabilitation services to determine if the private sector or VCS can deliver these more effectively than statutory agencies;

• • commissioning models to enable small and specialist VCS agencies to participate, particularly where these agencies ‘can make a real difference with those offenders who are hardest to change’ (MoJ, 2010a); and

• • identifying specific barriers for small VCS providers in any Payment by Results (PbR) commissioning and finding ways to enable them to participate.