I spend a lot of my time working with third sector organisations.  Usually – and this isn’t a criticism – it’s just the reality – what people want from me is a little vague.  Often someone has been tasked by their management committee to “find out how we can become a social enterprise”.  Whatever that might mean.

What does it mean?  It’s a question perhaps for another post.  My response to that kind of question is to fall back on the social enterprise as a verb not a noun stuff.  What is it that you do that is socially enterprising?  How are you enterprising in achieving your social mission?  How could you be more enterprising, more effective?  And how could I help?

The trigger for many organisations exploring “becoming a social enterprise” is that the markets that they work in are changing rapidly.  Funding is increasingly hard to come by, and, in fields such as social care, money is starting to follow individual “customers” – rather than being allocated to organisations as a block grant.  These issues present massive cultural and organisational challenges.

This transition – I saw it described the other day as “from wholesale to retail to bespoke” won’t happen overnight – but the direction of travel is clear.  And in my experience this is causing significant anxiety for a lot of third sector organisations.

If we borrow the language of the transition movement, how does an organisation respond to “peak funding”?  The problem we have is that peak funding has already happened – whereas peak oil is perhaps a few years away.   How do organisations plan for a pretty immediate future where they’ll need to be more resilient in order to survive?  Funding being cut, contracts shortened, commitments from commissioners postponed.  It’s very tough.

I don’t have a simple answer.  There isn’t one.  But perhaps we can look to the transition movement for inspiration.  What is inspiring about the transition movement is that people are coming together to come up with practical ways to help their communities to become more resilient in difficult circumstances.  They aren’t relying on others to sort out their problems.

It’s not quite that simple for third sector organisations.  But I do feel that there’s a tendency amongst some people to look outside of their organisation for a solution, rather than considering what they can do themselves.  And of course I know that lots of third sector organisations are proactive and are coming up with ways to do more with less money.  But I see plenty of others who seem to be waiting for someone else to sort things out.

I have news for them.  They’ll be waiting a long time for that bloke on a big white horse to come galloping over the hill.  I hear he lost his job in the cuts.

Things feel pretty gloomy this morning.  I’ve been spending the last couple of days telling myself and others that we need to stay hopeful.  That the word prosperity has its roots in the latin word for hope.   That we don’t need growth as we’ve always known it anyway.  We’ll work it out, I tell myself.  There are opportunities here, we must look for them, not lose hope, I keep repeating.

And I do believe all that stuff.  I have to, because I think if you don’t, you might as well just give up.  And I’m not prepared to do that.  I  have a son who’s 4 and we owe it to his generation to try to think of ways to work our way out of this mess.  But that doesn’t stop it feeling pretty bleak this morning.

I grew up in Liverpool in the 1980s.  I was 7 when Thatcher came to power.  I’m not pretending that my life was all Boys From The Blackstuff gloom, far from it.  But Liverpool, caught between Thatcherism and Militant, was a pretty grim place in the 1980s.  The city is recovering, but has never really recovered.  Many families and communities were scarred for life.

I haven’t digested all the news from yesterday yet so I don’t really feel like blogging about it today.  So in true blogger style I’ll just talk about myself instead.  What am I going to do now?

If I truly believe in my strapline – make it your business to change the world – then I need to see our current situation as a big opportunity to make a difference.  Once the cuts start to hit there will be service after service which people say “We can’t lose that”.  Amidst all of that, some of those services could be run by people themselves.  Perhaps I can help there.

But I’ll also need to help by working with people to be realistic about opportunities.  Lots of my work is done in areas where there is market failure – where the market has been propped up for years by funding of one kind or another.  Sometimes even the most socially entrepreneurial group of people can’t do anything if the State retreats and takes its money with it.  Or, the best they can do is think of a totally different way to meet the need.  We need to be careful to not go down a load of dead-end streets which just waste everyone’s time and cause more anger.

And personally, where will I get my work?  Like most people in the social enterprise sector I am overly reliant on the public sector to fund my work.  I know the dangers in that but that’s where the money’s been.  I don’t work in a sector where entrepreneurs come to me, wanting to spend some of their money on me.  Other people pay me to work with entrepreneurs – Business Links, local Councils and the like.   That money is going to be thin on the ground.

Big Society, I hear you cry.  There’s a big opportunity there.  Perhaps.  But as I suggest above, social entrepreneurs aren’t social alchemists.  Big Society will need investment, on a big scale, and a big change in mindset.  How, for example, will third sector organisations, accustomed to funding, go about setting up new enterprising services?  They’re used to finding funding for salaries etc for the start-up phase.  If they’re not there, will they find other ways to bootstrap the start up?  Or will they just not bother?

So I will need to continue to find new ways to work.  I’m not your average consultant, and I’m by no means a clock watcher, but I still get paid, generally, on day rates.  That’s likely to need to change.

I’m onto it – with my business partner Gill I’m running a DIY Business Planning course next month.

The next few years will be very DIY – as the State retreats people will need to become more resilient and do things themselves.  This is our first attempt to meet some of those needs.

So I don’t feel gloomy, but I feel realistic.  I feel hopeful, but I’m not stupid.  I know full well that the next few years for me will see me fielding lots of interest from people who want to do something, but don’t have any/much money to pay me to do it.  So I’ll have to think of different ways to work.

My interest, and concern is in how we hold together as a society in times like this.  Clearly the cuts will hurt a lot, but its the cumulative effect, the possible loss of hope, and loss of a vision for a better society, which is most worrying.  That’s the world I work in.  So I need to get to work.

The Lib Dem Minister for Care announced this week that from November everyone in receipt of social care will be able to choose to receive an Individual Budget. In short, this means that they can choose to spend the social care money that they are entitled to in ways that they choose – as long as it achieves agreed outcomes. It sounds great – and potentially it represents a life-changing step forward for millions of people.

This is an area I’ve been working in a lot recently – for example on this project in Bradford and this one in Leeds. Our main focus in each project is supporting organisations to set up services which people may choose to buy with their Individual Budget. The big hope is that lots of innovative services will spring up in place of the one-size-fits-all services of the past – day centres and the like.

As we’ve seen elsewhere recently, there’s a lot of faith placed in the market, in competition, and the transformational power of individual choice. It is assumed that the market will develop so that the best services (those for which there is most demand) flourish, whilst those which don’t meet people’s needs disappear. It’s an attractive vision in lots of ways, but I think we all know that markets don’t work quite so perfectly, particularly for those people without much power in the market.

Working with Gill, my business partner at Social Business Brokers, we’ve spent the last few months trying to get behind the rhetoric of Personalisation so that we can start to support people to set up services. I think we’re making some good progress, and I remain hopeful. But I can assure you that when you really start to try to understand Personalisation, it isn’t quite as rosy as it might first appear. Here are some of the issues that I think need to be addressed.

(For clarity’s sake, the points I’m making don’t relate in particular to one local authority – they are issues that we’ve come across in our work and in research into personalisation across the country.)

Anecdotally, we’re hearing that a good majority of people are continuing to receive the same services that they received before – even though they are now statistically classed as having an Individual Budget. It would seem that some local authorities are classifying someone as receiving an Individual Budget if they have been through the social care assessment process. So, in short, that means that their needs have been assessed, nothing has changed in terms of what they receive, but they’re now classed as being in receipt of an Individual Budget. That, to me at least, isn’t right, and presents us with misleading statistics.

It would appear that the majority of the support planning and brokerage work – to help people to agree how they’d like to be supported, and then find appropriate services, is being carried out by social workers. Now I have nothing against social workers, but I would think that there is a link between the point above (that most people are getting what they always got) and this point – that the people who’ve always done the support planning are still doing the support planning. Anecdotally we hear that Individual Budgets are seen as a right pain to administer – and with recruitment freezes and the like you can understand why an overworked social worker might gently encourage a client to stick with what they’ve got – particularly if that lack of change gets hidden in the statistics as I suggested above.

We’re not seeing a great deal of evidence of innovative services setting up. It’s still early days – and I’m sure there are people like us in other parts of the country trying to encourage the development of new services. Much emphasis is being put on third sector services (particularly social enterprises) being set up. But, as you’ll know, times are currently tough for the third sector, and insecurity in terms of funding isn’t providing an environment in which many organisations feel comfortable setting up new, risky, customer-facing services. There is also little funding or investment available to set up new services. And given that, anecdotally at least, most people seem to be sticking with what they’ve got, you can understand why some organisations may make the judgment that the market doesn’t exist for new, innovative services which individuals could purchase.

You can probably see the problem here in terms of market development. Customers can’t be expected to choose services which don’t yet exist – whilst businesses are reluctant to set up services where demand appears weak. It’s a classic chicken and egg situation. Will it be the third sector that drives innovation here? We’re certainly doing what we can in the work that we’re doing – but I think on a broader scale we need to be realistic. Setting up services which individuals can choose (or choose not) to pay for is as big a cultural challenge for the third sector as it is for the public sector. Innovation may come, but it may take time. My hunch is that it will be the private sector which leads on this.

So what do we do about this? At a national level, I hope for some leadership from people such as the Care Minister, to listen carefully to what’s happening, and to try to get beneath the rhetoric and the good stories (people buying season tickets in place of day care etc) to really understand what’s happening on the ground. We need to not be hoodwinked into believing that loads of people have Individual Budgets, when in practice nothing has changed (or improved) for them. And I also think that we need more honesty about the role of social workers in making change happen. Are they best placed to do support planning and brokerage? Or are they best placed to maintain the status quo? I think we need more creative and innovative ways to support people to decide what outcomes they want – and then to help them find the right services.

And, of course, we need a good dose of social entrepreneurship. That doesn’t mean social enterprises will solve it all. But it means that we need enterprising people finding creative ways to create change.

At an event we ran recently, one third sector representative confidently told the room that Personalisation will have been long forgotten by 2020. We’ll be back to State delivery of services, he reckoned. By then we’ll have seen that Personalisation was just a big waste of money and didn’t work. I didn’t agree with his analysis, but I do think that if we don’t up our game a fair bit, he could well turn out to be right.

I awoke at 630am yesterday morning and as I looked across the marital bed I saw my wife sat up with a cup of tea, reading a big wad of papers.

It turned out she was reading the papers for the Board meeting of social enterprise where she is a director. She had received the papers the day before, and the meeting was that evening. In between she had a life to lead and full time job to attend to.

The Minister for Civil Society, Nick Hurd, had tweeted something the day before that got me thinking:

On Radio Five talking about volunteering and #bigsociety. BBC poll says half people do not have time to give. Not my experience.

Here’s a link to a story about the poll that he mentions.

My initial reaction was my usual knee-jerk one which accompanies hearing a politician challenge a survey which doesn’t chime with their view of the world. I then, rightly or wrongly, found myself questioning his “experience”. I wondered what that experience is. I hear that he’s a decent, personable guy, and I don’t particularly have anything against him. And he can only have his experience, like we all can. But is that experience – probably a pretty decent upbringing, and then a life spent in a political bubble – really one which puts him in a strong position to challenge this research? I’m not sure.

But my morning wake-up call led me to think about this more. I actually don’t think it’s a question of time as such. Most of us have spare time. I spent two hours last night doing a combination of watching Boys from the Blackstuff, (which, incidently, should be required viewing for all sub 35 year old wonks in Whitehall) eating cake, texting friends and staring into space. I, like everyone of the Why Don’t You? generation, could easily have been doing something less boring instead. Like volunteering my time for the Big Society.

I think it’s more about capacity to take on extra responsibility. Antonia’s Board membership, on paper, takes up a maximum of 6 hours a month. And who doesn’t have six hours a month to spare? But who has the capacity to share the responsibility for a business which turns over a few million pounds, and which could, at any moment, call for more of your time than you have available, at that moment? Volunteering isn’t all Ha Ha Ha, Hee Hee Hee.

A few years ago I was on holiday in Mallorca and I got a phone call from a member of staff at the fairtrade social enterprise where I was a director (I’d previously been a member of staff). I was told that our landlord was calling in the receivers, as we were behind with our rent. I was then asked what I thought we should do about that. I’ve since learnt not to take my mobile on holiday.

So, yes, of course it’s nonesense for most of us to suggest that we don’t have time to do a bit more. But it’s perfectly understandable for many people to say that they don’t have the capacity to take on a greater burden than they’re already carrying. Big Society evangelists would do well to remember that.

If I wrote about myself on the blog in the way that many third sector organisations talk about themselves, you’d probably have the impression that I was a 6 foot hunk with a beach body and sparkling wit and charm.

I’m not all that bad, but I don’t quite match up to that image. But all the talk of Big Society has seen politicians, commentators and sector leaders trot out the same old stuff about heroic third sector organisations, close to the people they serve, dynamic, enterprising, efficient and all-together miraculous. Social alchemists R Us.

Anyone who’s been within moaning distance of a third sector organisation will know that this is a daft caricature. There are plenty of fantastic third sector organisations out there who do great work. I’m lucky enough to be working with one at the moment – HALE – who do health promotion work in West Yorkshire. They’ve recently won a national award for what they do – and it’s well deserved. They have a clear mission, they’re enterprising and they have a positive can-do culture. I bet they deliver good value for health commissioners too.

But alongside the great organisations there are plenty who are good (good enough?) and far too many that are mediocre to say the least. You’ll probably know a few – they tend to have been around a long time, they like having a good moan, there’s never enough funding, it’s always someone else’s fault. And even though things are so awful, they’re convinced that they’re the only people who could possibly improve the lot of their service users. And yes, you can bet they’ll be service users. Such a beautiful term which tells you all you need to know about their relationship with the people they serve.

I don’t want organisations like that running services in place of the State. But if we spend the next couple of years in a Big Society love-in, with a load of hangers-on realising that this is the Next Big Thing (post social enterprise) that they can hang their hat on, then we’re really not going to make much progress as a society.

I’m not looking forward to the next round of cuts. I personally think it’ll be chaos. But amidst the chaos I hope that less funding will result in some of the mediocre and poor third sector organisations, which have survived through rounds of ERDF and the like, will finally get out of the way and give some room to people who might make a real difference.

At times of crisis it’s tempting to seek out the Big Idea which is going to make everything better.

There are many who believe that social enterprises are inherently better at delivering services to customers. The story goes that the social mission, combined with a lack of external shareholders to service, alongside an enterprising approach will result in happier customers.

It’s a compelling narrative. And I for one do believe that those three factors – clear mission, the absence of shareholders focused on the short-term, and a can-do culture can achieve big things.

But I think we need to be careful not to get too carried away. Social enterprises can have clear missions, can be focussed on customers rather than shareholders, and can develop an enterprising culture – but those three things can’t be taken for granted.

Allow me to indulge in a moan which does, nonetheless, make this point. I have been a happy customer of Yorkshire Building Society for ten years. But this year – as we sold our house and tried to buy another – their service was consistently poor. Without boring you with all the details, their two main errors were that they sent me the deeds for the house we’d just sold, and did the wrong survey on the house we were trying to buy. Our ID also got lost somewhere between our postbox and their mailroom, which may or may not have been their fault. And throughout, their new automated phone system was difficult to navigate, and I often ended up at the wrong department.

I’ve complained, and they’ve said they’re sorry but they won’t consider refunding any of the administration fees I’ve paid. My point is that their service was poor, and I paid fees for that service. I’m now taking it to the Financial Ombudsman, mainly because I’ve got no other option.

I chose Yorkshire because they were competitive – but also because they are a mutual. I tell myself that they’re better, and are likely to give me a better deal, because they don’t have outside shareholders to satisfy. I also think that being a member may be different to being a customer, particularly when things go wrong.

But am I just being naive? This article on Nationwide – another mutual – would suggest that mutuals aren’t immune from some of the customer-unfriendly practices of other shareholder-driven companies. And are we as a society being equally naive in assuming that mutuals and other social enterprises will do a better job than others at delivering services?

I believe fully that they can deliver better services, not that they always do. Obvious really, but as we hunt for ways to get ourselves out of the mess we’re in, I think we’re in danger of putting too much faith in one form of organisational structure.

As I mentioned in my last post, we had to work hard to make sure our holiday money stretched to the end of our stay in France. Conveniently, for this story, £1 was worth around 25% less than it was last time we were in France. So the daily lunchtime beer in a cafe was out, replaced by a beer back on the terrace at the flat. The daily late-afternoon ice creams came from the supermarket, not the ice-cream parlour. It was hardly the 1930’s, but it wasn’t 2008 either.

So we changed our behaviour to adapt to our circumstances. The other time we did that was when Francis was born. We agreed that Antonia would take a year off. Again, handily for this story, that meant that we had to cut our budgets by around 25% (one salary lost for 6 months). We took advice from Alvin Hall, and tips from Martin Lewis. We worked out what money we would have, and set ourselves a budget. Most importantly, we went back to the cash economy. We agreed what we could afford to spend, and then took that cash out of the bank at the start of each month.

Handing over bank notes focuses the mind in a way that paying with plastic never could. It feels like real money, and gives you a greater sense of whether what you are about to purchase feels like good value, and is really needed. Anyone who gives you advice on how to spend less will tell you to start dealing in cash.

I’m fully aware that there are millions of people who are in a far worse position than me financially, for whom weekly budgeting, on far less money than me, is a painful fact of life. So my 25% cuts aren’t anywhere near as painful as someone else’s. But they are still significant – for me at least.

I’ve been thinking recently how (or if) I should work with organisations which are going to have to slash their expenditure by 25% or more. I enjoy a lot of the work I do. That doesn’t feel like the kind of work that’d be much fun.

But how could I help? I think that one thing I bring to my work is that whilst I’m driven by helping people to achieve social change, I’m also a realist and a pragmatist. I can separate the emotion of a social mission from the hard realities of the market. Maybe that’s one way I can help. Any discussions about budget cuts – particularly if there is a real/illusory desire to involve all staff – will be full of emotion, and rightly so. Trying to find a workable way forward in those circumstances will be very difficult. An outsider might be able to help.

Helping people to “think the unthinkable”, and challenge long-held assumptions, which have been sheltered from real life by the odd parallel universe that is the World of Funding, might be of use too. Could organised abandonment of that cherished, but less effective, project, be better in the long term than cuts across the board? And might it be worth looking at the way we work, and how we deal with our customers, to see where there is failure demand in our systems? In other words, demand (and therefore spent resources) that is only there because things aren’t dealt with properly first time. There is no one big idea which will help to cut expenditure less painfully, but I personally find the idea of failure demand pretty useful.

One thing is clear, any answers that I help people come up with won’t be my answers. Just as I don’t write business plans for people, I won’t be advising people on how to cut their budgets. But it might be that I can be part of something in Leeds or elsewhere where a group of organisations come together and share the burden of finding ways to continue to deliver change with less money.

If you have any thoughts please let me know by leaving a comment below.

So here we are. Day one of a Tory – Lib Dem government.

What might this mean for social entrepreneurs, and the world of social business? We are likely to be given opportunities over the next five years to do much more, and to have much more influence over the lives of the people of this country. More public services will be outsourced to social enterprises. More public sector workers will be encouraged to set up social enterprises so that they can sell their services back to the State. Hopefully a new generation of social entrepreneurs will emerge, as people across communities realise that if things are going to change, they are going to have to change them. With big budget cuts, the State is likely to withdraw completely from the delivery of certain services, leaving, in theory, big gaps which social entrepreneurs could fill.

I’ve made no secret on the blog of my scepticism with regards to the Tories’ plans for Big Society. I’ve also explained how growing up in 1980s Liverpool means that I am instinctively hostile towards the Conservatives. Yet I’ve also made the point that one reason that I am involved in social business is that I’m not, and never have been, a party-political animal. My hostility towards the Conservatives has never been balanced by a great enthusiasm for Labour or the Lib Dems. Until the last 6 months, I’ve never really taken much notice of any of them. The financial crisis changed all that.

Here are my thoughts on day 1 of the new Government. I think social entrepreneurs – and I’m thinking in particular of those who deliver services to the public, on behalf of the State, have a great opportunity to make a difference to people’s lives in what are bound to be difficult years. But we need to balance entrepreneurial enthusiasm, and the desire to make a difference, with hard-headed assessments as to whether the “opportunity” in front of us is actually just a get out of jail card for whoever is cutting that particular budget.

All of a sudden public servants who have always believed that the answers lie with them, and them alone, will warmly embrace social entrepreneurs and enthusiastically invite them in to “do things differently”. This could be progress, but it’s not necessarily progress. We need to remember that there can be a big gap between need and demand – and that someone, somewhere, needs to pay for services. This is where the pragmatism of the social entrepreneur may need to overcome the anger and the passion of the social activist. At times there may be no realistic way to deliver a service, if the State isn’t going to fund it. They need to be told that – not given a two year period of grace whilst we try to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

We also need to manage expectations. It takes time for new approaches to deliver results. At a time when every penny that is taken from us in tax will be closely scrutinised, there will be pressure to promise that we can deliver more, and more quickly, than is realistic. Years of mediocrity can’t suddenly be transformed into 5 star service.

Over the next few years, the real social entrepreneurs, and the real social businesses will emerge from amongst the ranks of the “me-too” organisations. It’s been sexy to be a social enterprise (or to at least call yourself one) since 1997. I don’t think it’ll feel quite so sexy over the next few years – even though it will be more high profile. But if you’re up for it, and if you’re serious about creating social change, then I have no doubt that there will be some once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to really make a difference. But we’ll need to be hard-headed as well as passionate about creating change.

Phillip Blond, director of think tank ResPublica, wrote a letter to the Observer on Sunday questioning why left-leaning commentators are hostile towards the Tories’ Big Society plans.

His letter included the following assertion:

Volunteering, especially among professional classes and the young, has doubled in recent months and the wish to make a difference is a common and rising aspiration.

I’m sure you’ll agree, that’s a pretty incredible claim. I think I would have heard about it if the number of people volunteering had shot through the roof since Christmas. I can imagine that the odd person reviewed their life choices and made a new year’s resolution to start giving something back, but I somehow doubt that numbers have doubled.

I would love to be wrong. I’ve asked Phillip Blond for clarification, but am as yet to receive a reply.

The wider point here is that it strengthens the argument of those of us who believe that the foundations for the Tories’ Big Society plans (which Blond’s Red Tory thinking has no doubt inspired) are pretty weak. Blond, in his letter, questions why people like me are hostile towards Big Society. It’s this kind of nonesense that we question. If one of the Tories’ most revered thinkers is capable of such seemingly daft assertions as this, is it not right for us to be sceptical about their ambitions for transforming society?

The only scenario in which volunteering could rise in such numbers is under a mismanaged economy, with hundreds of thousands of people put out of work by ideologically driven cuts, dressed up as Big Society.

I had an interesting day in Derbyshire on Saturday at an event run by the East Midlands School for Social Entrepreneurs and members of the Transition movement.

I was there to make the case for good marketing. My basic argument is that many of us who think that the world – and business – need to be run differently are pretty sceptical (or even hostile) towards marketing. We also think that it can only be done by big brands with loads of cash, who push unwanted products onto an unsuspecting public. My argument is that it doesn’t have to be like that – and that proper marketing – building relationships with people – can come naturally to social businesses if they just think it through.

The premise of the day was to explore whether a next step for some Transition initiatives could be to set up social enterprises. Let me be clear from the start, I have the kind of knowledge of Transition that you get from reading about it in magazine articles – so I don’t pretend to be an expert. But it does seem to make sense that, after following the twelve steps of Transition, some communities may go on to set up social businesses to help to build a different type of economy.

I’ve written a fair bit in the past about what I see as the differences between social activists and social entrepreneurs. I’d say that the majority of people who were there on Saturday were activists – and I’d guess that that’s pretty typical of the Transition movement.

I’m not saying that activism is not important. It’s vital, and there’s clearly some inspiring stuff happening in Transition initiatives around the country. It’s an idea which has clearly captured people’s imagination. But I would argue that making the next step – if that is to be settting up social enterprises – requires a different mindset.

I’m not suggesting that you need to be some kind of socially enterprising Del-Boy, or have an MBA, to set up a social enterprise. Far from it. But making changes to your own lifestyle – and teaming up with others to do the same – is quite different to setting up businesses which need to sustain themselves through the money they make.

I look at my own background for evidence of this. I never thought I’d get involved in business – not even social business – because I thought business was for fat-cat capitalists. I couldn’t understand how anyone who wanted to change the world could also find motivation in making money. Even if that money was ultimately used to do more good.

I was hostile towards business. There was a lot of that hostility – understandably – in Belper on Saturday. But to run a social enterprise I think you have to accept that things aren’t so black and white. That sometimes you have to compromise, or be pragmatic, or take decisions which might not sit totally comfortably with your value base. You might have to do deals with other businesses which traditionally you’ve seen as the enemy. This might mean you fall out with those who believe in the simple rights and wrongs of capitalism.

On a practical level it also involves different skills. And I believe that these skills can be learnt, but it takes time. This is a point relevant to the whole debate about Big Society. Phillip Blond wrote a letter to the Observer on Sunday expressing how he is puzzled by the hostility of people like me towards Big Society. (By the way, I’d be grateful if anyone can point me to the evidence for Blond’s assertion that volunteering has doubled in the last few months.)

One reason I’m sceptical is that I believe that it will take time for communities to develop the skills and build up the experience to run lots of services themselves. I do believe that, in the long term, it’s the right direction to be travelling in. But I have done this work for long enough to know that the road to better services is littered with painful, expensive examples of initiatives which haven’t worked. Because, sometimes, people got it wrong, because they were still learning how to run things themselves. And, I would suggest, the people who need better services most are the ones who may take a bit longer to get organised and get things right. Blond and Cameron will suggest I’m being patronising. I think I’m being realistic.

It may be that the Transition entrepreneurs were busy doing other things on Saturday – like traveling to the course on how to set up your own community supported bakery, run by the inspiring Handmade Bakery in the Transition hotspot of Slaithwaite. Either way, I think it’s worth us reflecting on the differences between what it takes to form a movement for change, and to run a business, so that we can continue to do the former, whilst also doing more of the latter.