We are helping people to come together to improve their own lives. The Big Society is about putting more power in people’s hands - a massive transfer of power from Whitehall to local communities. We want to see community empowerment, the opening up public services, and people encouraged and enabled to play a more active part in society.
- We are providing new funds for social enterprises and charities through a Big Society Bank which harnesses unclaimed assets from dormant accounts and money from high street banks.
- We are reducing bureaucracy for charities, introducing a new system of online filing, simplifiying Gift Aid and reducing inheritance tax for those bequeathing assets to charity.
- We are recognising excellence through the Big Society Awards set up by the Prime Minister to honour organisations contributing to building a bigger society.
- We are providing more than £100 million of transitional funding to social enterprises and charities.
- We are training up to 5,000 Community Organisers to encourage social action and enable individuals to shape the services that matter most to them.
- We are backing innovation through our new £10 million Innovation in Giving fund which will help increase volunteering and charitable giving by rooting out the visionary ideas that all too often never get the backing they need.
- We have opened a new £30 million fund to help modernise organisations that supply critical support to front-line charities, voluntary groups and social enterprises.
- We have piloted a National Citizen Service for thousands of 16 year-olds and we want to make this a rite of passage available to every 16 year-old.
- We are recruiting 100,000 Big Society ‘Digital Champions’ to help get online some of the 9 million people who have never used the internet.
- We are helping neighbourhood groups in areas of deprivation through a £80 million Community First fund, which will encourage social action through new and existing neighbourhood groups.
- We are currently piloting innovative new social impact bonds which will allow everyone to invest in programmes that provide intensive help for families blighted by anti-social behaviour, crime, addiction and poor education.
- We are looking at new innovative ways to structure services such as mutuals, where employees have stakes in the business they run. We have already announced that Civil Service Pensions will be delivered by a mutual joint venture.
- We are opening up Government procurement, and working to make it easier for social enterprises, charities and small and medium-sized enterprises to do business with and offer services to Government.
- We have the most ambitious open data agenda of any Government in the world because we know that transparency can help reform public services, foster innovation and drive growth.