'Big society' under pressure

Budget cuts are happening faster than voluntary groups can fill provision gaps and threatens to derail David Cameron's hopes for a 'big society', one of the government's key advisers on the idea has said. Philip Blond, head of the ResPublica thinktank, which is credited with developing the big society idea, also said that not all government departments were pulling equal weight. His comments come as Steve Hilton, the prime minister's director of strategy, also voiced private concerns that charities and the Labour party are managing to cast big society in a negative light and the former conservative minister, David Davis, said Cameron and his deputy, Nick Clegg, could only understand ordinary people "from an intellectual basis, not from their own history." "The drive for cuts and deficit reduction is perhaps running too fast to give people the chance to take over the state and create the conditions for a civic economy," Blond said in an interview . The big society agenda is still not widely grasped or shared across all departments." Other figures close to government have also come forward with concerns. Davis, the former conservative shadow home secretary, said the departure of Andy Coulson, No 10's director of communications, over the heat surrounding the News of the World phone hacking scandal , meant the loss of the only person who understood the issues of ordinary people. "Cameron and Clegg say that they aspire to much more social mobility and a much more open society — it's going to be tougher to do that because what they are going to have to do is to see where the problems are purely from an intellectual basis, not from their own history," he said. It was also reported that the banks and the Treasury have disagreed over plans for a 'big society bank' – part of a wider remit of banking reforms . Funding for the bank, which would provide loans for charities and voluntary groups, looks set to fall hundreds of millions of pounds short of a £1bn target set last year. Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the Royal Society for the Arts, suggested that Blond had not gone rogue: "Big society in crisis' – Philip Blond goes public with his concerns – must have had some No 10 encouragement – intriguing," he tweeted .