The difficult interface between the business, council and voluntary sectors
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2012-09-19 11:09:02 - Graham Ellis
Last night, I attended the "Grow Wiltshire" introductory and networking event in Melksham Town Hall - learned all (or rather something) about the new Melksham Community Blog at http://www.melksham.ourcommunitymatters.org.uk/ (what a mouthful - I've added my own short link at http://melksh.am/ocm )
I confess to being somewhat concerned at the interface between voluntary and commercial operations; it's my belief that we need a strong commercial base to fund (and provide through taxes) services such as GROW - which they then use to give the community sector a "leg up". And yet the team running the forum then seems to be waving the proverbial 2 fingers at the business community. To quote from the terms and conditions:
"Where comments and posts are not within the spirit of the etiquette for Our community matters and they meet any of the criteria below it may lead to them being deleted or not published ... Solicitation of commerce".
What does that mean? I followed up ... quoting an example of bus services. I asked:
"1. Does that "nothing commercial" rule mean that I can't talk about commercially operated bus services (such as daytime Melksham to Bath ones), but I can talk about council subsidised ones (such as evening and Sunday services on the same route)? "
and Wiltshire Council's Business Support Manager replied:
"... yes, a subsidised bus service would be appropriate but ... a purely commercial service ... would be inappropriate."
I confess that I think that's absurd, and I can't help wondering I was being written to me as if I was a bus company; I'm not - I just want to know how far I can go in passing on what I consider to be useful 3rd party information, for no personal gain of mine, but for the (small) personal gain of the owners of shares in First and Faresaver, perhaps for a small commercial gain for Well House Consultants as our customers sometimes use the daytime bus, and for a big community gain.
This whole issue of the voluntary and subsidised sector encroaching on commercial interests, to the unfair disadvantage of those commercial interests, continues to worry me. I sit on the SCOB - the Shadow Community Operations Board - and one of our key decisions has been that we do NOT wish to provide, within the campus, facilities that compete with viable locally available commercial alternatives. Not only would we be threatening other businesses by going against them with the might of the public purse, but we would also be wasting precious monies within our budget in providing competing facilities, when that money would be far better spent on something else which would otherwise lose out.
In contrast, I was concerned at GROW last night; Emergency First Aid at Work, and Food Health and Safety courses are already around and available - indeed, we ran a First Aid at Work course commercially, with places open to outside delegates, earlier this year. But part of the GROW organisation was proudly crowing that it's going to be providing cheap (subsidised) courses for volunteers in exactly these subjects; that makes it really hard for us to compete, and somehow I dislike paying my taxes to subsidise a government funded organisation that going to compete with our business. Not our core business, thank goodness ... but I really worry about the council and their offshoots getting involved in things they really should be leaving alone.