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As chief executives, we often have the privilege of meeting a diverse range of residents and businesses. I recently met young people from across our district to discuss their understanding of Big Society. I asked them about their schools, where they worked and lived and, in particular, was interested in their interaction with other residents. Stephen Weigel is chief executive at Tandridge DC One of the most interesting things about our current society is how little we are involved and know about where we live. How many of us know the names of the people who live near us? During my conversations with these young people, it became evident they knew very few of their neighbours. Many were unable to provide the names of people more than three houses either side of where they lived and generally, only their immediate neighbours opposite. While they knew their names, they knew very little about their neighbours' interests. But similar questions about the social network sites they used brought a very different response. It was not unusual for young people to have more than 40 online (virtual) friends through sites such as Facebook. Even more revealing was that they were able to tell me about their online friends in great detail – their ages, the names of their partners or children, where they had gone on holiday and, in quite a few cases, exactly what their friends were doing less than two hours ago. Local government and now the coalition government have been trying to improve local communities by encouraging people to interact and support one another more. Prime minister, David Cameron, spoke about our broken society in the lead up to the election, and is now taking forward Big Society and localism to remedy and improve local community involvement and support. With significant budget cuts, people will have to rely less on the state, local government and the third sector and instead, support themselves more. Quite a few of the new initiatives are place-based and could be overly optimistic, given the above. They could also miss the opportunity of achieving a change in culture by misjudging how to target our modern society. Perhaps Big Society would stand more chance of being achieved through new approaches of targeting people and their preferred behaviour, rather than through traditional and possibly, wrongly-focused, place-based initiatives.

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WHITEHALL

District View

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