Phillip Blond: 'Big society' is more than a slogan – here's how it can really work

SO JUST what is this "big society"?

Well, despite its poor presentation during the election and its admittedly very funny caricature by Labour as a DIY state where we perform heart surgery on our neighbours, run out to collect the bins and then pop in to teach economics at the local school, what it really represents is the most transformative, empowering and innovative idea for decades.

We have attempted to bring about the good society through the centralised state and the individualised market and both have failed. Too many of us are still poor, de-professionalised and stuck in a life that has no economic options. The big society suggests the way to change our social political and economic outcomes is to associate with one another to get the state and the market to start working properly again. So if you are on an estate beset by crime and social problems, you can't solve it by yourself and neither can the police or a whole army of social workers. Such problems can only be tackled by the residents themselves coming together to change their lives, their community and their neighbourhood.

And from the perspective of government, that is about creating the infrastructure and funding to help make that happen. The best way to help those who are in our poorest, most marginalised, most neglected communities, is not the state on its own, is not the market on its own, though both can facilitate the process –it is about civic action and organisation, people coming together and becoming the social change they want to achieve.

To pull this off, social entrepreneurs are key. They drive ventures that use the market to achieve social good. There are 1.7 million people involved in social ventures full time in the UK today, the highest in Europe. There are around a quarter of a million people attempting to set up a social venture in the UK today. There are some 62,000 social enterprises – social ventures that have become formal business vehicles – with a turnover of around 24 billion each year. We should be proud of this industry.

Financial support reaches only 1 per cent of all social entrepreneurs. Unless they have private or family money, things just don't happen. Fieldwork suggests 36 per cent of social entrepreneurs who receive support create ventures that work so well they can be replicated again and again. So, getting enough support to just 10 per cent of these means we could have witnessed the creation of a further 8,500 viable, sustainable social enterprises.

We need to seed the future, and that requires redistributing existing money directly to these entrepreneurs rather than through remote and bureaucratic state agencies.

We have proposed a radical new structure to support social entrepreneurs by developing a network of community hubs that would act as incubators for new social enterprises by providing the basic infrastructure, advice and funding. To slash the bureaucracy that plagues early- stage entrepreneurs, we would ask for regulatory powers to be transferred to these hubs.

In the longer term, we back the development of a capitalised social investment bank, targeted tax breaks for new investment vehicles and a community reinvestment act, all of which would help tailor and grow this market. Imagine the benefits to our economy from making this growth hungry sector work at the grass roots. Imagine the benefits to our society, too. A social entrepreneurship boom is but one element of the big society: but it is achievable and it is within our grasp.

• Phillip Blond is director of the ResPublica think tank.