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Out of the shadows

By Nathalie Thomas, Third Sector, 4 April 2007

Out of the shadows

Greg Clark, Shadow charities minister, is shaping Conservative Party policy on the voluntary sector.

When David Cameron scoured the ranks of the Conservative Party for a shadow charities minister capable of rivalling the young and popular Ed Miliband, he found a good match in Greg Clark.

At only 39 years of age, Clark has a boy scout charm similar to that of 37-year-old Miliband. Their educational backgrounds are almost identical: Clark read economics at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and has a PhD from the London School of Economics; Miliband studied at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, before also attending the LSE.

Both were baptised as members of Parliament after the 2005 General Election, and Clark is now as much part of Cameron's 'new Tory' gang as Miliband is part of the next generation of New Labour MPs on whom the party is relying to see it safely through the coming elections.

The similarities may be striking, but Clark says he is working on the distinctions. After a period of settling into his job - he was appointed last November - he and Cameron are researching four themes: public service delivery, giving, volunteering and regulation.

"First of all, David and I want to lay out some concerns; second, some directions for reform; and, third, some specific policies," says Clark. "I want it to be quite interactive so we can test whether our concerns are shared by the sector and whether the directions we think are appropriate are right. Then we can come up with some detailed pledges."

And then, of course, there's Iain Duncan Smith's Social Justice Policy Group, whose voluntary sector sub-committee produced a hefty research paper before Christmas.

"The combination of things that we're proposing and the policy group proposals that are accepted by the Conservative leadership will become policy," Clark explains.

He hints at where he would like to see the sector go. "I don't think the Government has adequately addressed the question of charities' independence and freedom to manoeuvre," he says. But it's unclear how much his policy on the voluntary sector will be coloured by the 'Tescoisation' agenda set out by Duncan Smith 18 months ago.

Until Clark's appointment, Duncan Smith was the loudest Tory voice on charities, but he made few friends among higher-income organisations when he argued at a Third Sector awards ceremony that they were edging out their smaller counterparts.

Clark isn't as vocal on the issue as the former Tory leader - he points out that he has a meeting with Mary Marsh, director of the NSPCC, on the same day as he talks to Third Sector - but a preference for small charities consistently creeps into his language.

"I've always believed in localism," he says. "People often identify with groups in their communities more than they do with national groups."

Clark's eager to ensure that small groups get an equal share of government money, if and when more public service contracts are dished out. He also warns against creating what he calls a "Whitehall of charities".

Clark says: "If that was to happen, it would fail to achieve the potential we have in using the voluntary sector and squeeze out the sector's ethos and entrepreneurialism."

Time will tell the extent to which Clark's thinking differs from that of the Tory old guard and, indeed, of Miliband, his Labour nemesis. In the meantime, his readiness to chastise the Office of the Third Sector for its performance over issues such as the Budget certainly sets him apart. "It has the most feeble performance of any office in government," he says.

Clark CV

2006: Shadow minister for charities, voluntary bodies and social enterprise
2005: Elected MP for Tunbridge Wells
2002: Elected to Westminster City Council
2001: Director of policy, the Conservative Party
1997: Chief adviser for commercial policy, BBC
1996: Special adviser to Ian Lang, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry