Cllr Peter Crossen represents Bramhall South & Woodford Ward on Stockport Council.
There is a crisis developing across Britain that is receiving remarkably little attention in Westminster.
You will not yet find it dominating the headlines or captured neatly in the monthly economic statistics. You can see it instead in church halls, community centres, food banks, sports clubs, luncheon clubs and small local charities.
The collection bucket is lighter. The food-bank box is less full. The donation that an elderly resident might once have made without hesitation is becoming harder to afford.
In my own community, the anecdotal evidence I am receiving is deeply concerning. Some organisations are telling me that financial donations and contributions to harvest and food-bank collections are running at only around 75 per cent of last year’s levels.
That should concern every Conservative, because strong communities are not created in Whitehall. They are built by people.
For generations, older people have been among the quiet heroes of British civil society. They volunteer. They run committees. They organise church events. They support hospices, food banks, the Royal British Legion and countless other local causes.
Their contribution is enormous. Charities Aid Foundation estimated that people aged 65 and over donated around £4.5 billion to charity in 2024.
But generosity requires something first: the confidence that you can afford to be generous.
That confidence is being steadily eroded.
Pensioners have faced upheaval over Winter Fuel Payments, continuing pressure from energy costs and uncertainty about their household finances. When somebody on a fixed income is worrying about the cost of heating their home through winter, charitable giving inevitably becomes discretionary expenditure.
The £20 for the food-bank appeal becomes £10. The standing order to the local charity gets reconsidered. The extra tins bought for the harvest collection remain on the supermarket shelf.
People have not suddenly become less generous.
They have simply been left with less room to be generous.
More worrying still, some of yesterday’s donors are becoming today’s recipients. Trussell has reported that the number of food parcels provided to people aged 65 and over has risen dramatically since 2019.
David Cameron’s Big Society was often caricatured by his political opponents, but at its heart was an important Conservative principle: government cannot, and should not, do everything.
Families, neighbours, churches, charities, voluntary organisations and community groups form the social infrastructure between the individual and the state.
A lunch club checking on isolated pensioners may prevent loneliness becoming a health crisis. A youth organisation may keep a teenager engaged and away from crime. A community organisation may support a struggling family before social services ever need to become involved. A food bank can stop a household already on the edge reaching complete crisis.
Much of this extraordinary work is delivered at remarkably little cost to the taxpayer because it is powered by volunteers, goodwill and thousands of modest individual donations.
But here is what Labour appears to be missing.
If that community infrastructure begins to disappear, the need does not disappear with it.
The pressure simply moves somewhere else.
And its next destination will very often be local government.
If the voluntary luncheon club closes, elderly isolation remains. If the charity supporting vulnerable families disappears, those families may eventually need statutory intervention. If early help vanishes, councils often inherit the same problem later, but by then it is more serious and considerably more expensive.
Yet councils themselves are hardly swimming in spare cash.
Labour’s new local-government funding system has produced winners and losers across England. The Government can point to headline increases in “core spending power”, but those figures increasingly assume councils will raise Council Tax to the maximum permitted levels and councils like my own in Liberal Democrat led Stockport, who despite lone efforts in voting against it, increased council tax by the absolute maximum permitted again this year and are likely to do the same again next year.
Meanwhile, organisations representing councils are warning that Government funding is not keeping pace with rising demand and costs. The Local Government Association estimates that English councils face a funding gap of around £2 billion this year, rising to £7 billion by 2028/29.
And the distribution of the money is itself deeply controversial.
That is not a sustainable funding settlement. Nor is it particularly fair.
It means communities can be squeezed three times over.
First, this Labour government policy leaves households with less disposable income.
Second, charities and voluntary organisations lose the donations they depend upon.
Then, as those organisations withdraw services, residents turn towards councils which themselves are being expected to do more while extracting more from local taxpayers.
Household to charity. Charity to council. Council to taxpayer.
At every stage, the pressure is simply pushed further down the line.
And eventually it lands back at the Treasury.
That is why this matters far beyond the charity sector.
A pensioner donating £10, a volunteer giving three hours of their week or a church opening its doors to provide meals creates enormous social value for almost no cost to the Exchequer.
Lose those networks and replacing them through formal state provision can cost many times more.
Conservatives should therefore be unapologetic champions of strong families, strong communities and a vibrant independent voluntary sector.
Not because the government should abandon people, but because the healthiest society is one in which the government does not need to be the first answer to every human problem.
Britain does not need the idea of a Big Society replaced by Labour’s Shrinking Society: fewer donations, fewer volunteers, weaker community organisations, overstretched councils and ever greater reliance on the state.
Because eventually there is nobody left to pass the problem to.
And when Labour finally realises that, taxpayers will be left with an enormous and ever increasing social security bill for replacing community institutions that should never have been allowed to fail in the first place.