The Big Society may well come to mean government ‘on the cheap’ – after all, it’s probably the only type of government we can afford at the moment. It may also turn out to just be ‘volunteers doing stuff for nothing’ as one perceptive member of the public put it on the six o’clock news last night. Or Cameron could end up ditching the idea, overwhelmed by great waves of public apathy and indifference.

But it could turn out to be a turning point, a great big libertarian stick in the ground, the (big) opportunity we’ve all been waiting for. In the face of tough economic times, and harder ones ahead, perhaps this is just what some of us need: the chance to measure ourselves against the ‘good’ that we do, rather than the money we make. Maybe there is more to life than just paid work (important, of course, though that is – volunteering won‘t pay the bills, after all… that‘s kind of the point). Life could, in fact, also be about mucking in, helping out, improving your immediate surroundings, your ‘neighbourhood’. Less: petitions, letter writing and criticism, then, more: DIY, direct action and ‘doing stuff for nothing’.

Whether it works or not will probably come down to the detail – principally, will people really get the chance to make a contribution, or is this the kind of devolved power that comes with a huge number of bureaucratic, and financial, strings attached? And, convinced as I am, by the argument that power should rest, as far as possible, with the individual, Edmund Burke’s line about paying undue attention to a vocal minority should give us some pause for thought. After all, one man’s Community Organiser is another man’s opportunistic political adversary. But for all that, if the Big Society is to mean anything then it does, ultimately, have to be about decentralising power – if it doesn’t then all that talk about letting people take more control over their lives will just end up sounding like the kind of stuff politicians always tell us when they‘re scrabbling around for the next Big Idea.

Birmingham spent £46m of Working Neighbourhood Fund money over the last two years trying to help people get into work. Even by the standards of the largest local authority in the country – and in a city with 14% unemployment – that’s a considerable amount of taxpayers’ money. That it only actually helped 170 people get a job shouldn’t surprise any of us, nor the fact that there’s little to show for the £500m that’s spent on the same problem since 1997. Even the Labour peer, Lord Myners, a recent convert to common sense now his party‘s not in government, knows that throwing money at ‘job creation’ doesn’t work:

“The government can’t create jobs” he said last month. “The government can create the environment which is conducive to the creation of jobs but it cannot create jobs and we mislead ourselves if we believe it can.”

The council’s targets for this largest tranche of money – getting 4,000 people into work, and advising a further 15,000 – were clearly hugely over optimistic. That’s not to say the money has necessarily been wasted, but it’s clearly symptomatic of much wider problems that the fund has been used instead to either plug the gaps of a failing educational system that sees so many young people leave work without the basic skills needed for a job, or has been spent on smoothing over the deficiencies of a benefit system that makes it financially prohibitive for so many people to come off benefits and into work.

And the bigger issue here is Lord Myner’s second point – that what governments can do is create the environment that is conducive to the creation of jobs. And businesses – whether already settled in the city or looking to locate from elsewhere – tend to be in broad agreement on what constitutes that type of ’conducive’ environment. It’s one with a good transport infrastructure, low crime rate, cultural and entertainment amenities on tap as well as access to the basics such as affordable housing and quality education. This is what councils need to remain focused on, not the impossible task of creating private sector jobs in the midst of a severe recession.