The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor by Penny Junor

Author:Penny Junor
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Royalty
ISBN: 0312377665
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2008-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-EIGHT

Community Spirit

His experiment at Poundbury is by no means the first time the Prince of Wales has had an influence on government. The Department of Work and Pensions New Deal for getting the unemployed back into work is straight out of the Prince’s Trust and the work they have been doing for nearly thirty years; the only difference is that the government’s scheme is doomed to failure. It provides money to encourage employers to recruit the long-term unemployed; it doesn’t provide the back-up, the practical help, the mentoring, the team building that the Prince’s Trust provides – essential in giving real help to young people who lack motivation – with the result that most of those who have been given employment under the New Deal don’t turn up on time, don’t have the right attitude and have been swiftly sacked. The government’s Public Sector Food Procurement Initiative is another example; this is pure Business in the Community – and in this instance pure Prince of Wales.

The Prince didn’t found Business in the Community (BITC). It was started by Stephen O’Brien in the early eighties with a simple idea for inner-city regeneration: to involve companies in the communities in which they operate. If you can persuade business to invest, train and recruit from within those communities then you solve unemployment and improve the whole depressed inner-city environment. O’Brien, aware of the Prince’s Trust’s work in that area, initially asked the Prince for support with a project called Fullemploy, to help unemployed young black people in the inner cities. What followed was a daring event known as the Windsor Conference. For two days the chairmen of sixty major companies in the UK were shut up with a crowd of articulate black people. Racism, the Prince told the assembled gathering, was a failure by the white community to recognize the potential of the black community. It was a brave thing to do, it could have backfired; instead it was widely regarded as one of the most significant advances ever made in race relations, and which people involved in the field still talk about today. Charles felt he had found a man who shared the same ideals and an organization where he could make a difference. He became President a year later and has been passionately and inextricably bound up with the organization ever since – personally initiating several major programmes. Like the Prince’s Trust, BITC is a huge success story. It turns over £22 million, employs four hundred people and has seven hundred member companies – one in five of the private sector workforce and three-quarters of FTSE one hundred companies.

O’Brien’s successor, Julia Cleverdon, an equally dynamic character, is frequently driven to distraction by the Prince.

He’s like an extraordinary campaigning terrier with a memory like an elephant’s – he remembers the detail of every character he’s met on every visit, which is why, when junior ministers start arriving with shiny suits and shoes like conkers and being enthusiastic about inner-city problems, the Prince rolls his eyes to heaven.

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