The Liberal Democrats have outlined their response to the Conservatives' proposed "Big Society", saying you can neither run everything from Whitehall, nor leave everything to society.

Speaking to Today presenter James Naughtie, Liberal Democrat education spokesman David Laws argued that the state had to have a role because "sometimes people don't turn up".

"What you need to do is to resource public services properly, but to devolve much more power down to the people who actually run public services," he said.

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