Volunteering

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Wednesday 21st February 2018 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they are taking to promote the importance of volunteering.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to be able to have this debate this evening on volunteering. I am touched by the number of other noble Lords who wish to speak. I am sorry that they have been allocated only two minutes, but I was beginning to think we were not going to get anything.

Every day, all across the world, millions of people give up their time in the service of others. Across our own country, school governors, magistrates, charity trustees and thousands of others make an invaluable contribution to public life, which is often hidden from view. Volunteering is the glue that holds together many of our communities. It helps to build a vibrant civil society and, along with that, more social cohesion, well-being and social capital. Volunteering has certainly enriched my life, and several of the charities that I am now involved with are blessed with volunteers who contribute to their work but also help to hold the charity accountable and feed into its culture.

This week is student volunteering week and Changing Lives, the charity that I chair based in Tyneside, works widely with people with complex needs. We have great experience of students volunteering and sometimes then becoming sessional workers, or even working full-time for us—a side of students that does not often hit the news.

When I was 21, I spent two years volunteering in Kenya with Voluntary Service Overseas. The experience was life-changing for me. One thing that it did was to make it very clear that you really can make a difference—you just have to decide that is what you are going to do. I have been re-involved with VSO over the last 10 years in various governance roles. My experience is not unique. VSO recently surveyed over 3,000 of its former volunteers from across the globe to find out more about the long-term impacts of volunteering. Over 80% of them said that their experiences had made them more confident and resilient, and 50% of them were more socially active as a result of volunteering, contributing more to their local communities when they returned from their placements.

In drawing up the sustainable development goals, the UN recognised the importance of the vital contribution of volunteers to the delivery of those goals, which all nations, including our own, have signed up to. The Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex did some ground-breaking research over two years with VSO which looked at the specific ways in which volunteers make a contribution to international development. This research found that there is a special role that volunteers as outsiders play. They can bring new ideas which spark innovation within the organisation and within the community. Volunteers inspire change, not just by what they do but by how they do it, through building trust and social capital. That helps to strengthen local ownership of the work, meaning that there is lasting change after the volunteers leave.

Volunteers can help to challenge some deep-rooted cultural practices and attitudes; for example, on gender equality—is that not something we still need today? Volunteers also help to get to places that others cannot, to extend and improve the reach of public services. Cath Nixon, a public health nurse from Manchester, spent two years in remote communities in Nepal training community health workers and supporting local women’s groups to advocate for better local healthcare, meaning that those communities could, for the first time, receive treatment locally rather than having to walk for several hours to the nearest clinic. That is but one of many examples that I could give; sadly, we do not have the time.

Finally, the research found—and I do not think that this will be a surprise to many in this debate—that volunteering is often the first step that people take towards becoming actively involved in their own communities and societies. It is often the beginning of a long journey of social action and active citizenship. There is a UK government-funded programme for young people that brings all these elements to life called International Citizen Service, which enables young people from the UK together to volunteer alongside young people from developing countries for three months. The programme has proven to be a great success both for the communities where the volunteers are placed and for its lasting impact on the personal and professional development of the young volunteers who take part. In Bangladesh, ICS volunteers have worked with the local community to set up child marriage prevention committees, stopping many young girls being married off at a young age. In Nigeria, volunteers have helped to get out-of-school children back into education, while in Kenya a team of all-deaf British and Kenyan volunteers has been teaching sign language and helped to challenge stigma, meaning that, for the first time, deaf children can communicate with their classmates.

The programme is helping to forge lasting friendships between young people around the globe. Many Ministers of Health, Education and Finance around the world fondly remember being taught by the first cohorts of VSO volunteers in the 1960s and 1970s. I can predict that many future politicians, entrepreneurs and leaders around the world will be formed from this cadre of young national volunteers who have taken part in the ICS programme. The Government are currently looking at the options for what they will do with the next phase, and I hope very much that they will continue to recognise the lasting benefits that it can deliver. Some 99% of returned volunteers say that it was useful to their personal development; 74% attribute their current career plans to their experiences with ICS, and two-thirds remain actively involved in volunteering a year after their placement ends. There are, of course, other steps that could be taken by the Government to make volunteering easier, and I am sure that other speakers will deal with some of what is in place in this area, as well as the recent reports which have been produced. I want in particular to thank the organisations that work with young people. I have had a good briefing from vinspired and am only sorry that I do not have time to include more about its work.

Changes to the benefits system have created additional hurdles for those who may wish to volunteer, particularly people living on housing benefit, who risk losing access to their accommodation if they volunteer on programmes such as ICS. More work needs to be done with the Department for Work and Pensions to recognise the valuable impact that volunteering has on the skills development of young people, and that this message is filtered down to jobcentres. I was pleased to learn that the Secretary of State at DfID will be taking this up. For volunteer doctors, re-registering with the GMC upon their return can be a challenge after a long stint out of the UK, and we need to deal with that.

Volunteering is a very practical way for each of us to live our commitment to social change. So many of VSO’s volunteers, whatever their age or nationality, volunteer because they choose to take part personally in the change in society and the world they want to see. I will finish with just one challenge: for those journalists who have rightly brought to our attention the bad things some involved in charities have done. I say this to them: come and volunteer, and help to develop a culture that is open and accountable in these organisations, and find and contribute to the good things that people are involved in.