Social Action

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Wednesday 12th September 2018 Grand Committee

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Scott of Needham Market. She and I share a wide-ranging interest in the voluntary sector. Although sometimes we come to it from a slightly different angle, we always end up having rather interesting discussions, of which I hope this is one.

I start from a very obvious but necessary point: we all agree that social action is a good thing. It is something that we all wish to encourage. It is something of which all Governments of every stripe are in favour. Going back to the 19th century, one can look at different initiatives which have arisen from different Governments, all in the name of trying to stimulate social action. I can certainly think back to the time of the Blair Government, when there were big new programmes of volunteering and social action announced with great fanfare.

Every time this House debates and discusses social action, we return to four key things: what is the purpose, what is the good that any programme of social action is trying to achieve which cannot be attained in any other way? How is access and eligibility for any programme going to be enabled? What resources will be behind it? Who is going to co-ordinate it? I am afraid we are back with those four questions again today. I was forcibly reminded of that by the fact that I was up very early yesterday morning attending a panel event in which four people were talking about the civil society response to Grenfell Tower. I was very struck by what they said. They had a tale to tell of unsurpassed generosity. In a very short space of time, people from all over this country sent £27 million. People sent goods. People turned up to volunteer to do something in a very immediate way to help in a place in which there was a clear need for social action to overcome a problem. Yet, even in a borough—to give Kensington and Chelsea its due—which has managed more than others to keep its voluntary infrastructure bodies funded, there was a complete lack of infrastructure to co-ordinate that outpouring of people who wanted to do something about social action. That is not just because it was an exceptional tragedy; it was because local government has been systematically stripped of its resources. Many of the first resources to go in local authorities have been those co-ordinating bodies. Consequently, what is left in any borough or local council are very small local organisations, sometimes religious, with a limited capacity to take on board some of the bigger and more intractable problems of social action. A key question that we have to think about when we talk about these national programmes of social action is: who will be there to translate that good will into something of a practical nature?

As we go through this I think we will see not a lack of willingness on the part of local government to treat social action as important, nor a lack of ideas for different, time-limited funds of which social action is an integral part. What we will see is a lack of coherence and long-term thinking. The question that I return to is: whatever this or any national Government’s enthusiasm for social action, how is it possible to ensure that we make the best of what young people have to give if there is no obvious and evident place in which there can be a coherent, co-ordinated response?

Noble Lords will not be surprised—the Minister certainly will not—if I turn to the subject of the National Citizen Service. I am on record as being somewhat critical of it. I do not dispute that the National Citizen Service does great things for young people or that those who go on it have a very good time. What I have always disputed, right from the beginning, is whether that very short-term programme can really be justified given how expensive it is per placement as compared to other services. We must return to asking questions about the National Citizen Service in some detail because it gets 95% of all central government spending on youth services at a time when local government resources for youth services are plummeting.

The Government sometimes come out with the value-for-money figures which noble Lords will have heard the chief executive of the National Citizen Service trot out again earlier in the summer. Those are presented on the basis of the return for every pound invested. I have no doubt that the academics who were brought in to produce that evidence base did a very good and thorough job. But in themselves the figures do not prove that the National Citizen Service is, comparatively speaking, the best way in which the Government should be spending the bulk of the money which they have to spend on this.

I have another question for the Minister. I know that the NCS Trust is making big efforts to get its overhead costs down, because it has been criticised for those. As part of its restructuring programme this summer, it announced that it would be changing the way it deals with a number of delivery partners. If I may pick my noble friend Lady Scott up on this, it is not the DCMS which runs the National Citizen Service; it just hands over a lot of money—£1 billion over three years. What can the Minister tell us about the efforts being made not only to bring down the overhead costs of the National Citizen Service but to improve its relationships with the rest of the voluntary sector? Given that it is largely not a citizenship service at all but a social action service, from its inception Members of your Lordships’ House have said that the National Citizen Service would rest or fall on the quality and durability of its relationships with the rest of the voluntary sector. So I ask them to do that.

The report around which today’s debate is structured asks for stronger managerial input for a full-time social action programme to be bolted on to the NCS. I am not sure that the NCS is the correct vehicle. The question is the extent to which the NCS is becoming, as it was supposed to be, the initial step that young people take towards a longer-term career or make a life-long commitment to social action and volunteering. I am not sure that the evidence is there yet. The NCS has just finished its summer programme for this year and no doubt we will see its next report.

I return to the point about local authorities. I am not asking for a return to the old structure of community service volunteers of years ago, not least because young people today want to do many more things online in a way that is very different from how it was 20 or 30 years ago. I still think there is a role for local government in making sense of the social action capacity of young people in a very immediate and enduring way. I also think that it is the role of government not necessarily to be the arbiter or founder of new schemes, but it certainly is for them to commission and deliver the comparative research data which at the moment is missing in all this. We urgently need data on these things to enable the Government to answer the question: where is the money best spent for the most effective return?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

What the Minister just said spoke to a thought. I thought that the whole point of the Bill that we passed two years ago was to create the NCS as an independent body. So when he said “we are working with them” to do this, that and the next thing, including reducing costs, can he describe what mechanism the Government have for that independent body?

[Baroness Barker]

When the Minister writes to me, will he set out in some detail who commissions the evaluation of the NCS Trust, and what the brief is for that evaluation? Is it a stand-alone evaluation?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

Those are both very fair questions. As the noble Lord and the noble Baroness probably know, I was not involved in that Bill. I shall write to them, because it is important to set out precisely what the Bill said about the relationship between the Government and the setting up of the NCS and where we are now, which I would argue should be the same. Let me, without making any commitments, clarify what is meant by “we”. I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, will know a lot more about the relationship that was set up. It is important that we get that right.

The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, had a few reservations about the NCS, saying that he thought that it was limited in reaching out to hard-to-reach young people and that it had not been scaled up. The NCS aids social cohesion. Eight out of 10 participants felt more positive about people from different backgrounds participating after the NCS was set up. Social mixing is a core aim of the NCS and, as I said earlier, nearly 500,000 young people have taken part. By the way, just to reassure the Committee, it is the fastest growing youth movement in a century, so surely there must be some good coming out of it—I hope so.

We are supporting young people to participate in social action by backing the #iwill campaign run by Step Up To Serve. This campaign is mobilising business, philanthropists, the voluntary sector and institutions to make social action a part of life for all 10 to 20 year- olds. To support this, in partnership with the Big Lottery Fund, we are working with other funders to create new opportunities for young people to participate in social action. The £40 million #iwillFund, has to date partnered with 20 match funders and has estimated that it will create 650,000 new opportunities for young people.

The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, asked whether we can work with the DWP to give jobcentres clearer guidance to recognise volunteering hours. That is a fair point. The DWP already recognises that volunteering can help young people develop vital skills for work. Unemployed people claiming jobseeker’s allowance or universal credit are required to spend a certain amount of time searching for work, as we know. Outside this, they can spend as many hours as they like volunteering. The DWP has also committed to update guidance to job coaches around their ability to provide additional, discretionary flexibility to claimants.

A note has come from behind me which may be helpful, about how the NCS and the DCMS work together. We are making the NCS an arm’s-length body. We are working with it on the basis that we are ensuring its accountability to Parliament while ensuring that it retains its independence. I think I need to embellish that in a letter—I see the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, nodding. That is an indication that we want to provide clarity on this.

In conclusion, the Government are providing people up and down the country with a range of opportunities to take part in their communities. It would not be right to conclude this debate without mentioning the important role that Scouts and Guides play, in the great tradition of Baden-Powell—the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, raised this point. Young people who join these and other uniformed organisations participate in weekly activities, contribute to their communities and develop key skills, such as teamwork, character and resilience. On Monday, the Government announced £5 million of new investment to create an additional 5,500 places for young people from disadvantaged communities. This will help more young people access these groups, participate in their communities and reach their full potential.