Active Citizenship

Baroness Neuberger Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neuberger]

My Lords, I am delighted to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Blair of Boughton, on his perceptive and compelling maiden speech. It is a real joy and privilege to have him in this House. I am personally so delighted as he and I have worked together on many issues to do with volunteering in the police in particular and the criminal justice system over many years. He will bring his wisdom and energy to this House and contribute not only on issues of crime and justice in which he has such expertise, but also on wider issues to do with the role of the citizen and the state. I look forward, as I note that all sides of the House do, to the major contribution that we know he will make over the coming years.

I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bannside, on his maiden speech and I was pleased to hear the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester teasing him very gently about a slight difference of theological perception. Wearing for one moment my rabbi’s hat, in so far as I believe in heaven at all—we Jews are very easy on the subject—we do not think that there will be no arguments there. We think that the debates which go on about the meaning of the law in this place will also go on up there. It will not be quiet at all. Two Jews with three opinions: that’s the way it goes.

I also congratulate my noble friend Lord Maclennan of Rogart on securing this debate. It is one about which I care passionately. We all want to see active citizens. We all know that we need our citizens to be more involved in shaping their own lives and local institutions. The questions that lie before us now are just how we should be doing that and, indeed, what the Government can do to promote active citizenship—and what they should not do if they want active citizenship to flourish. I declare my interest as the volunteering champion for the former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, until 2009; as chair of the independent Commission on the Future of Volunteering, supported by all three major parties, which reported in 2007; and as a former trustee of the Citizenship Foundation.

To start, the Government’s big society agenda is welcome. It intends to put power back in the hands of the people with the ambition that every adult will be an active member of an active neighbourhood group, but what will every adult need to do to achieve that? Does that mean voting and participating in political parties? Is it about being on school governing bodies or parochial church councils? Is it about being trustees of local charities? Is it about volunteering regularly in some way? It is all of these although, personally, I believe that volunteering time to help others in some way is an important part of active citizenship. I so agree with the noble Lord, Lord Blair, about that. As the Commission on the Future of Volunteering had as its strap line, we want to get volunteering into the DNA of our society.

We need people to volunteer and to discover what makes people want to do it, despite relatively high rates of volunteering in our society already compared with other countries. We know that active citizens build a stronger society. Active citizenship helps to foster trust in communities, creates a shared sense of values, increases personal satisfaction in influencing change and, as we know, increases self-esteem. As you make new friends and contacts, you strengthen your CV and find a reason to get up in the morning, and so on—we know a lot about it. We know quite a lot about what volunteering provides to those who do it, but we need to know more about how it provides it, what people want to give to it and what they want to gain from it, particularly if the Government want more of us to be more involved.

It is with growing dismay that I heard that the Department for Communities and Local Government has launched a consultation outlining its intention to cancel the citizenship survey, which provides by far the most rigorous, regular and reliable data on citizen engagement—specifically, on volunteering—in England. Both Volunteering England and the Institute for Volunteering Research have told me that they believe it is vital for the volunteering sector that the citizenship survey continues, because the survey provides national data on a range of citizenship issues including volunteering, cohesion, empowerment, values, racial and religious prejudice and political participation, as well as providing detailed demographic data. The citizenship survey provides a foundation for a huge amount of work on volunteering and active citizenship, and we need it. We need to know the answers to those sorts of questions, which are core questions for the big society. If the survey disappears, we will not know any more.

There are other national surveys which ask questions on volunteering, but their data sets, and their rigour and regularity, are far below the quality of that offered by the citizenship survey. We are trying to create the big society. Surely this is therefore not the time to cancel the citizenship survey for the future. We need to find out more about what goes on. It is also, surely, not the time to allow the volunteering infrastructure at national and local levels to face such severe cuts as it is doing at present, when it has never been more needed.

I am also hugely disappointed, personally, given everything that the Government have been saying about getting all sorts of people who have had huge difficulties of one sort or another into work or meaningful activity, that the access to volunteering fund which we called for in the Commission on the Future of Volunteering, which I chaired, will not be extended after the end of its first-year pilot this coming March, when there cannot possibly have been any meaningful evaluation of whether such a fund has improved access. It is particularly disappointing when the Government are calling for red tape and barriers to volunteering to be dismantled—precisely what the fund was set up to do. I cannot see that it makes sense.

What should be happening, then? We should be making it easier for people to volunteer. We have to deal with CRB checks—I can almost hear a collective groan around the House, as we have talked about it so often—which are still, ludicrously, not portable. Even if a volunteer has been checked by another organisation recently, each organisation has to organise for a fresh check, which has considerable administrative cost even if the check itself is free—not to mention that there is quite considerable confusion among volunteer-involving organisations over who needs to be checked. As far back as 2008, the Commission on the Future of Volunteering raised the need for CRB-checking processes to be simplified and for portability to be introduced, yet nothing has happened.

I could continue by raising the issue of citizenship education, as many noble Lords have done. I could discuss the issue of how compulsory community service should in no way be confused with true volunteering. I could praise the Government for their emphasis on encouraging people to take part in civil society, which I gladly do. However, I would be grateful if the Minister could give me some answers about CRB checks, the access to volunteering fund and supporting the infrastructure for volunteering, when the big society relies on all those for it to work well.