Volunteering

Lord Lingfield Excerpts

Wednesday 21st February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lingfield (Con)]

My Lords, I refer your Lordships to my charitable interests in the register. For six years I had the good fortune to be the voluntary director-general of one of this country’s major volunteer charities, the St John Ambulance. It was created in late Victorian times for the best of all reasons: it was seriously needed. Life in most workplaces was extremely dangerous and medical help was sparse so there was a great need for industrial communities to practise self-help and learn the techniques of first aid. St John Ambulance personnel are still needed as much as ever today in public places, as they were, for instance, at the Hillsborough stadium disaster which involved St John Ambulance volunteers in my time.

Our fathers’ generation retired at the age of 65 and looked forward to perhaps five to 10 more years of active life. Now extraordinary advances in medicine in past decades mean that living to 80 or 90 is commonplace. Our population is therefore becoming older with all the huge difficulties of care that this will bring, and so I believe that we are going to have to learn once again, as did our Victorian forefathers, to look after each other in our homes and communities far more than we do at present, as our health professionals will be even more severely stretched than they are now. There is no better way for this to happen than the development of more voluntary organisations to add to the many excellent ones that we have already in this country.

I have spent a lot of time in recent years visiting schools and FE colleges, and I am always gratified to see evidence of the voluntary work that some of their students do. However, we need a fresh national initiative to bring a new culture of volunteering to schools and colleges. If far more youngsters can be encouraged by their schools to give an hour or so each week to voluntary work in healthcare areas, our society would be better able to meet the great challenges that an ageing population will bring.