Community and Voluntary Sector

Baroness Pitkeathley Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Morgan for this debate. It was an honour to precede her as president of the NCVO and to listen to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Porter. I have worked in or with the charitable sector for most of a long working life and I was privileged to chair one of your Lordships’ Select Committees on charities in 2017. I begin with a quotation from the report we produced:

“Charities are the eyes, ears and conscience of society. They mobilise, they provide, they inspire, they advocate and they unite … their work touches almost every facet of British civic life”.


The then Government took 10 months to respond to the report that my committee submitted, and, when it came, the response was not worth waiting for. Although there was general acceptance of the problems facing the voluntary sector, there was no plan for dealing with them and much of the tone of the response could only be called dismissive.

Indeed, this rather typified the relationship between the previous Government and the voluntary sector, which is why the Labour Government’s renewed approach has been so welcomed by colleagues. A fundamental reset was needed and has now been announced by the Prime Minister in the form of a covenant, as we have heard.

We are in the engagement period now for that covenant, when consultation is going on between the Government and the sector; and the sector, as we know, will not be reluctant to make its views known. However, the huge variety of the sector, as we have heard, from tiny kitchen-table charities to multi-million-pound enterprises, makes it very difficult to consult in any meaningful way, although the intermediary bodies such as the NCVO and ACEVO do a magnificent job.

Up until 2010 I had the honour of chairing the advisory body for the third sector. This was set up by the Labour Government to encourage, promote and facilitate communication and co-operation between the sector and the Government. All the appointments to it were made through a public appointments process and members sat, not as representatives of their particular sector, but to act as a sounding board and a conduit for issues of concern to both the Government and the sector. All parties seemed to find this helpful and I wonder if the Minister would consider reactivating the idea. It was wound up by the incoming coalition Government but I believe it did a useful job. Our Leader, the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, was Minister for the Third Sector at the time. She had a lot of contact with us and I am sure could be consulted about the role of such an advisory body going forward.

I will just say a word about partnership. If I had £1 for every time I had heard Governments, the NHS and local authorities say they wanted to work in partnership with the voluntary and community sector, I would be a rich woman. We have to ask what partnership means. It does not mean deciding what services you want to provide for your citizens, progressing those plans, and then throwing a crumb or two out about what you want the volunteer sector to do when it was never even in the room when the plan was devised. This is very short-sighted for two main reasons. First, you do not get the best out of any partner unless you involve them at the earliest possible stage in planning, and secondly, you are ignoring the priceless contribution of the voluntary sector, which is its contact with consumers. Every piece of research about consumer involvement shows that people, especially those who are disadvantaged or vulnerable, engage more readily with charity or non-statutory agencies than someone perceived to be from the Government or the council. This is one of the many priceless contributions that the voluntary sector brings to the public life of our country.