Community and Voluntary Sector

Baroness Scott of Needham Market Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on securing this debate. It is easy to see that NCVO continues to be in great hands. The number of speakers today is testament to both the importance of the subject and the wide range of experience in this House. I am sure we have all been impressed by the many briefings that we have received, which show the sector in all its diversity. The recent praise for the sector from both Keir Starmer and Lisa Nandy has been very good to hear, as was their commitment to resetting the relationship. Hopefully, the days of government telling charities that their deeply held views are somehow woke and undesirable are behind us.

One of the problems with getting to my age is the constant sense of déjà vu—covenants, compacts, big society and so on—and how few lessons are ever learned from what has happened in the past. I am a member of the advisory board of the Institute for Volunteering Research at the University of East Anglia, and I can point the Minister and her team to some excellent analysis of what works and what does not, when it comes to the relationship between government and the sector.

There is not time today to go into why this relationship can be so problematic, but it is like that popular book from the early 1990s: Governments are from Mars and charities are from Venus. Charities have their own specific purposes, which do not always dovetail with the conventional way that government like to do things. Nowhere can you see this better than in commissioning. There is a body of advice available to government on making procurement practices really work for this sector and on the need for sustainable funding models, but it is too often ignored. NCVO reports that 84% of the organisations it surveyed reported that their grants and contracts had not covered their costs since 2020.

Community Action Suffolk, the county’s infrastructure body where I live, reported that 65% of respondents were oversubscribed and underfunded on projects for which they receive statutory funding. It seems to me that this is based on the myth that charities have a bottomless pool of volunteers on which they can draw and that it is somehow free labour—and that funding will always be met by an endless stream of philanthropy. Of course, none of the above is true. Volunteers need to be recruited, trained and managed, and, in an ideal world, we should meet some of their basic costs, such as bus fares. In any event, as we have heard, volunteering is in decline. Many people are working longer hours, older people are undertaking childcare duties and some cannot afford the basic costs of volunteering.

There are a few things government can do, as we have just heard from the noble Baroness, such as enabling more employer-supported volunteering. However, one of the lessons of the past is that top-down initiatives —snazzy apps and so on—simply do not provide results. The fact is that volunteering is an expression of an individual choice to give your time to something that you value; it is not really under the direction of the state.

Larger charities do have a bit more in the way of resource to recruit and manage volunteers, but we know that 77% of organisations have an income of under £100,000 a year and 47% have under £10,000 a year. I want to end with a plea for local infrastructure bodies such as Community Action Suffolk, where I was a trustee. They provide advice and support to hundreds of community-based voluntary organisations: everything from trustee recruitment and training, volunteer portals, a directory of funding opportunities and help with IT, DBS and charity commission compliance. We have heard a lot about investment and infrastructure, so let us not forget our social infrastructure.