National Citizen Service Bill [HL]

Baroness Vere of Norbiton Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard - part two): House of Lords
Tuesday 25th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

My Lords, I support the Bill, and am particularly keen that we recognise it for what it is. It is a short Bill with limited scope, focusing primarily on the right organisational structure for the NCS in the future. Using a royal charter ensures the right levels of transparency, accountability and sustainability. Furthermore, NCS will be kept above the mêlée of party politics and, I hope, largely out of the reach of direct control of government.

NCS is a young organisation, of which great things are expected. If I were running the NCS, I would be looking at today’s debate with great interest but also with some trepidation. There may be a temptation to try to review and amend the principles behind the NCS and to add provisions to the Bill. I worry that now may not be the time. Let us look at this from two perspectives—first, the NCS, and secondly, the impact on volunteering. It is beyond doubt that the National Citizen Service has the potential to be a ground-breaking programme offering all our young people of whatever background a valuable experience at a crucial time in their lives. I think we all agree on that.

The NCS’s stated goal is to grow threefold in the next few years. It is a hugely ambitious undertaking—from just under 100,000 young people in the programme to more than 300,000. This is all the more important as quality of experience is essential.

Currently, the remit of the NCS is simple: a short programme, based in the UK, for young people aged 16 or 17—no more, no less. That is absolutely right, for now. The NCS should be allowed to stick to its knitting and focus on growth of high-quality provision, because growing an organisation is exceptionally hard, particularly when that organisation is reliant on relationships with third-party providers. Each successively larger cohort will include an increasing number of young people who are harder and therefore more costly to reach, whether demographically or geographically. Growth will stretch the resources of the NCS, so while it may be tempting to require by statute the NCS to do other things—say, to reflect and represent the broader provision of youth services to people of all ages—there is a danger that we will over-expand the vision. The NCS is a simple concept with a well-defined programme that can and should exist independently of, but collaborating deeply with, large and small providers, in quite a complex marketplace. Simplicity and the ability to be nimble will be essential for growth. We need to let NCS be the NCS, not always but for the time being at least.

I turn to the impact of the NCS on volunteering. For most young people, the teenage years and the years thereafter are times of great change. For some people, a commitment to volunteering and social action is in their DNA, but for many of us it ebbs and flows throughout our lives, as education, work priorities and raising a family allow. Of course, we need a mechanism for sharing social action opportunities, not just for young people but for everybody, but the goal for NCS should be to plant a seed of community and reciprocity, as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said and, when the time is right, that seed will germinate and grow. NCS graduates will have the confidence to step up and serve whenever they choose, not because we have told them to do so. The only thing that needs to be right is the conditions for that individual.

While it may seem sensible to promote and measure in great detail the uptake of volunteering immediately on graduation from NCS, that runs the risks of encouraging perverse incentives. The NCS is a window on what is possible, maybe now and maybe in future, but there is nothing worse than being volunteered to volunteer, to feel under pressure to get involved immediately. It is the quickest way in which to extinguish any interest—and, trust me, word of mouth among young people will make sure that the next year’s cohort is well aware of the expectation. So while we and our country expect, we must ensure that the weight of our expectations does not crush the spirit of involvement in our young people now or in future.

I am in favour of scrutinising the Bill—of course we should—but we must resist the temptation to expand it, to load additional obligations on what is a relatively new organisation, focusing necessarily on high-quality growth. We should not confer unreasonable or unwelcome expectations on its graduates. We must allow young people to come to volunteering when it is right for them; it should not be forced. NCS is no quick fix; it will take decades to know whether it has worked—and, for once, we must be content with that.