Voluntary Sector Funding

Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2011 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[The Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they will take to support the work of publicly funded voluntary groups in deprived areas in the light of cuts in local authority budgets.

[The Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds]

My Lords, the voluntary sector in our society is effective, innovative and massively underfunded. The other day I was standing in a Leeds street discussing with community leaders why there were no riots or disturbances in the city in August this year. There was a good deal of sensible discussion about the key points of what had happened in the summer. But the point upon which people agreed was that the immediate presence on those restless evenings of the youth workers who mingled with young people gave expression to their authority and calmed nerves. Some were directly employed by the city, but more were members of a variety of organisations, many of them publicly funded and many of them faith-based, which run or have run youth work within the city. One of the community leaders said, “If this happens next summer, there won’t be the youth workers to provide confidence for the young people of Leeds”.

Those issues are key to a discussion of the work of voluntary groups in deprived areas. So much work is done by this collaboration between local authorities and voluntary organisations. I am sure that the Minister, when he replies to the question, will want to affirm that work. Yet, there is now such a massive threat to so much of it. I take as an example Thrive West Midlands, which is a faith-based infrastructure organisation in Birmingham founded by the Church Urban Fund, which has worked with the city to obtain continued funding for daycare centres for the elderly. That fits so well with the social care debate that we have just been having.

There has been some success, but, for example, the Weoley Castle Community Project has had to pull out of direct daycare making two staff members redundant because of a failure of funding. The impact on the elderly in situations such as that is immense. Individuals suffer and those individuals are often among our most deprived citizens. I know that we face cuts, but it should be for those of us who can afford it to bear the weight of those cuts; not those under most pressure already. There would be no great loss if the dustbins of our comparatively well-resourced suburb were emptied fortnightly rather than weekly. Many of us could afford higher council taxes, yet the pressure is always on the weaker members of our society.

To its credit, Manchester City Council has tried to ring-fence homeless support, but the Booth Centre for the homeless there has had a £40,000 cut from DCLG which means that it is unable to bear the burden of homeless people coming there because of the closure of other advice centres.

Leeds has a good record of collaboration with the voluntary sector through Third Sector Leeds and I pay tribute to the collaboration that we try to express in the city. Yet we have seen cuts, for example, to English as a second or other language provision, which helps people to integrate more fully into our exciting multiethnic society. This has made it all the more difficult for asylum seekers and refugees to be served and helped as we try to support them through charities such as Meeting Point in Armley. That means that the volunteer provision is often unused because we cannot find premises or expenses. There are volunteers who would like to be involved. It is becoming true that some of them cannot afford to be so.

The examples could go on, and I know that the Minister, as a good Yorkshire inhabitant, will want to respond to the particular pressures that we have in the north. Hope Housing in Bradford writes of the increase in clients becoming homeless because of higher rents in the city. The Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations points to the probable closure of Oxfordshire Children and Voluntary Youth Service, which has placed 3,100 young people in volunteering positions. We know that closures such as those mean a waste of talent, energy and commitment and yet we have not yet found a way to circumvent it. It is not impossible. Philanthropy and generosity have remained remarkably buoyant during the financial squeeze. There could be tax encouragement to make that philanthropy more effective, but philanthropy is not enough. There needs to be some specific ring-fencing of government money, public money, for areas such as mental health, where charities struggle as mental health issues grow, with increasing homelessness and fear. There need to be incentives for money to be directed to areas of most need, and to those organisations which use most volunteers. Earlier in the day, we thought of how there could be incentives for firms which have most apprentices as they seek to provide facilities for the Government. There could be a parallel in direct incentives for those who use volunteers. It is no use exhorting local authorities and then squeezing the amounts they have to work with in the voluntary sector.

There needs to be a greater fairness in the allocation of local authority funds. It is those under most pressure which face the most substantial cuts. So I looked at the authorities with the maximum cut of 8.8 per cent in 2011-12. I began to feel that there might be a personal vendetta in this, because they were most of the places in which I have lived and worked—places like Knowsley, St Helens, Doncaster and Manchester—whereas those with the small cuts are the places where I go on holiday: Dorset, Rutland or West Sussex. The most challenged include some London boroughs: Hackney and Tower Hamlets. For the most part, however, the cuts to local authority funding represent a significant transfer of money from the north to the south. That can only widen the north-south divide which plagues our economics, and which I am quite sure the Minister regrets.

There are a variety of ways forward. I have tried to suggest some of the possibilities. I look forward to hearing proposals from others who speak, and to hearing which of those directions the Government will follow in fulfilling their desire to encourage both volunteering and voluntary groups in their contribution to our society.