Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, if she will make an assessment of the potential benefits of establishing a National Volunteer Corps to support emergency services.

Volunteering is critical to a vibrant and resilient civil society; it benefits volunteers and the organisations involving them and has transformational impacts on beneficiaries and their communities. This Government is committed to enabling people to take part in all forms of social action, including volunteering. We know the profound benefit that volunteering has on the individual, on communities and on society.

We also recognise the impact of volunteering in emergencies. As such, DCMS has committed to funding the Voluntary and Community Sector Emergencies Partnership (VCSEP) through to 2025. The partnership was established following 2017 crises including the Grenfell fire and Manchester terrorist attacks and aims to help people and organisations prepare for, respond to and recover from emergencies. The VCSEP is a collection of voluntary and community sector organisations, and is co-chaired by the British Red Cross and the National Association of Voluntary and Community Action (NAVCA). The partnership creates a network of networks, reaching thousands of volunteer-involving groups and organisations.

Given the effectiveness of this partnership and their existing reach into communities, DCMS is keen to support their resilience and emergency response work.

DCMS has considered other mechanisms, including a national volunteering reserve as was suggested in 2020 by Danny Kruger MP in his report 'Levelling Up Our Communities: Proposals for a New Social Covenant'. The Government response to this report outlined that a volunteering reserve would not be a solution to current barriers to volunteering such as work commitments, caring commitments, and people doing other things in their spare time. Evidence such as NCVO’s Time Well Spent research indicates volunteering is an activity inspired by a particular cause or purpose. For these reasons, we are focussing our efforts on supporting volunteering to grow and adapt, including through our active support of the Vision for Volunteering.We will continue to assess the value of approaches such as a national volunteering corps. However, given the evidence points to people stepping forward when demand exists, our current focus is on developing structures which coordinate a crisis response across organisations, rather than developing a national corps.