I should inform the House that I have selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister for the second debate.

I beg to move,

That this House welcomes National Volunteering Week and the publication of the report of the Morgan Inquiry; recognises the outstanding contribution made by volunteers to what, sixty years ago, William Beveridge called ‘the vigour and abundance of voluntary action...which are the distinguishing marks of a free society’; notes that every week millions of people volunteer their time for others, providing indispensable personal care and attention in all of Britain’s communities; emphasises the continuing importance of volunteering even as the voluntary sector expands its paid workforce and takes on the delivery of public services; further notes that some voluntary organisations experience shortages of volunteers in key positions; supports the call of the Commission for the Future of Volunteering for ‘volunteering to become part of the DNA of our society’; congratulates employers who encourage and make time available for their employees to volunteer; and urges the Government to address the bureaucratic barriers that lie between volunteers and volunteering.

The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is currently abroad, and the Minister has courteously explained his reasons for not being present. On behalf of the Conservatives, let me say that we regard the Minister as a more than adequate substitute, and look forward to hearing him speak at both ends of the debate if the House consents to that course.

Everyone is in favour of volunteering. This could turn out to be one of those debates in which there is a serious danger of violent agreement breaking out. It is good to see that no amendment has been tabled to our motion, which I think will be seen as a positive development by the world of volunteering. It will see the House, as would be expected, responding to national volunteering week in a unified and consensual way.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Beveridge report on voluntary action, in which he said that

“the vigour and abundance of voluntary action…are the distinguishing marks of a free society”.

He is often described as the architect of the welfare state and is sometimes thought of as the apostle of stateism, but he was by no means that. He was a passionate advocate of the benefit to society of what people do themselves.

This is national volunteering week, as I said, which I am sure is why the Chamber is relatively empty. I am sure that hon. Members are taking part in voluntary activities. [Hon. Members: “Henley!”] My hon. Friends make the most ignoble suggestion that the voluntary activity—

That would not be voluntary.

Exactly—but I digress.

There have been three major reports, in quick succession, on volunteering: Baroness Neuberger’s wide-ranging and excellent Commission on the Future of Volunteering; the Morgan inquiry, which looked at the barriers that discourage young people from volunteering; and, yesterday, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition launched our radical and groundbreaking policy paper on voluntary action in the 21st century. The latter is very much the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), who has immersed himself in the subject for some years and is widely regarded in the sector as a serious authority on it.

Every week, millions of people across Britain volunteer their time for others, providing indispensable personal care across the country. Less than half of those voluntary groups receive any income from Government, and most of them simply would not exist without the work of volunteers. A survey of 59 hospices has concluded that the value of volunteering to the hospice movement as a whole is £112 million, which is almost equal to the financial contribution of the NHS. It estimated that for every £1 spent on supporting volunteers, hospices receive a return worth more than £11, so there is a huge return on modest investment. Indeed, few investments can produce such a rich yield.

Whole areas of community life would simply cease to exist without volunteering. Local sport is an obvious case in point, as 93 per cent. of sports clubs use volunteers. According to Sport England, volunteer coaches, officials, minibus drivers, match secretaries, umpires, treasurers, stewards and countless other helpers sustain more than 100,000 affiliated clubs with more than 8 million members. The annual contribution to sport is about 1 billion hours a year. The London Olympics, in 2012, will mobilise and rely on the energy of many hundreds of thousands of volunteers specifically for that event.

We know that Britain stands well in international comparisons of volunteering. It is unclear exactly how much volunteering is done, as different studies show different numbers, but we are exceeded only by Norway, among comparable countries, on the number of people who do any volunteer work. About half of Norway’s population are volunteers, compared with about 30 per cent. of ours. However, if one measures the number of volunteer hours rather than the number of volunteers, we slip down the ranks to fifth among comparable, developed nations. We compare rather less well with Sweden and the Netherlands, in particular, on the contribution that is made by volunteers. They are well ahead on volunteering as a share of gross domestic product. Those figures suggest that there are very different patterns in different countries, as one would expect.

In Britain, lots of people do some volunteering, but a smaller proportion here than in other countries volunteer regularly. Volunteers are spread pretty evenly across age ranges, with no huge bias in any particular range. Women are twice as likely as men to volunteer, as are those who describe themselves as religious. The Charity Awareness Monitor independent quarterly review shows that except for a few shallow peaks and troughs, the level of volunteering has remained essentially unchanged at a little below 20 per cent. To add to that confused picture, while some volunteering organisations say that they are reaching saturation point, others warn of a shortage.

Is my right hon. Friend aware of the excellent work being done by the third sector and volunteers in prisons and youth offender institutes? They are going in and helping youngsters, in particular, to rebuild their self-esteem. Above all, they are giving them the confidence to go out and find work when they leave prison. Is he aware that many volunteers are put off by the over-onerous and over-bureaucratic work of the Criminal Records Bureau, which puts in place obstacles that surely should not be quite as tight as they are?

I shall come to exactly that concern. I was going to mention the work on penal reform and the incredibly important work that needs to be done to address our appalling rates on the reconviction and reimprisonment of prisoners. My hon. Friend puts his finger on an important point.

Some parts of the volunteering sector have as many volunteers as they need, whereas others warn of a shortage. That indicates that episodic volunteering is flourishing, rather than the kind of long-term commitment that most volunteering organisations seek. Youth organisations such as the Scouts and Guides are, happily, growing fast, but they are finding it hard to recruit enough leaders to cope with the serious growth in the number of young people who want to take part in those activities.

There have also been shortages in the public service. The number of special constables has dropped sharply in the past 10 years. The National Trust reports an increase in volunteer numbers but a decrease in the amount of time that the average volunteer can contribute. At the same time, there is evidence that some existing volunteers are taking on ever more responsibilities. It is not surprising that in a Volunteering England survey of charities, 86 per cent. of respondents said that their priority was to keep existing volunteers rather than to search for new recruits.

A fantastic amount is being done, and nothing that we or any other party proposes should in any way diminish our recognition and celebration of that. Every volunteer whom I meet—I expect that other hon. Members have found the same—passionately wants more people to volunteer and volunteers to do more.

Will my right hon. Friend pay tribute to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, whose headquarters are just outside my constituency? The RNLI is a great example of how a national charity can not only raise funds but perform an important service, rescuing up to 22 people a day. It succeeds because it is independent of Government interference.

The RNLI is an amazing national institution that carries out a crucial public service in an exemplary way. My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point: the fact that the RNLI is able to raise that funding and to use volunteers to the extent that it does puts it in the happy position of being independent of government. The pluralism to which that contributes is a crucial part of a free and civil society. I am grateful to him for drawing attention to that point.

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that a real challenge for volunteering in an era of high employment is encouraging people who are in work to do voluntary work? One of the most powerful ways of doing that is to persuade volunteers how much they can personally gain from volunteering.

I totally agree, and I shall come to that point, which has been addressed in our policy paper that was published yesterday. There are great benefits not only for the employees who give their time to volunteer, but for employers. I shall return to that point towards the end of my speech.

We support the Government’s desire to build on what already exists, and we share many of their ambitions, but I want to look at their record. I do not want to be churlish or partisan, but there are some differences of approach that it would be only right to highlight in the debate. In recent years, there has been a bit of a tendency for Ministers to launch one “eye-catching initiative”—as Tony Blair used to describe them—after another to boost volunteer head count. There is a suspicion—these are not my words—that many of those initiatives amount to little more than a launch, a lunch and a logo. Despite the evidence that a culture of volunteering has to be grown from the bottom up, the Government have slightly tended to prefer a top-down approach involving high-profile Government initiatives. Rather than investing in the grass roots of volunteering, there has been a tendency to create more public bodies that, from the top, aim to change what happens.

I noticed that catchy phrase, “a launch, a lunch and a logo” on page 22 of the right hon. Gentleman’s document. Will he give us some examples of initiatives that he thinks have failed in that sense?

I am coming to exactly that point. An example would be the Experience Corps. A volunteering initiative was set up by the Government. It was aimed at retired people—a splendid objective—but it greatly underperformed in relation to its targets and was subsequently abandoned.

The right hon. Gentleman might not be aware that, in three weeks’ time, I shall be hosting the annual event of the Experience Corps in the House. The organisation has certainly not been abandoned. When it was set up, it was intended to be a three-year programme, but it is now in its eighth year. It deals not only with retired people but with people over the age of 50. We have a problem with this year’s event, in that it is significantly over-subscribed by hon. Members who are working with the Experience Corps to draw attention to the work of older volunteers in their constituencies. Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman would like to congratulate the Experience Corps, five years after Government support for it finished at the end of the programme, on still being a thriving and active organisation.

I hear what the hon. Gentleman says, but my understanding is that the Experience Corps has not met the targets that were set for it, and that the Government have had to come back and chop and change in a way that has been disadvantageous. I am delighted that lots of our colleagues across the House are going to attend the event; that is very good news. However, that organisation is an example of the kind of top-down approach that does not always work.

Another, more recent, example is v, another volunteering initiative with a splendid objective, aimed at young people. It is still establishing itself, and so far, its impact has inevitably been limited. I made a visit in my constituency that was set up by v in order to show me exactly what it did. I visited a voluntary organisation based in West Sussex, and I am afraid that I came away from it without any sense of what v was doing that added to an initiative that was already busy and successful. There were words rather than actions, and it was not clear that anything was going to be done in the future that was not already being done by that excellent organisation.

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way again. I will leave him alone in just a moment. I hope that, in November, he will take part in an event in the House: v will invite Members of Parliament to bring young volunteers from their constituencies, so that we can come together to celebrate the work of young volunteers. There are new initiatives in my constituency and elsewhere that are being helped along by v. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will bring a young volunteer from his constituency, with whom he has been working over the next few months, to that celebration later in the year.

Of course I would be delighted to do so, but we all do this kind of thing all the time. I suspect that, every Friday in our constituencies, we are all visiting organisations in which young, middle-aged and old volunteers are doing fantastic work. We celebrate that all the time, and it is important that we should give our support in that way.

The hon. Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt) and I were members of Baroness Neuberger’s commission, and he will know that, when we had the opportunity to discuss those matters with volunteers, v was raised by a number of those who were working with young people’s organisations. They said that they were not quite sure why v was there or what it was adding. Perhaps, in time, that will change, but that concern was raised during the commission’s work. It might be helpful to my right hon. Friend to know that the concerns that he is expressing have also been raised by others close to the coal face.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. I should stress that, when I made that local visit, I went there almost wanting to be persuaded, really wanting to understand what was being done that had not previously been done, and why v was needed. I went with the most open mind in the world, but I could not see anything being done that would not otherwise have been done.

The problem with these debates is that they often descend into a discussion on who celebrates the role of the voluntary sector the most. The truth is that all this is nonsense about celebrating the voluntary sector. I spend a lot of time with people who work in the sector—we are holding the awards for the Poverty Fighters Alliance in July, for example—and what they say, time and again, is, “Visits to the House of Commons and celebrations are okay, but just release us, give us the ability to find the money and let us get on with the job. We don’t want to be celebrated; we want to celebrate the work that we do ourselves.”

Speaking of recognition, the House should recognise the work that my right hon. Friend has done, particularly through the Centre for Social Justice, which has been absolutely superb. It has promoted good practice and focused attention on what can be done when inspiring, dedicated people commit themselves to solving social challenges. He has done the country an enormous service in focusing on those issues in recent years. I totally take on board the point that he has made about what the people who run these organisations want—namely, to be allowed to get on with the job that they have been inspired to do.

We have mentioned Baroness Neuberger’s commission, on which my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) and the hon. Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt) served. The commission noted

“a very large amount of criticism of several aspects of the Government’s initiatives to promote volunteering”,

which focused on a

“lack of joined-up thinking...poor communication…funding timescales...reporting and monitoring timescales...targets to the detriment of quality...quality and quantity of volunteering placements available”.

It concluded that

“the depressing thing is that messages about short-termism and a project based approach that fails to become mainstream—all of which we have heard repeatedly—are not new.”

There are issues, and it is important that we seek to address them with an open spirit.

There is an urgent need to promote volunteering, as well as other non-state activity, in what we believe to be the rather ill-named third sector. There is growing consensus across the political spectrum that the limit to the size of the taxpayer-funded state has been reached or exceeded. We read remarks by the right hon. Member for Darlington (Mr. Milburn), the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart) and the right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane), and we see the Lib Dems’ direction of travel; it is clear that there are no longer any serious advocates, outside the ranks of doctrinal statists, for the state as the answer to all social ills.

Of course, there remain pressing social challenges for today’s Britain. We think of the linking of family breakdown with crime and addiction, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) has done a huge amount to highlight. We already have the largest prison population in Europe, yet we can also see the appalling record of prisoners being reconvicted and imprisoned within two years of their release. We see 2.6 million people with disabilities on incapacity benefit, when so many could and would prefer to be in some sort of work. We see the pockets of acute poverty that still exist in too many parts of our country.

Addressing those challenges requires active intervention, because in most cases the key to success is breaking the cycle of deprivation. That means treating each person individually and working with them in a holistic way to solve their problems. The state is not good at that.

I am particularly grateful to my right hon. Friend for making the point about the importance of volunteers to criminal justice and about the concern in the community that we have important role models, not least male and young adult role models, who can lead young people into better ways. The Scout Association is an example of a group providing fine grassroots work, but it needs young adults to come through as volunteers. We need to provide flexibility and support to grassroots organisations to provide the work that will lead young people away from crime.

My hon. Friend makes an important point very well. The Scouts are expanding, which is excellent, but they need the encouragement of new leaders and volunteers to come in and work with young people to provide exactly the sort of support that my hon. Friend mentioned, particularly male role models. Many boys and young men are growing up without a father in their lives and, in many cases, without any male teachers; the proportion of male teachers in primary schools is now down to 10 per cent. or so, and is 20 per cent. in secondary schools. There are lots of young men growing up without any male role models in their lives, which is a concern.

The state is not good at that holistic treatment of the challenged individual—the individual with significant problems which society has a vested interest in solving—but voluntary organisations, charities and social enterprises are good at that. That is why our approach to these challenges unashamedly places emphasis on the role of an active and enlarged civil society.

I am listening carefully to the right hon. Gentleman in what is an interesting debate. Does he agree that there is one very important role that the state must play, which is to provide a high level of sustained investment in the provision of services? Is not the reality that we have had a sustained level of high investment from the state in the voluntary sector over the past 11 years? Is he saying that his party would match that?

When the hon. Gentleman has time to read our paper, he will see that one of our concerns is in regard to the compact, one of whose central tenets has been that, where voluntary, third sector organisations provide public services, there should be full cost recovery. As we know, that is much more honoured in the breach than in the observance. We are saying that there should be at least the possibility when that happens for voluntary and other organisations to make a surplus in what they do. Part of the problem is that it is much too difficult for really outstanding organisations that have found innovative and successful ways to address a particular problem to replicate that in different places in the way that a private sector organisation naturally would be able to do.

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point about the need for sustainable investment in these organisations and we draw attention to the amount of statutory funding for voluntary organisations and charities. The proportion that comes from grants versus contracts has crossed over, so a smaller proportion is now coming from grants. That impinges on the independence of those organisations, which is their lifeblood, makes them distinctive and enables them to do their fantastic work.

On finance, in Shropshire many volunteers are senior citizens and people on very low incomes. They play a vital role as volunteers, but owing to a lack of support from the Government to Shropshire county council, the council is struggling to give those people enough money to pay for their mileage in covering very large distances in a rural county such as Shropshire.

My hon. Friend makes an important point.

The right hon. Gentleman makes a good point about full cost recovery. Clearly, both sides wish to see a relationship where services are delivered in common, where common aims exist and where there is a professional relationship between the third sector and the public sector, but one of the problems with full cost recovery has often been the inability of third sector organisations to judge properly the full cost element. They are building up that experience over time. Throughout his document, the right hon. Gentleman decries the professionalisation of the sector. It seems to me that we cannot keep the values of amateurism while being good in terms of administration and accountancy.

I am grateful for what the hon. Gentleman says and I am delighted that he has had the chance to look at our document, but he is wrong to say that we decry professionalisation. We talk about it and say that the lessons of growing professionalisation are unclear. If we are to see the sort of growth in the sector that we believe to be essential for the strength of our society, organisations need to be efficient and professionally run. We do not have the slightest problem with that.

There is a real nub to this debate and my right hon. Friend has touched on it now: whether or not the state sees the voluntary sector as an add-on to the work it does, or as a viable, separate entity that it will help and support in the areas where it works. When Beveridge designed what we call the welfare state, he wrote a third paper in response to the introduction of the welfare state by the then Labour Government. He warned that the voluntary sector would be subsumed into the welfare state, instead of being viable and separate in its own right. Think of the private sector: write off vast sums of money from small businesses in taxation and do not ask them to pay the money back when they fail. They get huge write-offs. When it comes to the voluntary sector, we say, “There is only a year’s contract. Give us full cost recovery. If you can’t do that, goodbye.”

My right hon. Friend makes the point powerfully and he is absolutely right. That is what is meant by having an active civil society, which is thriving and vibrant. [Interruption.] The Minister is chuntering from a sedentary position about Victorian society. I notice that he made a rather intemperate, knee-jerk response to our paper yesterday, plainly without having read it. I am hearing a rather more moderate and thoughtful response from his Back-Bench colleagues. I do not want to be partisan. This is a good debate without particular doctrinal differences, but we need to explore differences of approach, which are important. If the approach is, as ours is, that to address many of these powerful social challenges requires the work of third sector organisations, voluntary organisations, charities and social enterprises, the question properly to be raised is, “Where will the additional capacity come from?”

Is it simply enough to hope that 100 flowers will suddenly and spontaneously bloom? The truth is that new flowers are coming into bloom all the time. This is generally about a person or group of people who see a problem and have an idea as to how to solve it, but too often these flowers wither and too rarely do they seed themselves and multiply.

We have been seeking to address those challenges in our paper published yesterday. We have set out a Conservative alternative that we believe can boost volunteering as a central pillar of the regrowth of civil society. We believe that it can contribute to a vibrant culture of giving and volunteering. Our proposals reflect wide-ranging discussions with charities, voluntary groups and social enterprises as well as the input from my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green’s policy group and the party’s social enterprise taskforce. I am sorry that the Minister’s knee-jerk reaction to our paper yesterday was to trash it, rather as Sir Clive Booth, the Labour chairman of the Big Lottery Fund, attacked our proposals for the reform of the lottery before they had even been published. He then had to retract his remarks, which were profoundly inaccurate. We look to the Minister to do the same today when he stands up.

Our ideas are very much drawn from what leaders in the sector have argued, and the Government would do well to learn from that. Notably, the comments that people in the sector have made in response to our papers have been uniformly positive, in sharp contrast to what the Minister said yesterday and what he seems still to be planning to say today.

I am listening to the right hon. Gentleman’s remarks with interest, and, to my regret, I read the paper last night. On the charities’ response to the Conservative proposals, how does he respond to NCH’s excoriating analysis of Conservative proposals in respect of single parents and jobless people, particularly those in the north-west of England?

I am not sure what point the hon. Gentleman has made, but it is certainly not relevant to this debate, nor does it come out of anything in the paper that we published yesterday. If he wants to raise those questions later in the debate, I am sure that the House will listen with great respect to what he has to say.

Our ideas draw heavily on what the sector itself has argued, and we make a number of proposals. They can be found in the document, and I do not need to go through them all today, given that I have taken up much more time than I intended and that I am aware that many hon. Members want to participate in the debate. I shall, however, mention one or two of them. As my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) has mentioned, one is our support for the long overdue moves being made to improve the Criminal Records Bureau checks system. Such moves have been recommended. We know that confidence and morale can be destroyed by bureaucratic hurdles and burdens. It is important to understand that Britain—society—will lose volunteers who are fired up and enthused, and who want to get on with things, if they find themselves parked for weeks while the bureaucracy creaks its way through the checks, because, all too often, the moment will have passed, the spark may have died and the enthusiasm may have waned.

This follows up the point that my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Norfolk made. There clearly must be a case for simplifying and speeding up the CRB process. Does my right hon. Friend agree that, given cases such as that of a constituent of mine who underwent all kinds of checks to enable him to be employed at a young offenders institution, only to be told that he would need another CRB check when he approached the Scouts to offer to help on a Thursday night, we should, at the very least, ensure that one check will suffice for all similar activity?

My hon. Friend is right. It is painful, it kills the spark and it takes the edge off things when people who are fired up and want to get on with volunteering are suddenly told, “You can’t do anything for five weeks because we have to go through this whole process.”

We will also act to clear up any remaining confusion surrounding the rules on volunteering and benefit claimants, so that misunderstandings on that front do not dissuade potential volunteers. We also want to exclude any notion of compulsory volunteering, which is, of course, a contradiction in terms. There is a sense that the Government, frustrated by the failure of their volunteering campaigns to deliver the growth for which they hoped, are displaying a bit of a tendency towards making volunteering compulsory in some circumstances. There is a hint of that in the Education and Skills Bill, which proposes volunteering as an enforced alternative to work or education—even v, the Government’s own youth volunteering organisation, is aghast at that. We are also concerned at the apparent Home Office plan to force volunteering on new immigrants as part of its probationary citizenship scheme.

We will encourage and promote a new environment conducive to volunteering. We believe that there needs to be more of a culture change to create a social norm that volunteering is what people do—so many people already do it. Indeed, the Commission on the Future of Volunteering referred to

“a culture change in society so that helping others and benefiting from a culture of mutual dependence becomes a way of life”.

We would say that that is social responsibility in action. All the evidence tells us that volunteering is infectious: people who volunteer in one capacity in their community generally end up helping lots of other community groups as well. A study for the Scout Association found that young people who are members of a youth or sports club are twice as likely to have helped out in their community as those who are not.

Meanwhile, many pioneering companies—this deals with the point raised by the hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas)—from John Lewis to KPMG, have begun to establish volunteering as a social norm of working life. They give their employees an entitlement to volunteer, and a small number of hours that they can use during the year to add to their own time spent volunteering. KPMG, for example, allows each employee 3.5 hours of firm time per month to volunteer, and last year, KPMG people contributed more than 38,000 hours to the community. The company recognised that their volunteering commitment is a major factor in giving it a competitive edge in retaining vital staff and recruiting the top people of tomorrow. Therefore, that is an important point.

As we know, social norms cannot be legislated for, but the Government can lead by example. I would like to refer to a final proposal today. The Conservatives would make a start by allowing every central Government employee eight hours’ volunteering during employed time a year. That is perhaps not a huge amount, but when one adds up all the hours, one finds that it amounts to a big contribution. I applaud the Government for being very ready to pick up our ideas in recent months, so there is one that we have prepared. What a great contribution to national volunteering week it would be if the Minister were to announce in his speech that that is yet another Conservative idea that the Government intend to implement. I commend the motion to the House.

I very much welcome this debate. The right hon. Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude) evinced from me a combination of laughter, when he made claim to a raft of proposals that the Government are already putting into practice, and despair—at the proposals that the Conservatives are bringing forward. Although I did not agree with everything in his speech—I shall pick up on some of those areas in a moment—we are voting on a motion to support volunteering, and on that I very much agree.

My right hon. Friends and I welcome the interest shown in volunteering by the Conservative party, although some interventions from my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt) on examples associated with older people’s volunteering and youth volunteering would suggest that there remains a need for the right hon. Member for Horsham, and the Opposition, to play catch-up on the marvellous things going on around the country, which are supported by both central and local government in many ways.

Like me, hon. Members across the House will want to praise the work of volunteers around the country, particularly given that this is national volunteering week. We can all welcome, too, the healthy state of charities in general. The motion rightly points out that this debate takes place

“as the voluntary sector expands its paid workforce and takes on the delivery of public services”.

The Conservative paper published yesterday says that “we are doing well” on volunteering, that we are

“second out of 36 countries”

on one measure and that Britain is “leading most of Europe” on charitable giving. That is absolutely right. Indeed, I think that the right hon. Gentleman said that a fantastic amount is being done, and it is great to know that the Opposition are celebrating the success of this Labour Government in supporting and promoting volunteering and the third sector.

The Minister makes a slightly glib point, but it illustrates an unhelpful premise in his mind: that what ordinary people are doing up and down the country in giving their time is somehow something for which the Government should take credit. People do this despite the Government, not because of them, and they have been doing it for much longer than new Labour has been in existence.

The right hon. Gentleman did say that he did not want to be churlish in this debate, but he has just demonstrated how he has given up on that ambition.

As the right hon. Gentleman rightly says, despite the pressures of work and family, and the rush of modern life, millions of Britons—the previous survey suggested a figure of 20 million—give up their time to help others. It is right that, across the House, we say that British society is not an “elbows culture”. The headlines about problems in neighbourhoods do not tell the whole story, because people in Britain do care about their neighbours and, both formally and informally, through voluntary organisations and in other ways, they contribute their time and their money to make our society a better place to live.

Does my hon. Friend agree that people who do charitable work need the tools to do it? One of the most important tools that the Government provide is investment. There has been a substantial increase in the charitable sector thanks to sustained Government investment. The sooner the Conservatives accept that and recognise that it is part of the reason for the success of the charitable sector, the better.

My hon. Friend is right. It is because the Government have acted in partnership with the third sector and listened to their concerns. We have responded, through direct investment and by creating an environment in which the third sector—charities, voluntary organisations, small local community groups and social enterprises, the whole panoply—can thrive, be dynamic and make progress in the future. I shall say more about the nature of the investment that the Government have put in and the outcomes that it has had in a moment.

It is through volunteering that neighbourhoods are drawn together. Knowledge is the best, surest weapon against prejudice, and shared activities that bring together the old and the young, people of different ethnic backgrounds and people with different levels of education, are among the surest ways to dispel assumptions and reduce tensions in our communities.

Can the Minister be specific about how much of the £75 million investment in v has had an impact on actual volunteering in projects involving young people?

I will address that point directly later in my speech.

Volunteering is not only about building stronger communities and neighbourhoods. Volunteering can transform the prospects of volunteers themselves. We have all met volunteers who learn as much as they teach, or are helped as much as they helped, whether the volunteer is someone moving from a long period of unemployment—former users of services can become volunteers and, in some cases, paid staff members—or a high-flying professional who volunteers and sees a different side of life. Many people from the City are now moving into third sector organisations and transferring their skills, and they gain hugely rewarding experiences in becoming leaders and chief executives in the third sector.

My hon. Friend will have noticed the recognition of the value of training in the voluntary sector on page 30 of the Conservative document. It states:

“It’s essential that such a system is of practical value to volunteers and is fully owned and controlled by the voluntary sector.”

Does he agree that what is really important is that skills acquired by volunteers should be transferable and part of an overall training gateway or network that is not confined to the sector, but allows people to progress and take their skills with them because they are recognised by industry and others?

My hon. Friend’s experience and knowledge in these matters, and his contribution to the charity world, the third sector and volunteering, are unsurpassed in this House. He speaks with great authority and knowledge about how developing the skills of those who work for and volunteer with the third sector—and the public and private sectors—has enormous benefits, both individually and to the nation, because those skills can be transferred. Such training can improve the ability of the third sector to deliver the aim of creating better outcomes for users, but it can also enable individuals to make a wider contribution to community life. He is right to highlight that benefit of volunteering.

Our thriving culture of volunteering cannot be taken for granted, and we must take some important steps to secure it for the future. I wish to use this opportunity to say that we must encourage volunteering by making volunteering easier, by actively supporting volunteers and by using the leadership of the public sector. Volunteering does not happen in a vacuum. It is informed by other debates, and I will go on to say what we can learn from the silence on those debates from the Conservative party.

We have been listening to the sector and working with it to make volunteering easier. We have heard concerns about criminal records checks and we consulted with the sector and across Government. In March, we promised that we would look at how to make the checks easier. Today, I am delighted to say, we published guidance that makes it clear that CRB checks are not always necessary. When volunteers do need a criminal records check—as is often right, when they will be working with children or other vulnerable groups—those checks are free. Volunteers are not charged for CRB checks, and last year that saved organisations involving volunteers more than £26 million.

I raised this point with my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude). I understand the Minister’s point and it is generally accepted that CRB checks are necessary for those who work with children, but surely it is not necessary to require multiple checks for the same individual when they wish to work in the same general field. Can the Minister reassure us that part of his changes will include a considerable streamlining of that process?

I can give the hon. Gentleman that assurance. Section 5 of the guidance document, entitled “The portability of CRB checks”, sets out in detail when it might be necessary to carry out a new CRB check. There is a simple template and an eight-point checklist that organisations can use to address that issue, so that they and volunteers will know where they stand.

We have removed one barrier with the requirement for multiple CRB checks, but the sector also told us about the problem of volunteers being left out of pocket. So in March we introduced the Employment Bill in the other place—it will shortly be considered in this House—to change the law to allow voluntary workers to claim expenses such as travel and child care without triggering the national minimum wage legislation. That is a major step forward.

In 2006, we also took action to change benefit rules to lift any barriers to volunteering by people receiving benefits. We ensured that they could be reimbursed any reasonable expenses when they volunteer, and that move was greatly welcomed by the sector. The chief executive of Volunteering England, Justin Davis Smith, said that

“this is great news as it lifts a barrier to the two million volunteers on benefits who were affected by the guidance”.

During the commission’s work, we picked up on continuing misunderstanding about the position of volunteers on benefits, so can the Minister reassure the House on the question of how the changes are being monitored? The feeling was that they are not being universally applied in the way that the Government would want, and that misunderstanding creates a barrier in places where the rules are not as effective as they could be.

The hon. Gentleman is right. It is one thing to change the rules to ensure that individuals on benefits can continue to volunteer and claim expenses, but the guidance needs to get out to every single jobcentre and organisation that uses volunteers, who also need to know the rules themselves. We do need a good communications campaign. Part of my job as champion for the third sector in Government is to ensure that when that does not happen I talk to ministerial colleagues, Departments and others to ensure that they understand and implement the new Government policy.

We welcome the report by Baroness Morgan, which was mentioned by the right hon. Member for Horsham, on volunteering by people on benefits. It includes further ideas and suggestions. We will consider them and see what more we can do to ensure that we ease volunteering into the role of a route into work for workless people. Many of us can think of projects and examples where that has been the case.

When it comes to expenses, benefits and CRB checks, volunteering is getting easier, but if one listens to the right hon. Members for Horsham and for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) one would sometimes think that the only thing the state should do is get out of the way. Those are almost the same words as were used earlier. I do not agree.

That takes me to my second point. We need actively to support volunteers and the small voluntary organisations that bring them together. Let me say how. Often, volunteers work for very small community organisations—we all have examples in our constituencies—often with no paid member of staff and little or no access to funds. For those very small volunteer-led community projects, a small amount of money can make a huge difference. That is why we now have a new programme, announced in last year’s Budget, to provide small grants to the smallest community organisations. The grassroots grants scheme will give grants of between £250 and £5,000 over the next three years to small volunteer-led organisations based in the heart of our communities. In July, we will announce the local partners who will give out the money, and I hope to see the first grants go out to those community groups in the autumn.

Embedded in the programme is an endowment component. Part of the money for the grassroots grants will create new endowments in every area of the country. That is a fundamentally new approach that has not been taken before by any Government and will create a sustainable source of small grant funding in every area of the country. The endowment funds will never be spent, but the interest generated by them will provide a supply of small grants to small community groups in every part of the country. That is an extraordinary new and ambitious way forward, and I hope that it has the support of the House.

Volunteers are often deeply rooted in their community. That is what makes them so effective. They do not always hear about the best ways to recruit other volunteers and to ensure they are used effectively. That is why in November 2007, as part of an overall £11 billion a year investment in education, employment and training, the Government opened up the flagship Train to Gain skills programme not only to paid staff of voluntary organisations but to volunteers. I want to use the debate to encourage all third sector organisations to access the Train to Gain funding pool to help to upskill their staff and volunteers.

Last March, we announced £4 million to train volunteers and those who manage them. That is why our GoldStar programme, which started in 2005, is working nationally and locally to spread good practice in volunteer management, going out to local and voluntary sector groups and providing them with training and support. I want to pay tribute to Baroness Neuberger for her work with the independent Commission on the Future of Volunteering—members of the commission have already spoken in the debate—which has drawn attention to these issues. She is a tireless champion for volunteering and is viewed with huge respect—some would say fear—across this House and in the wider volunteering community.

Not only small grants and training but active support can be needed when people want to volunteer but need an extra bit of help to do so. If someone is disabled, has no formal qualifications or faces other barriers, they can be left trapped and isolated without a helping hand. That is why Government programmes such as Volunteering for All are so important. They help to dispel the myth that volunteering is “Not for people like me”, spreading the message that volunteering is truly for all and that it should become part of the DNA of our society.

Our most significant investment is in the future of volunteering. Strong habits—such as volunteering, taking responsibility and taking part in the community—are best started early, so over three years the Government are investing £117 million in the independent charity v. The remarks made earlier by the right hon. Member for Horsham, which were critical, were unwise and, as he must know, inaccurate. So far, v has created more than 210,000 volunteering opportunities and it plans to deliver more than 500,000 more in the coming years—I hope that answers the question asked by the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr. Burrowes). That is a way in which we can encourage hundreds of thousands of young people to engage in a variety of youth-led projects and initiatives across the country, to get involved in their communities and to make a difference. Once they have that habit, I think that they will keep it for the rest of their lives.

It is important that we reward and recognise the contribution made by volunteers. The right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green was wrong to say that we should not recognise and celebrate the work of volunteers, although I do not think that he quite meant it in that way. I was at Buckingham palace only a few days ago to watch the volunteers and groups of volunteers receive the Queen’s award for voluntary service. Those awards were presented by the Queen, and other members of the royal family were present, and those who came to the awards were over the moon at the recognition of the value of the contribution made by those often unsung heroes. Although it is not the only thing that we should do, we should not underestimate the importance of giving such recognition to individuals who play a part in their communities.

I did not say that volunteers should not be rewarded. I said that debates in the House tend to be about who celebrates them more. The truth is that they do not need that much celebration from politicians. They need a lot of action to help free them up to get on with things on the ground. That was my point.

Let us hope that we can agree on that one. We should be doing more; that was the next point I wanted to mention. Volunteers need freedom, with as little bureaucracy as possible, but they also need active support: small grants, training, and help for those who face barriers. They also need leadership from the public sector.

Before the Minister leaves the point about on-the-ground assistance to small voluntary organisations, will he deal with this point? I am sure that he will accept and appreciate the huge contribution that community amateur sports clubs make to local communities by encouraging participation in healthy pastimes, particularly for young people, who are diverted from antisocial behaviour. Will he join those Members, some of whom are in the Chamber today, who are campaigning for tax relief on junior sports club contributions?

I thank my hon. Friend for that question. I regret the fact that as a Member of the Government I am unable to speak on behalf of the Chancellor, but my hon. Friend has made a powerful point that I am sure will be heard in the Treasury as a proposal for encouraging more people to volunteer, not least in the world of sport. Volunteers in sport and the arts play a huge role through not only increased participation, but the wider benefits that that participation brings. Young people become engaged, gain greater skills and are diverted from antisocial behaviour into social behaviour. They learn to gain skills and self-confidence as a result. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to point out the wider benefits of volunteering in a range of ways.

Will the Minister give way?

Yes, I will. My hon. Friend has a track record of campaigning on behalf of the world of sport and volunteers in sport that is second to none.

Follow that, as they say. I chair the national strategic partnership for volunteers in sport, which represents 3 million to 5 million sports volunteers across the country. Does the Minister recognise that most organisations that are set up to look after the voluntary sector do not necessary regard sport as part of the traditional voluntary sector, and vice versa? Most of us in sport tend to regard ourselves as helpers rather than volunteers, so some of the structures do not quite match. I know that some work is being done, but we need to look further at bringing that right down to the grass-roots level so that voluntary sector organisations are cognisant of that slight difference of approach to volunteering and what it means to individuals.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that we need to find better ways to connect those in the world of sport who are involved with not-for-profit organisations in sports clubs up and down the country that take part in and encourage participation in sport to be seen as part of the whole community of the third sector. We must ensure that our policies and programmes reflect that. In a debate only yesterday, the point was made to Stuart Etherington, the chief executive of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, that organisations such as the NCVO could see how they could look at themselves as part of a large infrastructure body that we support and fund as a strategic partner to embrace a whole wealth of organisations in not only the world of sport but the world of art.

The Conservative party has been talking about leadership. The right hon. Member for Horsham concluded his speech by talking about volunteering by civil servants. Indeed, I think that he briefed the Daily Mail that

“Tories accept that a day off a year is only a first step”.

He talked about eight hours today. However, on that first step, he has fallen over. Every civil servant in every central Government Department already has the right to paid time off for volunteering. Those in the Cabinet Office have the right to three days a year and in some Departments, such as the Home Office, the right is to five days a year.

The right hon. Member for Horsham will have welcomed our moves to help not just central civil servants but all public sector workers, including doctors, nurses, police and teachers. Thanks to a new £13 million fund that we announced in March, they can now volunteer in some of the poorest countries in the world without losing their pension contributions. I am sure that he will welcome today’s announcement by the Cabinet Secretary that we have established a cross-Government working group to promote volunteering in the central civil service. I am delighted that, rather than our adopting Conservative party policy, the Conservative party has caught up with something that has been Government policy for some time.

We have a great track record on volunteering, and we are working with volunteers and voluntary organisations to push back the frontiers of what they can do. However, volunteering does not exist in isolation. There are two debates that affect it deeply, but they have met only silence from the Conservative party. The first is on money. When questioned, the right hon. Member for Horsham felt unable to tell the House that total public funding for the third sector has more than doubled in real terms over the past decade from less than £5 billion in 1997 to more than £10 billion according to the latest figures. That record investment is a proud achievement of a Government who are working in partnership with the third sector to ensure that it continues to thrive and succeed.

There is more than that, however. This comes down to a philosophical divide: do volunteering and the ethic of volunteering get weaker or stronger when public services are well funded? Labour Members know the answer. Volunteers complement good funding. If one talks to them and hears what they are working to achieve, there is no doubt that they are helped, not harmed, by good public services. Indeed, the Conservative party’s publication shows that countries with high public spending have lots of volunteering. The right hon. Gentleman mentioned Norway. Volunteers add most to gross domestic product in the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway, and the countries with the largest number of volunteers are Norway, the UK and Sweden.

If one listens to the Conservative party, one hears this:

“Many things that are done by the government or the private sector could be done more effectively, or more cheaply, by the third sector.”

Those are the words of not some off-message Back Bencher but the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin), the Conservatives’ policy chief, who is writing the party’s manifesto. He let the cat out of the bag while speaking to the NCVO in February. The Conservatives do not believe in a strong society that supports services that enhance that society being paid for fairly through taxation, even though the international comparisons suggest that volunteering thrives in societies in which public services are strong and collectively paid for.

Does my hon. Friend share my concern and that of many commentators on this entire debate that we are talking about a fundamental difference of opinion on the role of the state in society? Does he believe that we are hearing from Conservative Members a proxy for compassionate conservatism, the like of which is espoused by George W. Bush? My hon. Friend does not have to take my word for it. The man who coined the phrase “compassionate conservatism”, Michael Gerson, said in the Washington Post in March that what the Conservatives were doing was the “reincarnation of compassionate conservatism”.

There is a philosophical divide, not least when we think about the wider role of volunteers. When volunteers see for themselves that something needs to change, do they feel able to have their voices heard and to campaign for those changes, or do they worry that if they speak up against the way in which law works or public policy affects the people whom they help, they will find themselves on the wrong side of the law or cut out from decision making regarding the public services about which they care so much? Volunteers are not motivated by plugging the gaps where public services fail. They are motivated to change those services through speaking up for the people affected, campaigning to change the law, being involved in the design of services that could make all the difference, and working towards ensuring that new services are the right ones that are properly funded by all of us through taxation.

When we have clashed with the Conservatives here and in other places on campaigning, their discomfort has been palpable and their silence deafening. Although there is no mention of the issue in the report that they published yesterday, we remember when charities such as Oxfam were afraid to campaign because the Conservative Government were disapproving. I see volunteers acting as advocates for those whom the system has let down, and acting not only as individuals but as a group, to change the system altogether. One great example was the mass movement of volunteers who were mobilised through the Make Poverty History campaign.

The Minister talks about philosophy, but before he gets too carried away with the way in which volunteers see the Government, will he explain why there is so much criticism from the grass roots of volunteering about how the Government are handling volunteers, using them in the public services and pushing them towards targets? Will he explain why those people complain about how they are being controlled, and why volunteers feel that they are unable to contribute to their fullest because of the way in which the public sector drives them at the Government’s command?

If everything is as good as the Minister says, why is there page after page of criticism? That criticism indicates that there is a philosophical difference. We want to give charities and volunteers more freedom to do what they do best, but there is a sense among those volunteers that the Government are using them to plug the gaps. I am not sure that they would appreciate the way in which the Minister is trying to set out a difference between his party and ours, because I do not think that they would agree with him.

The hon. Gentleman cannot deny what his party has published about the future role of volunteers and the third sector. The publication makes it clear that the approach is not about setting volunteers and the third sector free, but about abandoning them to work in some of the areas of the country with the greatest challenges. That is the wrong way to go about things. The philosophical divide between us is on whether volunteers and voluntary organisations should be left to cope on their own—isolated and without support—or whether there should be a genuine partnership among ourselves, the third sector and volunteers to create new ways of responding to needs, not least those of the most needy individuals and families in our society with the most challenges.

There is a fundamental difference, and I welcome a debate on it. The Minister has just let the difference slip out. In all his extolling over the past five minutes of the virtues of the voluntary sector, he concentrated hugely on its ability to campaign for change in the public sector. At no point did he address the point of delivery and what people are doing to change radically what is happening on the ground by changing and saving lives. He did not talk about the small voluntary sector that works against the odds because local government and its officials are often inconsiderate of what it does and do not take a huge interest. Those involved fight to get funding from the sector because they cannot control it, or the organisations are subjected to tick boxes, targets and lists, and feel that they are taken over. The fundamental difference is that Conservatives say that these people need to be set free and to be given real opportunities and access to money, but not to be lectured to and directed by the Government, whereas Labour talks about direction and campaigning at the top.

Order. Before the Minister replies, may I say that I have noticed that interventions are getting longer? Several hon. Members hope to participate in the debate before it concludes.

The right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green has listened to what I have said. He will know that I have just described how we have reduced bureaucracy and made volunteering easier by enabling people on benefits to volunteer, and how volunteers can claim expenses. I see volunteers every day of the week; one of the great privileges of being the Minister for the third sector is that I spend a lot of my time with volunteers, as well as users and staff of third-sector organisations, and see the remarkable work that they do on the ground, changing and transforming people’s lives.

My point was that in the Conservative party’s policies, there is an absence of any mention of the other roles that volunteers play, for instance as advocates for users, and in being the voice of the voiceless. They do that both collectively and individually; people even come along to our constituency surgeries to act as advocates on behalf of individuals who are in need, and who are struggling with the local council’s systems. The absence of mention of that campaigning role tells me that the Opposition see it as the third sector’s part to be silent and grateful. That simply will not do. That is not the case for the third sector in the 21st century.

The Minister will be aware that one of the proposals in our document is to strengthen and enforce the compact. The compact enshrines the right of charities to campaign. Will he condemn the Department for International Development, which, when it gives grants, has attempted to impose the condition that charities do not campaign?

First, the hon. Gentleman is wrong. Secondly, the compact was introduced in 1998 by the Labour Government—10 years ago. We have appointed a new commissioner, Sir Bert Massie, who is hugely respected in the sector. I congratulate Richard Corden, the new chief executive of the commission for the compact team, who will drive forward ways of strengthening the compact, so that it works across Government and in local government, too. A key part of the Government’s contribution to strengthening the third sector’s ability to deliver was the introduction and promotion of the compact. I am glad that we might have cross-party consensus on that, at least. The hon. Gentleman is just wrong.

We have heard that it is Conservative policy to free up voluntary organisations to do what they do better, but we see in the document that has been published that under a Conservative Government, cognisance would have to be taken of the reputation of the lottery when it came to giving lottery funding. Does my hon. Friend think that those two policies combined would help organisations that set out to help asylum seekers, refugees or people with HIV/AIDS? Does he think that their cause would be enhanced by those policies? I certainly do not.

My hon. Friend, with his wealth of experience, again speaks knowledgeably about the possibly unintended—I suspect that they are intended—consequences of policies that the Conservative party would put in place, were it ever in a position to do so. Those policies would not be in the interests of some of the most disadvantaged, alienated, disfranchised groups in our communities.

Mention of the Government’s track record in leading the way for improvements and support for volunteering and community action has been absent from this debate, and it was also absent from the Conservatives’ report. However, looking at the report, I say that perhaps that silence is better. We have waited a long time for the Conservative party’s ideas. The hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) started promising ideas on charitable giving for the new year in 2007; we have been waiting for them. The right hon. Member for West Dorset started promising a Green Paper in February, at a conference of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, but after all that waiting, when we finally read it, we can see that it is a rush job with heavy use of cut and paste, not least from Government policy on the third sector.

Let us take idea No. 1, which is to reduce administration on gift aid. I will send the right hon. Member for Horsham a copy of the Budget so that he can read for himself how charities can now bundle together donations under £10, so that they do not have to list all the individual donors on the claim form—a major step forward in reducing bureaucracy. Charities with small claims will no longer be penalised for errors in record keeping. Charities with a good record of bookkeeping may soon be able to self-certify. All that comes about after our discussions with charities on how to make the system work, and individuals can already give oral declarations rather than fill in a form. He and his party make warm noises about getting rid of paper trails, but they have no ideas to contribute. The truth is that we are cutting out unnecessary paperwork. I challenge him now: would he abolish the need for a record of declarations—for an audit trail for more than £800 million of public money—or does he admit that he was creating false expectations by promising action when there is nothing that he can deliver?

Or let us take idea No. 3, which is about giving “Direct support for volunteering” through real volunteering groups, not Government-controlled bodies. Let me send the right hon. Gentleman copies of the reports by v, the independent youth-led charity that we have already mentioned, which works with hundreds of other grass-roots volunteering organisations to deliver volunteering opportunities. Those opportunities are directed not by Government, and not even by organisations, but by young people themselves. I can send him our press release of 31 January on the small grants programme, which, as I said earlier, will support voluntary organisations, not through a Government body but through local funders with grass-roots knowledge and experience of grant-making in their area.

The Conservatives’ idea No. 5 is to introduce a volunteers’ hours scheme for central Government employees. As I said, we are already doing that. Every central Government Department now gives at least one day, and in many cases they give up to five days. Idea No. 6 is to improve Criminal Records Bureau checks. We have just had a debate about the fact that we have published a document on improving CRB checks.

When?

We announced our intention to do so months ago, and today we announced the details because it is national volunteering week. The list goes on; ideas Nos. 13 and 15 are on multi-year funding and community assets, and there are ideas about the compact. More than half the Opposition’s proposals are cut and pasted from Government reports.

In our last debate on the subject, called for by the Opposition, they seemed unbriefed about the fact that the central thing for which they were calling—a civil service Bill—was already being taken forward. They are making a habit of not knowing what Government policy is, making policy up, announcing it and pretending that it is theirs. They are in denial about the need for Government funding. They are uncomfortable with charities’ disruptive, campaigning voices. They are unbriefed on the facts of Government policy. They can praise volunteers today, and we are happy to join them in doing so, but there is little doubt about which side of the House will support volunteers with action and which side is still playing catch-up.

I confess that I thought that this would be a worthy, celebratory but rather dull debate, but it is turning out to be anything but that. The Liberal Democrat party obviously supports the motion; it would be hard not to when many of the references in it are to well-known Liberals or Liberal Democrats. The motion uses a phrase from the Commission on the Future of Volunteering that we very much approve of; it calls for

“volunteering to become part of the DNA of our society”.

It is part of the DNA of my party, both now and in the past.

At least we have all agreed today that the health of a society is largely to be judged by the commitment of its citizens to that society. That is incredibly well expressed through volunteering. For me, this is a relatively new area to focus on from a policy perspective, so I was pleased to have the opportunity earlier this year to attend a Volunteering England event with two hon. Members who are present today on different sides of the Chamber—the Minister and the hon. Member for West Dorset.

Tunbridge Wells.

I got the constituency wrong again; I meant the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark). I am terrible at constituencies. I sincerely apologise. The event was in Newcastle. It was more interesting to listen to the questions from the floor than to the discussion between the participants, because the participants shared so much common ground.

The first concern expressed from the floor was the potential for substituting volunteers and volunteer activity for public services. The feeling was that that line should not be crossed. We heard from volunteers and volunteer groups that the focus must be on additionality, not on substituting what professionals and public services should deliver. That is an important message to underscore, because it seems that there is tension in the way in which the Government relate to the public sector and public services. Voluntary sector organisations are trying to cope with that tension, and are working out what role they should play. The issue of independence has been stressed throughout the debate.

It was reiterated that there is confusion about how volunteering expenses should be paid. On that occasion, the Minister explained that changes have been made to clarify the fact that payment of legitimate and reasonable expenses should not compromise access to benefits or put at risk the ability to enter into job-seeking activities. That had not communicated itself to people at large, so the point was made that that crucial fact should be communicated far better. Perhaps at some point the Minister will clarify the position. I am not sure that he recognises the need for expenses to be paid up front. It does not work if someone who has no resources, particularly a young person, has to pay and go through a reimbursement cycle. The problem needs to be taken on more directly.

On Criminal Records Bureau checks, I can confirm that the Minister said on that occasion that changes in regulation were under way and would be announced shortly. We heard that repeated today. May I raise with him the issue of the Official Secrets Act? As other hon. Members will know, prison visitor volunteers struggle with requirements to sign the Official Secrets Act in the course of their activity. There are many small bureaucratic issues that interrupt the process of volunteering. CRB checks are only a small part of that.

The topic of full cost recovery was raised from the floor at the conference. I am not sure that I fully understand where the Government stand on that issue—whether that is a policy in process or whether it is being delivered.

The Treasury has issued guidance on the importance of three-year funding and full cost recovery.

I thank the Minister for that. I hope he will follow it up. The Treasury’s policy on payment should be monitored and observed by other parts of Government. The subject is still an issue of contention for the major charities and has yet to be addressed.

We have had two superb reports on volunteering—the “Manifesto for Change”, chaired by Baroness Julia Neuberger, and the Morgan inquiry, published this week, which was chaired by Baroness Morgan of Huyton. The focus of both reports is on enabling people to volunteer and removing obstacles so that people can make a genuine choice whether to volunteer and how best to do so. I am glad to see from the Green Paper that they issued this week that the Tories have finally dropped the idea of compulsory volunteering, which always seemed to be a contradiction. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells says from a sedentary position that that was the Government’s idea, but the national citizen service proposal always seemed to contain the notion of compulsion, and I am glad that that has been dismissed.

I am delighted that the hon. Lady has raised the matter, because it has always been clear that national citizenship service is a voluntary option for young people.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that information. It has probably taken the Green Paper to provide clarity. When I have had discussions with the voluntary sector, I did not find that it shared that perception. They have seen national citizen service as a step towards a compulsory strategy. It is important that that does not happen. Community service of various kinds and volunteering should not be confused.

We have heard much about the benefits that come from volunteering, the way in which volunteers can build confidence and pride in their communities, and that volunteering across communities helps bring people together. I shall focus on the need to embed the culture of youth action and youth volunteering. That should become part of our education system, but there is a tension that needs to be recognised.

My children grew up in the United States. In order to graduate from high school, it is necessary in many schools there to perform what is called voluntary service, but it is not very voluntary. As it is regarded as part of the curriculum, most youngsters find some way to do it more in the breach than by actively engaging. When volunteering becomes embedded as a necessary part of the curriculum, there is always the risk that that will undermine the spirit of community and engagement that should be part of a healthy volunteering community. Opportunity within the education system makes an enormous amount of sense, but compulsion, whether it is back-door compulsion or front-door compulsion, is not a particularly attractive characteristic.

Does the hon. Lady agree that, as the Morgan inquiry, in which I was lucky enough to take part, recognised, getting young people to recognise the benefits of volunteering for their CVs and training and employment opportunities is an important factor? Without in any way undermining her points about the need to promote volunteering in its purest sense, those benefits could be emphasised as a further dimension of volunteering.

I fully accept what the hon. Gentleman says, but I would caution him in this respect: we have many youngsters in our community, and I can think of many in mine, who have extensive responsibilities in their own families—for example, young carers. There is no formal recognition of the contribution that they are making. I would hate to see them lose out because that cannot be captured in the same way on a CV.

Let me give my son as an example. He chose as his route to go and play with puppies once a week—apparently socialising them. I honestly cannot say that that was of serious educational benefit or an addition to his skills, but he was able to craft it in such a way that it probably sounded quite good when the written CV was issued. I ask for an element of common sense in the way we deal with youth volunteering, although, as we know, common sense is hard to deliver.

I would like much more opportunity for family and intergenerational volunteering in my community. That might require some different thinking by organisations. I hope that part of our discussion of volunteering is addressed to the voluntary sector, encouraging it to think of ways of structuring opportunities so that they strengthen our communities generally. Sometimes the view seems to be, “Here’s the task. Now let’s find the volunteers.” It becomes more interesting when organisations look at the volunteers and think of ways of structuring their activities to meet broader social needs.

In the world in which we live, with the stress arising from our work-life balance, when parents and grandparents find it difficult to spend the time that they wish with children, volunteering should be not an additional challenge but a mechanism to let people spend time together. I have been impressed with voluntary groups in my community that have seen the opportunity for young people—sometimes young people who, we sense, might be involved in antisocial behaviour—to be brought in to spend time with older people. The young people have taken the opportunity to flower, because for the first time they are met by people who have no preconceptions about them and who are delighted that they are coming in to spend time with them. Mutual respect begins to grow out of those circumstances.

Like many people, as I reach my current age I would like to dispel the image of the volunteer as the elderly lady in the charity shop, but let us not denigrate the elderly lady in the charity shop, who does an enormous amount of work in our community.

Many of the statistics on volunteering suggest that people often look at the different activities of ethnic groups. We need to tackle that before the perception develops that people from various ethnic groups do not participate. The statistics tend to show that people not born in the UK are less likely to volunteer. Perhaps that suggests a weakness in reaching out to those groups and giving them a sense of inclusion and welcome.

Like many hon. Members in their constituencies, in my own community I meet a number of asylum seekers, who do volunteer, but their activities tend to be restricted to organisations structured by the local church or mosque or some faith group. There is a hesitation on the part of charities and voluntary groups more broadly to engage those individuals. I hope that we can get better guidance to make it clear that that is a resource that we can turn to, because there are often incredible skills in the asylum community. We can argue about issues of immigration and asylum, but we have not used the skills of people willing and sometimes almost desperate to become engaged in some way, because the boredom of living day to day with no activity is utterly shattering and destroying.

I have been fascinated, too, by some of my local mental health charities and my local primary care trust, which has been working with people recovering from mental illnesses and helping them use volunteering as a way to regain their confidence and self-respect; contributing can help the individuals themselves.

There has been discussion of employer-supported volunteering. The Government are to be congratulated on making time available for civil servants to participate in voluntary activities and it would be excellent if the initiative were strengthened. However, should we not consider not only giving time but matching time? That might be much more palatable to the private sector, part of which still resists the notion of giving time for volunteering.

If people are willing to give a day of their own holiday, giving a matching employment day can become a much easier strategy. We have missed a trick in not looking at the potential of that. Obviously, the issue would be difficult for small businesses. Ironically, however—the statistics do not bear this out, perhaps because of a flaw in statistics—small businesses in my community value volunteering because they already see themselves closely engaged with the community. I do not find resistance from small businesses; the large business organisations, which feel that things have to be put on a more formal basis, struggle rather more.

We fully support the idea that volunteers should get recognition for the skills that they acquire. However, as we discussed earlier with reference to job hunting and CVs, there is an element of tension in making sure that the volunteer is carrying out tasks important to the activity, rather than getting a paper national vocational qualification or whatever else.

On the formalities of volunteering, we have to recognise that lots of people do not see themselves as volunteers. We had that debate during the Morgan inquiry, even though the word “volunteering” was used from the start.

Most people help; they do not necessarily want to be dragged into a volunteering system that has recognition and all the rest of it, through to formal qualifications. Most people are seeking to help the local Scout group, church or community group, for example. Is there not a better way of doing things? Without going through formal recognition, we could allow people to help a little, rather than have them get into all the formal structures, which can be a burden. The hon. Lady is going in the right direction on that issue, but we need to look much more closely—particularly in my own area of sport—at letting people help the local sports club, for example, without having to get formal qualifications to be able to continue to do that in the long term.

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. When we see something good, the risk is that we will try to find a way to structure it, put rules around it and formalise it; it then loses its spirit and spontaneity. At the same time, it is probably legitimate to encourage people to make sure that when they write a CV they stress not only their employment activities but their helping activities. We should get that into the culture and encourage employers and recruiters to recognise the value of it. Perhaps that could be done on a more conversational basis, without our trying to crystallise everything into an actual qualification.

A number of contentious issues have been raised. The issue of v is interesting. Unlike the official Opposition, I think that a lot of v’s work has been valuable and it strikes me as a very positive organisation. However, I confess that I still struggle with its fundamental structure. It was conceived and set up by the Government and its board was put in place by the Government. Essentially, it is funded by the Government, although it can raise funds from other sources. It strikes me that v is rather a different animal from what I would consider to be a typical charitable organisation; we do not have a category for it. I recognise the good work that it has done, but we must be careful about the route that it has taken. There is always a risk of trying to co-opt, for entirely good purposes and intentions, the energies, activities and roles that we want to be carried out by an entity whose character and associations are not part of the Government. Recognising the importance of that requires an act of self-restraint by the Government.

One element of the voluntary sector that no one has raised today is its ability to innovate and experiment, and thereby knowingly to risk failure. We like our public sector organisations to innovate and experiment, but we do not expect them to risk failure; the voluntary sector, however, can do that. Perhaps v is getting a bit of that voluntary sector feeling about it, in that it can be risky, innovate and do things that would not be done by a straight and narrow traditional organisation. Perhaps it is gaining from voluntary sector values in that way. Might that be an explanation of its history to date?

I do not question the intent or the fact that it has done good work. However, I am cautious because of a much broader, more fundamental point about the health of a democratic society. We live in an environment where the tendency for many decades has been to pull power to the centre. That has always been done with good intent—“We know better”; the removal of London government might be one of the dramatic examples, but centralisation has continued under the Labour Government in a number of ways. A healthy, democratic society needs centres of power and influence that are outside the remit of central or local government.

Yesterday, the Conservatives issued a paper in which they propose to replace the Office of the Third Sector—I agree that the name is perfectly meaningless—with an office of civil society. By definition, civil society should not be fully co-opted into Government. When we go overseas, we see civil society as key, for example, to delivering aid in a way that will not be influenced by the local Government—frequently because we think them corrupt, biased or whatever else. We see civil society as incredibly necessary as a mechanism for challenge; we want it to be an authentic voice of the people. There is real risk if we try to grasp it, draw it in and co-opt it. I am concerned about that and about the approach that says, “Let’s put civil society in the Cabinet.”

To set the hon. Lady’s mind at rest, I should say that we want the office to be for civil society, not of civil society. It is important that all the incredibly valuable activities that we all wish to flourish and prosper should get support from the Government; much of this debate has been about how that should happen. What we propose does not in any way try to co-opt civil society into the Government. In fact, the very reverse is true: we see the independence of the body as crucial to its future thriving.

I thank the right hon. Gentleman, but it would be a rare body that did not find itself instinctively—tiny step by tiny step—crossing the barrier between “for” and “of”. That is one of the dangers, and I raise it because we have to be conscious and aware of it.

Is the hon. Lady surprised by the inconsistency of the Conservatives’ position? They call for Government support for civil society, but many Conservative councils, including Castle Point borough council and Essex county council, are cutting support, grants and provisions such as free room rents for many voluntary groups. They are putting those groups at risk. I am thinking, for instance, of the Phoenix club in my constituency.

I thank the hon. Gentleman. I have little knowledge of his situation, but perhaps Conservative Front Benchers will have an opportunity to answer those questions later. Many of us, however, suck in breath as we see what our colleagues do from time to time.

I should say that my party has pleasure in the Government’s decision to create a grass-roots grant programme—particularly in the endowment element of it. In my own constituency there are groups such as—they have these terrible, old-fashioned Victorian names—the Barnes Workhouse Fund and the Hampton Fuel Allotment Charity. They have been crucial to the survival of our small charities at a time when the large charities—the premier league of 18 or so major recipients of Government funds through various contracts to deliver services—have managed to use the increased base to thrive and grow, while many of the smaller and middle-sized charities have struggled, and a few in my community have closed. From time to time, charities will close. Their purpose will disappear, or somebody else may start to deliver the service better. However, that is not the case with these groups, and I am glad that there is a nod in the direction of creating an endowment body that can continue to give life to this sector, which has been generally under-recognised.

The Minister made a point of the importance of Government providing investment in and support for charities. However, let us all recognise that the requirements for monitoring and accountability, the application process and the ongoing reporting process are often such that they are virtually impossible to satisfy unless one has a significant staff of people merely to push the paper. I am thinking of inappropriate demands such as a charity for the homeless being required to justify its geographical reach by providing the addresses of the people who attend it—an inept monitoring mechanism if ever we were to choose one. Small charities probably use volunteers to the maximum because they use them in so many broad roles and because they are so often spontaneously driven by the concerns of local people.

I am glad to participate in the debate on this issue, which should not be hugely contentious. I slightly regret the tone that developed at some points, because this is an area where all of us—finger-pointing or not—essentially have our hearts in the same place. I hope that we can make this debate in large part a celebration of national volunteering week and a recognition of the extraordinary work that so many people do.

This country has started a process of change—the change from analogue to digital broadcasting. Over the next couple of years, the digital switchover process will take place in every community with every television transmitter. A large number of people in our communities—elderly, alone, frail or disabled—will be particularly challenged as regards getting to grips with that, and they will need help and advice. It will not be ongoing, but they will probably need it once or twice over the next couple of years—for example, in the Borders region at the moment, in the South West region over the next few months, and in my Granada region in 2009.

If we are to get that help to them, what is the most cost-effective way of getting people into hundreds of homes in every community, where they are most needed, to deal with and to help the most frail and vulnerable people? The answer is to work with the voluntary sector, and the Government are doing just that. They have set up an organisation called Digital Outreach, which is a consortium comprising a private sector enterprise called Collective Enterprises Ltd. and three major national voluntary organisations—Community Service Volunteers, Age Concern and Help the Aged—which have come together to provide a service that only the voluntary sector can provide.

I am absolutely delighted that the sponsoring company and Digital Outreach are based in my constituency. I was very proud on Monday when the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport came to visit Digital Outreach and to meet representatives of the voluntary organisations on the ground, who, over the next couple of years, will work not only in my constituency but across the country with volunteers, voluntary organisations and statutory bodies. That is a unique collaboration: public sector responsibility, private sector organisation and third sector delivery coming together for a one-off cause—it will not be required again after a couple of years—to deliver something of great value to our communities. That is the epitome of partnership between the sectors these days, and it is only the latest of many examples of that to celebrate.

I welcome the motion tabled by the Conservative party, and the fact that there is not an amendment on the Order Paper simply for the sake of having one, so that we can, in volunteering week, coalesce around some values that are very important to us all. I welcome, too, the call from both Opposition parties for less bureaucracy and for encouragement and enjoyment of volunteering for its own sake, and, modestly, along with the hon. Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), the support from across the House for the report by the Commission on the Future of Volunteering. The Minister’s formal response to that report clearly shows that there is momentum for a healthy future for volunteering, if we can deliver together on our side of the bargain. We cannot guarantee outcomes for the sector, but we can make its life easier and give those in the third sector generally opportunities to succeed at what they have set out to do where they have chosen to match and to work with the statutory providers.

In slight contrast, I found it a little disingenuous that this debate comes alongside the publication of a major policy report by the Conservative party. As that 90-page document was issued less than 24 hours before the debate, only its authors will be completely au fait with it. Even I, with my commitment to the subject, only got to read two chapters, but they were quite interesting. There is no reference to the report in the motion, and I wonder whether the Conservatives were entirely pleased with its reception in the press. I noticed yesterday’s whirlwind tour to Harlow and other places picking out different bits of the report. The Medway Messenger sums it up in one phrase with its headline, “Tory leader follows Gordon Brown to Gillingham.” As they say, “You can’t win ’em all.” I only had a chance to look at chapter 2, on volunteering, and chapter 3, on grant funding, but I want to comment on some of the issues that I found there. On page 22, there is a dismissal of Government programmes as

“a launch, a lunch and a logo.”

When I asked the right hon. Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude) whether he could provide an example of that, he came up with the one that I expected—that of the Experience Corps, as featured in the document—and I demonstrated why he was completely wrong. That was a classic example of seedcorn funding that has led to a crop that is only now being harvested. Nevertheless, we have an organisation that was funded for three years and is still going strong after eight years, encouraging older people and celebrating their contribution to society.

Let me say to the hon. Gentleman as gently as I can that perhaps my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham was taking information from those who contributed to the commission’s work. I quote from page 90 of the report, where it says:

“Many people were critical of the way in which the Experience Corps in particular had been established, referring to it as ‘an expensive disaster’”—

a quote from an employee of a national voluntary sector network organisation. I think that my right hon. Friend could be excused for saying that the inauguration of the Experience Corps did not go quite as well as the Government might have wished. He had some evidence for that, and his comments were fair.

I am aware that those comments were made in years two and three of the Experience Corps’ work. I know that they were made while the Experience Corps was under the auspices of the Home Office, and people clearly have long memories. I have not heard such things said about the Experience Corps in recent years when it has been an independent organisation. It may be that someone giving evidence has recalled it as such, but in my work with the Experience Corps, I have found it to be a thriving and excellent organisation.

When I asked the right hon. Member for Horsham about professionalisation, he said that he was not opposed to it. On page 24, however, the Conservative document is somewhat ambiguous. It points out that the Directory of Social Change says that

“52 per cent. of voluntary sector staff in Britain believe that the drive towards professionalisation is killing the spirit of charitable activity.”

However, it also says that there is a higher level of paid people in the voluntary sectors in countries where the voluntary sector is successful. I welcomed the right hon. Gentleman coming off the fence in his response and saying that professionalisation was necessary. It is not the be all and end all—of course, it must not be that—but a professional hub for the sector is necessary.

There are eight or 10 lines on page 30 of the document on the question of training and recognition dealing with support for sector-led investment and volunteer training and recognition. I reiterate that we must recognise that people have all sorts of different motives for volunteering. One of those motives—I suspect that this is increasingly the case—is to gain experience and qualifications that they can put on their CV and use in future work. If they are going to have that experience and gain those qualifications, it must be possible for it all to be accredited in a way that is acceptable to other sectors. I am not saying that every volunteer has to undergo training or be examined on what they have done—of course not—but if people wish to use their volunteering experience as a way of making themselves more employable, employable at a higher level, or to enable them to branch out into something new in their career, that is a perfectly valid reason for volunteering. They should be able to access accredited training, but definitely not training that is, in the words of the Conservative document,

“fully owned and controlled by the voluntary sector”.

That would mean that they had skills that could not be transferred, leading them to a dead end.

On page 37 of the document, reference is made to council funding. I was going to point out that the experience of Conservatives taking control of councils throughout the country during the past few years has been one of cuts to spending. Why? They always tell us that it is to reduce the council tax. What is the first bit that gets cut? It is the non-statutory funding, which means funding for the voluntary sector. I was going to go into that, but the hon. Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink) put it so succinctly that I will let his comments speak for themselves. We must bear it in mind that we are told in the document that ring-fencing of council funding will take place

“so that councils can spend their funding as they see fit”.

That will set off alarm bells among those in the voluntary sector because they know what Conservative councils do when they

“spend their funding as they see fit”.

That will all take place against a background of the Conservatives being committed to at least £10 billion of cuts in public spending, which will mean a lack of money for partnerships and joint enterprise, and cuts to the non-statutory elements of local authority work, which is essentially the work with this sector.

One thing I found amusing about the document, under the heading “Restoring the lottery” on page 41, was how it deals with a bête noire of the Conservative party. Ever since the Conservatives established the lottery in 1994, many of them seem to think that they have created a Frankenstein’s monster that has gone out of control. They really do not like the Big Lottery Fund, do they? They are going to replace it with a voluntary action lottery fund. Their justification for that, however, does not make sense. The hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) has corrected me on this matter in the past, but at the last general election they were committed to 25 per cent. of lottery funding going to each of the four good causes, which would have led to a reduction in funding for voluntary sector causes. I understand that that is no longer the policy, and I accept that, but that is part of the heritage of the process.

What the Conservatives are proposing now is to reduce funding for the voluntary action lottery fund, compared with the Big Lottery Fund, by about 16 per cent. At the moment, 84 per cent. of all Big Lottery Fund money goes to voluntary sector organisations in one way or another—67 per cent. goes in directly, and another element goes to voluntary sector organisations through the arts and sports bodies and so on. The Conservative document proposes to top-slice that 16 per cent. and says that we will only have a voluntary action lottery fund that operates according to different rules, to which I shall return in a moment. The Conservatives forget that an undertaking has been given by the Big Lottery Fund, backed by the Government and in response to the arrangements on Olympic funding, that the real level of funding to voluntary sector organisations in 2009, when they feel the temporary impact of Olympic funding on the Big Lottery Fund, will remain at least at current levels. It is not possible to do that if the size of the Big Lottery Fund is cut by 16 per cent. to get a leaner, slimmer voluntary action lottery fund.

I did not raise the Big Lottery Fund because it seemed outside the remit of volunteering, but there is one concern. If the fund only funds the charitable sector and not the statutory organisation that would normally form a partnership with the voluntary sector, it is not possible to have a coherent project. I have raised that issue with the Minister—it cuts both ways—with regard to the impact of the Olympics.

The hon. Lady is absolutely right about that, which is why we have to accept that it is valid for the Big Lottery Fund to fund partnerships as well as directly funding voluntary organisations.

The voluntary action lottery fund would be guided by a slightly different set of principles than what has gone before. The Conservatives tell us that there will be more grants for local charities and community groups, but that everything done by that fund will have to take into account the reputation of the lottery. I do not know what that means. I suspect that it means, “Unpopular causes? Bye bye—you won’t get funding from the Big Lottery Fund.” In the “Breakdown Britain” document published by the Conservatives in 2006, they talked about consultation on where funding should go, and of having referendums on where it should go. If we were to do that, we would be discriminating against the less popular causes such as, as I said earlier, asylum seekers, those with HIV/AIDS, and refugees. Those groups would almost certainly miss out.

We come to the question of additionality. The document prays in aid the former Community Fund, which the document calls the communities fund, wishing that we could go back to its halcyon days. I think that the Conservatives forget who the biggest critic of the Community Fund was—for political correctness, doing the Government’s bidding or non-additionality. The biggest critic of the Community Fund was the Conservative party, but now it prays it in aid. We should welcome the return of a sinner, I suppose.

The National Lottery Act 2006 put paid to the question of additionality and complementarity in lottery and state funding. We have always had a system of complementary funding rather than additional funding, but that distinction is now clearer. Since it was set up, the Big Lottery Fund has had much more discretion and independence and has been able to demonstrate more effectively that additionality is the order of the day, and not the subsidising state mechanisms, which was the accusation made in the past. I fear for lottery funding if the Conservative plans were to come into effect.

When looking at the ancestry of the Conservative document, I referred back to notes that I made about “Breakdown Britain” when that was published by the Conservative party in December 2006. Its very name demeans what is good about our society, our people and the fabric of the communities that hold us together; it is a title of hopelessness and despair, when there is so much out there to celebrate.

“Breakdown Britain” was highly critical of larger charities—the Conservative party does not like the big boys in the voluntary sector. In that document, the Conservatives hinted that assets that they calculated were worth £35 billion, which were collectively held by the major charities, should be disbursed. That does not appear in their new document as far as I can see, but I should be grateful if, when he winds up the debate, the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells confirmed that that is no longer his party’s intention, or at least that that recommendation in “Breakdown Britain” has not been taken up, because that would be disastrous. Let me ask the House, how could a small, local organisation do what, for example, the Royal National Institute for Deaf People did when, working as a partner with the Department of Health, it delivered a £95 million programme to provide digital hearing aids through the NHS? That could not have been done by a small, local voluntary organisation; it had to rely on a larger body.

Across the House, we recognise that three quarters of all Britons have volunteered at least once in the past 12 months and that half of our population volunteers monthly. We cannot ignore the sector—it is huge, as is its capacity to influence the success of implementation of Government policy and even the outcome of a general election, to be frank.

That brings me to the question of campaigning. I was on the management board of the citizens advice bureau in my constituency in the early 1990s, when the CAB was threatened with loss of Government funding—it received grants directly from the then Department of Trade and Industry—if it continued to challenge Government policy on matters such as benefits. That was wrong. It was an abuse of power by the Government of the day. I am delighted to say that legislation was not needed to correct that—all we needed was a change of Government—but when the Prime Minister tells the country that the voluntary sector is the voice for the voiceless, we must listen. I am certain that my colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions listen to bodies such as the citizens advice bureaux, because their feedback on how Government policy is or is not working is essential to our understanding of the effect that the Government are having on the people whom we have the privilege to govern.

The so-called third sector encompasses not only volunteers in the classical definition, but the increasingly important community sector. The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office knows of my interest in that. I applaud what my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government is doing to recognise the way in which volunteers and activists within communities can and should prevent any tendency to a one-size-fits-all approach and make sure that local communities get the quality of services that they need.

We should also celebrate the success of the not-for-profit sector in general, including social enterprises and co-operatives, and in particular community interest companies. Established by the Charities Act 2006, community interest companies are run, often by volunteers, for purposes that are wholly consistent with those of the voluntary sector and are not directed by Government at all. Their work is very welcome.

The image of volunteering has been modernised as its depth and diversity have increased. It is much more organic than the brigade of charity shop volunteers, volunteer drivers and fete organisers who have been mentioned. It includes trade union activists, magistrates, special constables and all those people who came together to make poverty history in 2006. The sector also delivers a huge proportion of this country’s residential care and funding for medical research and the lifeboat service, and it acts as a champion for children, disabled people and animals. Voluntary action can be passive—signing petitions or postcards, or sponsoring a fundraising event—or active. The services that volunteers provide can be stand-alone or complementary to services provided by the public sector; they can even be integrated within public sector provision. I challenge anyone to go for an out-patient appointment at a typical acute hospital and not encounter several volunteers providing key services as they always have done, whether by raising money for a new machine, making tea, selling flowers, or carrying X-rays from one department to another. Volunteers are everywhere, and any policy on the voluntary sector must recognise its huge diversity.

Where I want to praise the Conservative document published yesterday is on its unequivocal statement that voluntary action must be voluntary. I have written to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families about that, and I believe that I have received an undertaking in response to the sector’s worry that by integrating volunteering too far into the curriculum, its voluntary nature is lost, which can reduce the quality of the experience. Although it is difficult, by and large schools manage to encourage and practise active citizenship, which is not quite the same as volunteering, although it certainly includes volunteering. We must find ways to encourage, promote and give young people opportunities to experience active citizenship without treading on the sector’s toes and making people volunteer.

My conclusions on what I want to see in future come in several sections and I suspect that they will find favour on all three Front Benches. In service provision, it should be easier for the voluntary sector to compete with the private and public sectors, either through contracts or through partnership. Means should be found better to ensure that full cost recovery is built into such contracts—at the moment, that cannot be guaranteed, in part because of the skills set available in the sector. The length of contracts should be extended—that has happened and is happening, but it should continue. Now, the lottery sometimes gives five-year grants for programmes, instead of the three-year, two-year or one-year grants that used to be the norm in local government. Local government now has three-year funding, so there is no reason why it should not fund local projects on a three-year basis, rather than the traditional one-year basis.

The next group of conclusions deals with the other funding of volunteering, outside service provision. Better communication is needed within the sector and between the sector and its partners to ensure more equitable and transparent access to grants and funding streams. It is essential that the sector has a healthy organisational core and a diverse funding base. I am excited by some of the work that has been done on endowments, and the organisation that I chair—the Community Development Foundation—is working with the Office of the Third Sector on that and other schemes. Endowment, combined with social ownership of assets within communities, is a way to ensure independence and sustainability of funding, especially for smaller organisations.

We need to find ways to promote both giving generally and payroll giving. A minute ago, I said that we should not force people to volunteer, but let us make it a bit easier for them to be payroll givers, especially in the light of the welcome announcement in the Budget that the effect of the reduction in income tax will not be felt on gift aid for three years. Nevertheless, it will be felt in three years and we need to find ways to mitigate that. If we have changed the basis of funding by that time and, through diversity of funding, are not so reliant on gift aid, so be it. If gift aid is so big that the difference will not cause much damage, so be it.

We must fulfil our responsibility to promote volunteering as an end in itself. It is a healthy thing for people to do. I find that the communities that do not work are those where the community and voluntary sectors do not exist. That is as true in developing countries as it is in parts of Britain. We need to do more work to encourage the voluntary sector in some of our developing country partners, where resources are often not recycled in the community in the way in which the voluntary sector can achieve.

I applaud the moves that the Parliamentary Secretary mentioned, of which I was not aware, on the five days’ volunteering in some Departments. Let us keep on with that, encourage other employers to take—dare I say it?—an American approach to volunteering and make corporate commitments, which people in companies deliver in their own time.

There must be absolute clarity at the interface between benefits and volunteering, and improved user-friendliness of the Criminal Records Bureau system. I welcome the announcements that have been made and understand that there are more to come in the summer. Formal recognition of skills acquisition must also be available.

It is an exciting time for the sector. It is good to see the consensus that has largely been expressed today. However, I find it difficult to forget that someone, who shall remain nameless, once said that there was no such thing as society, and I do not intend the House to forget it. As Members of Parliament, we all know that we have thriving voluntary sectors in our constituencies and we ignore them at our peril. We engage with them because they are what citizenship is about and because that is what we should do.

I am concerned about the organisation that distributes half of all lottery cash—the Big Lottery Fund. It expends a huge sum each year on administration and staffing costs, yet, when questioned about it, Sir Clive Booth, the head of the fund, launched an attack on the Conservative party, saying that it was hostile to the voluntary and community sectors. Sir Clive gravely misrepresented the Conservative party, but it would be uncharitable not to accept his apology. He conceded that he had made errors, based on an

“innocent misunderstanding of Conservative policy”.

Perhaps it is therefore our responsibility to educate him about such matters. I suggest that he read our excellent report on social justice, which was launched yesterday. Above all, the incident is a clear reminder that people in Sir Clive’s position must remain impartial, despite their political leanings.

To volunteer means to offer oneself or one’s services by choice and without being forced. The Government do not force people to volunteer, but once they have volunteered they are often forced to do things that they would not choose to do. They have to tick endless boxes, for which they cannot understand the need.

On the Isle of Wight, we are very fortunate. We have a strong community spirit and many people become involved in voluntary work. I witness at first hand the astounding work that volunteers carry out. I know that, without volunteers, many islanders would be stuck. That is why I support my right hon. and hon. Friends’ attempt to strip away the endless and often mindless bureaucracy that handicaps those who are simply trying to help others.

The Government seem to mistrust anything that they did not invent and seek to control and micro-manage it into submission. The voluntary sector has been corroded little by little, leaving well-meaning souls wondering what they have done wrong. The work that they carry out has been underrated and undermined, and their roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-on-with-it mentality has been replaced with red-tape handcuffs.

If we want our communities to stay strong and our society to flourish, we must allow volunteers to get back to basics and get on with what they do best—volunteering, without the interference of Whitehall. From school governors drowning in paperwork to scoutmasters jumping through hoops for the Criminal Records Bureau, we need to let people who want to help others simply get on with it.

The YMCA on the island has just carried out research on young volunteers for the rural community council. It identified overbearing bureaucracy as one of the key factors that put young people off volunteering, as well as a lack of understanding of its value. I think that those two ideas are connected. If one gives one’s time voluntarily, one wants to feel that one has made a real difference to somebody’s life, not merely become involved in a paper-chasing exercise.

The research also demonstrated that smaller organisations succeed better in utilising volunteers by keeping paperwork and bureaucracy to a minimum. We need to encourage that. After all, if we do not succeed in attracting young people into volunteering, our society will never regain the idea that volunteering is valuable and useful.

It is right that charities and social enterprises should have the chance to receive public funds in return for helping to solve difficult social problems. However, the approach needs to be different and sensitive to their needs. They are not another branch of local government—they are different and they need to be treated differently.

We should recognise the need for longer-term contracts so that organisations can plan for the future with certainty. Local government and national Government get to know the work of charities and voluntary bodies over time. They should be able to trust them to make good use of public funds. There should be more grants and fewer contracts. If one trusts an organisation to do a good job, one does not need to specify in minute detail how it should be done.

When contracts are needed, they should be based on outcomes rather than processes. It should be recognised that those organisations are rather special. Model contracts should be available so that successful smaller charities can have the chance to put public money to good use. They are currently often excluded from the process because they do not have legal expertise and cannot afford to employ staff to ensure compliance.

Volunteering can take many forms. All hon. Members have taken part in and benefited from the voluntary ethos. Where would our political parties be without those who stuff envelopes, lend their gardens for social events, such as the annual True Blue party in Seaview, and trudge the streets in winter and summer? I do not believe that there should be more public funding of political parties. It could never replace such involvement and commitment.

I take the opportunity to thank those residents of the Isle of Wight who volunteer and support all our local political parties. Indeed, I pay tribute to all volunteers, most of whom have nothing to do with politics.

I do not suggest that the Government are not well intentioned. We all recognise the vital part that volunteers play in our society. The National Council for Voluntary Organisations estimates that the annual benefit to the UK economy of volunteering is £27.5 billion. That is irreplaceable. Volunteering is also an enriching experience for those who take part. As well as knowing that they are helping others, volunteers often benefit from learning new skills and finding a new circle of friends.

To be fair, the Government are facing up to some of the problems. For example, they are making moves to improve the system of Criminal Records Bureau checks. I applaud that, but they need to move faster.

In preparation for speaking in this debate, I contacted Michael Bulpitt, the chief executive of the rural community council on the Isle of Wight. I asked him what he thought the Government should do to encourage volunteering. His answer was succinct and characteristically forthright: “Both volunteers and the voluntary sector know what they want to do—just let us get on with it.” I commend his advice to the Minister.

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner) and the hon. Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt). My hon. Friend spoke warmly of his constituents and his personal experience. The hon. Gentleman and I spent many hours on Baroness Neuberger’s commission. I pay tribute to his extensive knowledge of the subject and his deep commitment to it.

This has been a good debate, and we have broadly stuck to the convention of recognising that the major parties share a great deal on volunteering, rather than gleefully falling on our differences and spending a lot of time exploiting them. This debate has been given spice by the publication yesterday of the excellent paper by my hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) on volunteering, which threw those on the Government Benches into something of a tizz. Now that the Conservative party speaks extensively on social issues, the Government think that tanks are being parked on their lawn. They therefore respond, forgetting that it was not their lawn in the first place—it is more like a common, which we have all occupied, but on which the Labour party occasionally squats and pretends to claim exclusive rights, which it has never had.

Consequently, a frisson of excitement is still felt among Labour Members when we take them on, drawing on the vast experience of Conservative Members and representatives, and people throughout the country who support the Conservative party who have always been involved in social issues and are pleased to see their party speaking out on them.

I shall come to the Minister’s remarks shortly, because they have required me to alter somewhat those that I was going to make. I noticed that he fizzed like a decent bottle of Spanish cava when my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight talked about the need for the Government to stand back and not get involved. That reminded me of a quotation from someone who gave evidence to the commission. We spend a lot of time saying what we think about volunteering, but the commission amassed a great deal of evidence in the past 12 to 18 months from people actively engaged in volunteering. Their comments deserve a hearing, in order that they are not missed. I have a lovely quotation here, on page 39 of the evidence, from an elected member of a public sector organisation:

“Keep out of it—let the organisations get on with doing what they are doing. Don’t put so much red tape on them and just let them do what they want to do. Any structuring and you will lose what volunteers you have. Why should I spend my free time taking a lot of stupid orders from a lot of bureaucrats, when I could be retired and sitting on a sun-drenched beach?”

I suspect that the sentiment that my hon. Friend expressed is not held solely by him or Conservative Members, and that it was not the impression that the commission formed, either.

I shall return to the evidence later. By taking on my hon. Friend and my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude), the Minister sought to project an image of the Government’s relationship with the voluntary sector with which he is entirely comfortable, but which is not shared by the sector. I do not minimise things that are going well or areas where the voluntary sector is working entirely comfortably, but the sector wants to take on the Government on a number of issues. I hate the phrase “a sense of complacency”, but there were elements in the Minister’s response to my hon. Friend that smacked a bit of, “I think we’ve got it right and I’m not listening to anything else.”

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman—I shall call him my hon. Friend, as usual, after our discussions last night. I worked with the voluntary sector before I came to this place, as a project officer for a local authority, and I was also on the Morgan inquiry. Most of the remarks in the document that he quoted are almost exactly the same as the sort of comments that I heard 20 years ago about local authorities or the Government getting off people’s backs. That is the nature of the voluntary sector. However, does he accept that it is also our responsibility, as the funders, to require a certain amount of accountability for those funds? If the voluntary sector wants us off its back, so that it can go its own way, that is fine—indeed, we should leave the sector alone as far as possible. However, we all have a responsibility, as parliamentarians and in local government, to require those projects to be accountable for the public funds that they use.

As the great Tony Hancock once said in “Hancock’s Half Hour”, “Do you know, that could’ve been me talking.” Of course, the hon. Gentleman gets it absolutely right. A lot of the comments made by the voluntary sector about the Government could indeed have been said about any Government, because there is a necessary tension in the relationship. I want to bring out the fact that, because the Minister sought to emphasise the difference in approach between the Government and us, he missed the fact that some of the issues being raised by the voluntary sector are partly due to the approach taken by the Government. Therefore, they have a special responsibility to deal with the situation. However, the hon. Gentleman is of course correct to say that there are always tensions and accountabilities.

I can confirm that the hon. Gentleman and I spent an enjoyable 18 months on the commission. I hope that he, like me, will welcome not only the outcome of the commission but the Government’s response, which was positive and supportive. To put the question that my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Mr. Reed) asked slightly differently, if the Government want something done and make money available to do it, it is surely quite legitimate for a voluntary sector organisation to have to make adaptations in order to take advantage of that funding. However, I agree with the hon. Gentleman that mission creep should only ever come from the voluntary organisations, rather than being imposed on them.

In answer to the hon. Gentleman’s first point, the Government’s response to the commission was indeed good, but Julia spent so many hours with the Prime Minister that the dear man was probably browbeaten and could only respond generously to what she had said.

To respond to the hon. Gentleman’s second point, yes, but it is all a question of degree. If the parameters are set and the voluntary sector is given the opportunity to take on a role that has been broadly set out by the Government, that is all well and good. However, we have picked up a concern that the requirements, rules and targets set out under a Government course of action for which money is available to the voluntary sector have gone a little too far. The Government should be warned about that, and I hope that my colleagues have picked that up as something that we would not do when we get the opportunity.

In the relatively brief time available to me—I know that both Front-Bench spokesmen will want to respond to what has been a good debate—let me say that, like most colleagues, I draw much of my experience of the voluntary sector from my constituency. It would be remiss of me not to pay tribute to those who work in our constituencies in a voluntary capacity.

Among those that I know best are the Sea Cadets in Biggleswade, a uniformed organisation of which I am the president that does remarkable work in the town and represents well the uniformed organisations that do so much good work throughout the country. Carers in Bedfordshire is a service set up by Yvonne Clark, a dedicated woman, to look after those who care not only in my constituency but throughout the country, and to provide a meeting point where best practice can be spread for such work. Headway is the organisation that looks after those with head injuries. Chris Batten does remarkable work with them. I was fortunate to run this year’s London marathon on behalf of St. John’s hospice in Moggerhanger and Sue Ryder Care. My wife has chaired Home-Start in Bedford for many years.

A variety of organisations are involved, and I suspect that I am not unique in my experience. Every Member of the House will know half a dozen organisations well, and even more tolerably well, because of personal connections, which we all attract. We know that they give us the sense of what voluntary organisations do in our constituencies, and how remarkably valuable they are.

Sport is greatly important to the hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Reed). The Bedfordshire football association does good work through football and my friends Phil Dean and Martin Humberstone do a great deal through Biggleswade swimming club. Sport does so much for so many people who are looking for guidance, and I echo the comments made by a number of others about the need for more adult volunteers to coach and to get involved. What youngsters need most is for grown-ups to be involved in what they are doing; that is what they are looking for.

I echo the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight, as we would all do, in thanking the volunteers who work for us on the street, supporting political parties. That is not the most popular form of voluntary activity. I regret the fact that MPs being the target for popular attacks reflects on those who give their time to work for political parties, making it harder to recruit them and making it difficult for them to feel valued for what they do. Those who put many pieces of paper through people’s doors, as they have recently in Crewe and Nantwich and as I believe they will do shortly in other parts of the country, are to be immensely valued. We very much appreciate what they do.

I would like to spend a few minutes discussing the commission and thanking it for the work that it did, as well as those who contributed to it. We found volunteering to be in rude health throughout the country, and we found exactly what hon. Members have spoken of—tremendous commitment from individuals to what they are doing and no need for direction from any great authority. Those people are committed to what they are doing because of their wellspring of need to respond to their neighbours and build a better society.

People know that what they are doing is not just about them; it is about what they can give to others. In volunteering, they have found an opportunity to train, give to others and ensure that a cohesive society, which is not the same thing as the state, is working effectively. We are all delighted that we found that, and I have no wish to go over the statistics that colleagues have already referred to.

Psychologically, volunteering is crucial for a society that is obsessed with work and the working culture, as well as the number of hours that people devote to them. It is essential that there is another outlet for our energy, and volunteering fulfils that remarkable need.

A number of barriers were mentioned by those we spoke to, which have nothing to do with the Government and are not their responsibility. Lifestyle is one. I represent a rural area and a rural community. There are fewer jobs in rural areas than there were. Think of the change in the nature of society over the last 50 or 100 years. People commute more and spend more time travelling. No longer do they finish work locally at 5 or 6 o’clock, have their tea and get ready to go out and contribute to local activities. They get home at half-past 7 or 8 o’clock. They are tired. After they have eaten, the evening is gone. We are all suffering from the problem that that causes, in that there are not enough people who are able to commit themselves to such activities.

The problem of sustainability was mentioned earlier. People cannot make a long-term commitment to do something day after day. I spoke to the leader of Bolton lads’ club, who told me that the club, which has about 3,000 members, is successful because, “We operate whenever the schools don’t. Every night of the week, every day during the holidays, we’re there, because we can rely on a large number of people to give us time day after day.” It is not like running a youth club once a week or once a fortnight, with attendance inevitably dropping off. There is that commitment from volunteers, which means so much.

I shall come to rules and regulations, red tape and health and safety in a moment. The onus placed on trustees is much greater than it used to be. It is harder for some people to accept the obligations, because they suddenly realise that they might end up more committed—financially and in other ways—than would have been the case some years ago. Being a trustee of a voluntary group is no longer the job it was. That issue ought to be looked at by Members on both sides of the House to see whether we can in some way relieve people of those responsibilities. That matter was referred to more than once in the evidence given to the commission.

May I say a word about Government responsibility? As I said, to some degree I have changed what I was going to say. I think that the Minister was too defensive, perhaps because he was stung by the document that we have produced. He deserves to listen a little to what those involved in voluntary activities think of what is happening out there. A section in the results of the public consultation is entitled “The relationship between Volunteering and Government”. Some of it is positive. Page 88 deals with positive experiences. However, pages 89 to 113 set out a rather different story of problems that volunteers experience, which they put down to things that the Government might do something about. They include the planning process, continuity between initiatives, consultation and communication with volunteer-involving agencies, funding time scales, reporting and monitoring time scales, focus on targets, lack of resources to capitalise on initiatives, the nature of the volunteering placements available and the focus of some programmes.

Let me quote, if I may, people who spent their time and gave their commitment to contributing to the consultation process. They deserve to be heard. On the planning process, an employee of a national voluntary sector organisation said that

“my organisation has participated in a number of government programmes. As a whole they tend to be poorly conceived, aimed at grabbing attention, and misunderstand volunteering and the voluntary sector”.

A local branch of a national charity considered that there is

“a confusion of initiatives from central government and local authorities…there is no overall plan or structure”.

We have already discussed one or two individual initiatives. I quote an employee of a national voluntary sector network organisation:

“There has been huge investment in new volunteering initiatives over the years from the Experience Corps to v which has taken little account of existing volunteering experience or of volunteering organisations or structures”.

There is no criticism of that investment being made, but there is criticism of failure to recognise what was already there and, therefore, money committed. So often, for the Government it is all about how much money has been spent, not necessarily what has been done or achieved. The concern is that money and time are being spent that need not be.

The document also says:

“A further area of criticism related to funding timescales. A complaint voiced frequently was that the time allowed to apply for funding from government volunteering programmes is sometimes too short”.

It goes on to supply quotes from various people.

On the focus on targets, Minister, the document says:

“Government funding programmes place too much emphasis on targets, ie number of volunteers placed. Respondents considered that stress on targets can prove detrimental to the quality of the volunteering experience. This appears to be a particular criticism of Millennium Volunteers: ‘target driven with emphasis on quantity not quality’.”

Another employee from a public sector organisation said:

“As a result, ‘organisations who are unlikely to provide a volunteering opportunity for the required length of time or potential volunteers that are unable to make the time commitment that would meet the terms of the definition will both miss out from the support of the Volunteer Centre…it feels as if government can move the goalposts but we can’t’.”

I shall refer to a final quote on volunteering policy, which will be of interest to the Minister because it is rather wide-ranging. An employee of a national voluntary organisation for older people said:

“I have no sense that there exists a strategic volunteering policy within government, a roadmap if you will, that sees volunteers and volunteering as an evolving, interlinked creature, that recognises the impact interventions (such as funding) have, not just on the targeted group but also the potential negative impact it may have on non-targeted groups”.

That is a selection of quotes; there are a lot. Of course, a lot has been done that is positive—we understand that—but the Minister, in his determination to have a go at a document produced by my colleagues, which he has barely had a chance to consider, was over-optimistic in his view of how the voluntary sector views the Government.

As the hon. Member for Loughborough rightly pointed out, much of this criticism could be directed at any Government. If we were in government we would have to take full note of the views of people who spend their lives in organisations, either as volunteers or as employees. I would be disappointed if we glossed over criticisms and did not accept them as being genuine.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) observed that the philosophical difference between our parties related to the intention of volunteers. It seems to me that the Government focus on their importance in relation to the process of delivering services, while we concentrate on their importance in relation to the end product. What matters is the quality of services delivered to the people for whom we are concerned and for whom we have responsibility. Are those services effective? In broken-down families, is the necessary work being done to mend people and keep them together? Are old people helped by what we are trying to do? This is not about a process, but about outcomes. I think that too often the Government concentrate on the process—hence their self-admiration in the context of the amount of money given rather than what is actually delivered.

My colleagues’ approach to the document published yesterday indicated our interest in using the freshness of voluntary groups—large and small, but in many instances community-based—to deliver what they do best without being excessively trammelled by Government targets, regulation and direction. Yes, there must be accountability, but we must not lose that freshness of approach. According to what we hear from voluntary groups, they feel that the Government have overdone it—for all sorts of reasons, but perhaps because they cannot quite let go in this sector as in others. That is the main difference between us. My hon. Friends have responded to that desire for freshness—the desire to allow people to do what they do best; the desire for the professionals to be professional in public services, and for the volunteers to deliver what they know so much about.

I believe that we can set those people free. If the Government do not listen to the criticisms coming from the sector, they will miss an opportunity to do something rather better in the couple of years remaining to them. We will make the very most of that opportunity on the basis of the information that the voluntary sector has already given us.

It is a pleasure to be able to mark national volunteering week with a debate on the subject. It is good that the Government did not table an amendment, thus enabling us to unite on a motion that draws attention to the contribution made by voluntary organisations, and specifically by volunteers, to our national life. My hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner) quoted the NCVO’s figure of £27 billion. That is a colossal figure, but the real contribution lies in the transformation of the lives of the people whom we see in our constituencies.

The great attraction of today’s debate is that although not many Members have had a chance to make speeches or intervene, we have been given so many examples that capture in a microcosm the widespread contributions made by volunteers. My hon. Friend the Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) spoke of the great work done in prisons to get people back on to the right road and to prevent recidivism. My hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood) told us of the signal contribution that the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, free of any requirement to do what it does, makes to our national life. My hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr. Burrowes) talked about the Scouts.

The hon. Member for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer) praised the work done by charity shops, but also referred to more quirkily named charities such as the Barnes Workhouse Fund. Its Victorian name may appear somewhat archaic, but I gather from the hon. Lady that it continues to do fantastic work. The hon. Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt) mentioned the RNID, a national charity. It was clear from what we heard that, from national level to a very small level, the sector makes a colossal difference. My hon. Friend the Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) took the prize in listing the litany of organisations with which he is involved: the Sea Cadets, the Bedfordshire carers, Headway, the hospice movement, Sue Ryder Care and Home-Starts, with which his wife does such great work.

All that demonstrated the great variety of contributions that we have the opportunity to make through volunteering. One of the unsung contributions to our national life is made by volunteers in the public services. Aintree University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, for example, has pioneered the use of volunteers in the delivery of care and making life better for patients. The Kent and Sussex hospital in my constituency has just embarked on a pilot enabling volunteers to become “supper-time companions”, giving their time to be sociable with patients who may have no one to talk to during the day and ensuring that they have company, which is good for their morale.

The debate has given us an opportunity to record our appreciation of the work of the voluntary sector, and in that context I found the tone of the Minister’s opening speech slightly regrettable. We were careful to table a motion that was not partisan and reflected broad cross-party support, but he seems to have the knack of rendering divisive issues on which I think there ought to be a degree of consensus. I think he was wrong to ascribe to a Labour Government in particular the fact that the voluntary sector is flourishing; volunteers throughout the country may well resent the fact that their efforts, voluntarily given, have been described by a Minister as in some way down to the activities of the Government. Those people are there because they have the instinct to take voluntary action, and I do not think they will take kindly to having it usurped by the Minister, in words at least.

The Minister entertained us yesterday with his response to something that he had barely read. He said on the radio that our document represented a return to the Victorian age for charities, but that half what was in it had already been proposed by the Government. That strikes me as being in the long and admirable tradition begun by the former Deputy Prime Minister, who famously said that the green belt was a Labour achievement and that we must build on it. If the current Prime Minister is seeking a replacement for that much-missed figure, he may have found one in the Minister if he continues to make statements like that.

We have discussed the contribution that the sector currently makes, and my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Bedfordshire spoke of the rude health that it enjoys, but there is still a shortage of volunteers. According to a survey of people who manage volunteers, 59 per cent. said that they experienced difficulty in recruiting enough of them. The Morgan report—an excellent report—said that that was particularly true of young adults, which was confirmed by my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate. The Scout Association, a fantastic organisation, has a waiting list of 40,000 children and young people for the Beavers, Cubs and Scouts, because there are not enough adult volunteers.

May I return the hon. Gentleman to what was said by the hon. Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt)? I took part in the Morgan inquiry, and have been involved with the Scouts and Beavers as a helper. I used to help to run a Friday night Beaver session. Does the hon. Gentleman accept that many of the constraints that he has mentioned are social constraints relating to the work-life balance? Given that 65 per cent. of people now have an atypical working week, parents tend to do volunteer work for a shorter time before moving on with their children. A generation earlier, people such as my parents would volunteer for 20 years. The problems are social problems that we must work together to eradicate, not just through the voluntary sector but in the wider context of social mobility and the social contract that we have as a country.

The hon. Gentleman is exactly right. The commission has helpfully suggested, and spread the notion, that employers should play their part. If work life is impinging more on what was previously leisure time that could have been devoted to volunteering, perhaps a bit more give and take is required, and people, especially young adults, should be allowed to take time off. That is one of the more welcome contributions, which we have sought to echo.

It is concerning that the number of young people who volunteer seems to be static. In an nfpSynergy study, between November 2006 and November 2007, the number of young people who said that they had not volunteered in the past three months had increased—it had done so only marginally, but it had not declined—from 79 per cent. to 80 per cent. It is important to get more people, especially young adults, involved in volunteering. That is particularly true in the volunteering deserts, as they have been described. The parts of the country that would benefit most from volunteering are those where the level of volunteering is half of that in less-deprived areas.

Committed volunteering is important. It will be fantastic if people try their hand at volunteering this week, in national volunteering week, but it is crucial to the running of Scout groups, and even more so for organisations such as the Bolton lads’ club, which my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Bedfordshire mentioned, to get people to commit to volunteering regularly. I completely agree with the hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Reed) that that will require a change in the work-life balance to which people are subjected.

Certain issues hold back further possibilities in the sector. For example, we have heard a lot about over-regulation. I assume that the Government agree on that point, put in a reasonable way, as it is in the motion, which mentions the

“bureaucratic barriers that lie between volunteers and volunteering.”

I hope that that issue is not in contention across the House.

The Commission on the Future of Volunteering, on which the hon. Member for High Peak and my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Bedfordshire served with distinction, said time and again that it had heard stories of bureaucratic hurdles. The motivation for having those hurdles might have been good, but they have degenerated into caricatures of risk-aversion. We must act on that issue. CRB checks are a particular bugbear, so I am delighted to hear that the long-awaited reforms were published today, and I look forward to reading them.

The benefit system has been mentioned once or twice, but not too much. However, the Morgan inquiry, on which the hon. Member for Loughborough served, talked about the rigid package of bureaucracy that surrounds the unemployment benefit system and dissuades young adults from volunteering. It is important that we address that problem. The rules might have changed but the orders have not got out there. In a letter to the Prime Minister, the volunteer centre in Nuneaton said:

“In the last 6 weeks, 3 of our volunteers have had their benefits stopped”

despite completing the necessary forms. The letter went on to say:

“Recruiting volunteers has never been an easy task, however with more and more volunteers experiencing difficulties with their benefits and the DW&P, that task is much harder.”

We need to change the way in which we communicate people’s entitlements.

On Government initiatives, the commission highlighted the views of many in the sector. For example, it picked up a lot of criticism about several aspects of the Government’s initiatives to promote volunteering. I do not doubt that those initiatives had the best of purposes, and I shall not repeat the quotes that my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Bedfordshire gave from the groups that took the trouble to give evidence to the committee, but it is wrong for the Minister to dismiss that point so readily as having being dreamt up or motivated in a partisan way.

When it comes to solutions, we need to do exactly what the Neuberger commission recommended, which is ensure that volunteering

“becomes part of the DNA of our society”.

A culture change is needed, but it must be voluntary. We cannot compel people to volunteer. Members on both sides of the House made the point that it is important that the party in government should draw back from seeming to suggest that volunteering might be compulsory. We want to spread a social norm of volunteering, so that it happens in all sectors. There are some fantastic examples of companies that give time to their employees to volunteer, and they benefit substantially from that. We have heard that KPMG gives three and a half hours a month, and we have suggested that there should be a minimum commitment across government for eight hours a year. The Cabinet Office rightly makes a commitment to do that, but we need to make sure that, at the very least, everyone knows, across government, that they have the right to take eight hours a year to make a difference to their communities. It is empowering that they should know that.

We need to get rid of bureaucratic checks. CRB checks have been mentioned, and we will look at the matter with great interest. Benefit complexity has also been mentioned in that regard. It is also important to recognise training. The Morgan inquiry recommended that the skills that young adults can gain from volunteering should be recognised. In response to the comments of the hon. Member for High Peak, I point out that when we say that that should be owned by the sector, we do not mean to say that it should not relate to the world of employment—far from it. However, we do not think that it should be imposed on the sector by the Government. It should be driven by the sector and by the enthusiasm of those in it.

Does the hon. Gentleman therefore agree with the recommendation of the Commission on the Future of Volunteering regarding the importance of training?

I do agree with that recommendation. We have made a suggestion in our report that we should work with the sector to see whether we can develop a system for recognising that training. Training is absolutely key.

The question of investing directly in the grass roots has come up, and v has also been mentioned. That organisation has a particular responsibility, because the £117 million of public funds that is going into it over three years is a lot of money. It needs to demonstrate that the value that it offers is proportionate to the amount of public support that it is receiving. The alternative would have been to put that money into existing organisations, such as the Scouts. The Scouts would benefit from having access to even a fraction of that amount, to enable them to employ more development officers in areas where there are not enough volunteers to lead Scout groups, and we need to be convinced that that would not be a more effective use of the money. We wish v well, but the evidence to date is far from conclusive. A lot of the evidence given to us and to the various commissions suggests at least that the jury is still out in regard to v. In particular, over the past year, the fact that there has been no material increase in youth volunteering, despite the considerable funding that has gone into the organisation in its first year, gives cause for concern.

Volunteers deserve the recognition that they are getting this week, and I am pleased that we have had the opportunity to express that recognition in Parliament. I believe that volunteers are both the beginning and the end for us in civil society. Volunteers were always the first to open schools and hospitals, and the first providers of relief to the poor. Today, they are still the first to spot patterns of deprivation developing, and problems that need to be resolved. They are still the first to take action on some of the sources of social breakdown. They have always been there first.

It is also important to reflect that volunteers are always there at the end. Often, it is volunteers who are there as a last resort when all else fails. They are the last resort for the vulnerable and marginalised people who slip through the net that the state erects to catch them. Outside this country, volunteers are the last gasp of civilisation when Governments have ignored and turned their back on their own people. No sector is more central to our national life, and it is important that we have recognised it today. We have made some suggestions in our Green Paper on how we can strengthen the support and help that the Government can give to the sector. I look forward to the Minister’s response to the debate and thank him for his agreement to make this a cross-party motion today.

With the leave of the House, I would like to respond to the debate. We have had a good, robust discussion today about volunteering. Last week, I had the privilege of joining users, volunteers and staff at Newark Mind, and of preparing, cooking and eating lunch with them. I experienced at first hand the difference that such an organisation can make to people with mental health problems—the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer) mentioned such people in her speech—who are endeavouring to get back into society and to develop their self-esteem and self-confidence. Organisations such as Mind are doing terrific work to bring about a transformation in people’s lives.

This afternoon, Members on both sides of the House have recognised the value of the contribution that volunteers, charities and third sector organisations are making to communities in their constituencies. I am worried, however, that we are seeing a new tactic being used in the House. The Conservatives published a controversial policy document on the third sector. They then tabled a motion on volunteering, about which there is genuine consensus. But they are expecting to use this consensual debate as a cover for a debate on their policy, because they know that we do not want to break the consensus on volunteering that clearly exists. Well, they are not going to get away with that. If they publish a policy document, their proposals are going to get robust scrutiny, not least from Labour Members and from me, as Minister for the third sector. I believe that their policy is, at worst, flawed and damaging to a thriving third sector, and that it would take us back to a Victorian era of silent and grateful charities.

The Minister has said that he wants a robust debate. He has also said that our policy would take us back to Victorian times. Can he tell me which of the 20 main policies that we have put forward would result in a return to Victorian times?

The complete absence of any acknowledgement of the campaigning role that volunteers individually and collectively play in changing society is exactly where the Opposition’s policy is fundamentally flawed, because it does not embrace the full range of volunteering opportunities and the role that the third sector has played in bringing about massive changes over the last century and a half.

The hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) criticises me, as did the hon. Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), for putting on record the success of the Labour Government, under whom volunteering and third sector organisations have genuinely flourished over the decade. The hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells even suggested that I should be appointed Deputy Prime Minister. That particular suggestion may have some merit.

Without wishing to be too tendentious, let me say that the number of registered charities has risen over the last decade from 120,000 to 160,000. The number of people volunteering formally or informally at least once a month has risen from 18.4 million in 2001 to 20.4 million in 2005. Research into charities estimates that turnover has increased from around £16 billion to more than £27 billion over the last decade. The work force has increased by around a fifth. I cannot agree with the hon. Members for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner), for Tunbridge Wells or for North-East Bedfordshire that we do not have a strong and flourishing third sector, brought about by the policies to create the environment in which it can flourish.

Will the Minister give way?

I shall address some of the hon. Gentleman’s points in a second.

The hon. Member for Isle of Wight confused grants and contracts. The point about contracts is that they specify outcomes and services because they are part of a wider commissioning strategy in which third sector organisations are involved at every stage, identifying user needs, talking about user outcomes and designing services. Where the third sector wants to engage in bidding for contracts, it can deliver those services while holding all providers—third sector, public sector and private sector—to account for their performance. That is why those systems exist.

The hon. Member for Richmond Park asked about expenses. Volunteers can get expenses up front, and DWP guidance has stated that. I very much agree that young people in particular need their expenses up front, which is why v has an allowance scheme that has enabled expenses to be paid up front to young people on their full-time volunteering programmes.

The hon. Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink) intervened to ask whether local Conservative-controlled councils have read the Conservatives’ policy, and if so whether they would stop cutting their grants to local voluntary organisations. That gives me the opportunity to remind the House about the new local government performance framework, which includes two indicators in a national set, one on volunteering and one on a thriving third sector. Two thirds of the 35 local area agreements will have at least one of those indicators as priority indicators to pursue. We wish to see voluntary organisations locally playing a strong and equal part in local city partnerships, deciding local priorities, delivering local services and holding local government to account.

The hon. Member for North-East Bedfordshire complained that we were not listening. In 2006, the Government undertook the largest ever single consultation, involving more organisations, voluntary groups, social enterprises, community groups and charities than on any other occasion in drawing up the third sector review, which spells out a 10-year strategy to ensure that we have stronger communities, better public services, flourishing social enterprises and a flourishing third sector.

On the hon. Gentleman’s point about the commission, we have not only listened to it, but have responded directly. I have announced the CRB guidance today, and there is more money for training and more help for disabled volunteers. New benefits guidance is to be published as well. He is right to say that the Prime Minister spent a great deal of time with Baroness Julia Neuberger. One of the Prime Minister’s first acts on being appointed was to appoint Baroness Neuberger as the Government’s champion for volunteering. To say that we have not listened, do not know the issues or have not responded is so far from the truth as to be laughable. Baroness Neuberger has recently produced a groundbreaking report on the development of volunteering in health and social care services and is now working on the role that volunteers can play in criminal justice.

We have demonstrated not only that we are celebrating success, but that we continue to listen to representations from voluntary organisations, third sector organisations and even Opposition MPs who make some clear—

rose—

I have not got time to give way now, but I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will be able to write to me afterwards.

My hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt) is one of the most knowledgeable, experienced and committed Members of the House in his support for the voluntary sector. We hugely welcome not only his contribution this afternoon, but the work he does tirelessly behind the scenes, in all-party groups and across the board, for which I sincerely thank him. He gave a forensic analysis of the Opposition’s proposals, particularly in respect of how the Big Lottery Fund might be disadvantaging organisations that are doing a good job. He talked a lot about the role of organisations becoming the voice of the voiceless, but he rightly said that we have more to do on ensuring that contracts really do take into account the needs of third sector organisations and that we can do a lot better on employee volunteering.

Whenever I visit voluntary organisations and volunteers, it is a privilege to meet those often unsung heroes, who, day in, day out, provide vital services to the community, not least to those who experience most disadvantage. I agree with the Opposition Members who say that volunteers are at the heart of our communities, because, as they rightly say, volunteers are the glue that binds us together and they have a huge impact on people’s lives. I am delighted that Justin Davis Smith, the chief executive of Volunteering England, who continues to press us to do more, has said that volunteering has never had it so good. I think that he is right.

The report that the Conservatives published yesterday is a missed opportunity. It looks good, but frankly it has little substance. It is slick salesmanship and a good performance, but it is little more than a literature review that plagiarises a great deal of Government policy that has put us on track. A point was made about the report’s recommendations with which I disagree, so I should say that the absence of any remarks about campaigning would take us back to an era of silent and grateful charities, and that is not the way in which we should progress in the future.

I ask the Opposition to listen to organisations such as the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, which has already registered its concern that

“the Green Paper makes no reference to the important role that voluntary and community organisations play in campaigning and advocacy.”

We have a strong, forward-looking agenda for change, which was drawn up in partnership with the sector. I think that the Conservatives would like us to have that relationship break down, and that is what would happen were they ever to get into power.

Our relationship with the sector should be deepened and strengthened. Our vision for the next 10 years is one of building stronger communities where people can and do make a difference; building a stronger third sector; investing in capacity to provide services; and creating new mechanisms for inward investment and transforming public services. This is a Government who have ensured, and will continue to ensure, that we have a thriving third sector and that volunteering is at the heart of stronger communities.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House welcomes National Volunteering Week and the publication of the report of the Morgan Inquiry; recognises the outstanding contribution made by volunteers to what, sixty years ago, William Beveridge called ‘the vigour and abundance of voluntary action…which are the distinguishing marks of a free society’; notes that every week millions of people volunteer their time for others, providing indispensable personal care and attention in all of Britain’s communities; emphasises the continuing importance of volunteering even as the voluntary sector expands its paid workforce and takes on the delivery of public services; further notes that some voluntary organisations experience shortages of volunteers in key positions; supports the call of the Commission for the Future of Volunteering for ‘volunteering to become part of the DNA of our society’; congratulates employers who encourage and make time available for their employees to volunteer; and urges the Government to address the bureaucratic barriers that lie between volunteers and volunteering.