On 18 March 2008 Tom spoke to a Natural England conference in York. He was invited as a member of the Commission on the Future of Volunteering. Here is his speech:

'Volunteering and the Environment'

Thank you for inviting me to York, it’s a city with a great history; not only has it a long record of volunteering – from people coming forward to fight the Romans onwards – but also my grandma used to live here.

And Natural England’s Martin Doughty, I happen to know, is a man with a bit of history about him too; not only have I had the pleasure of being his Member of Parliament in High Peak for the last 11 years but before that, when he was Leader of Derbyshire County Council, I was one of his loyal backbenchers.

It’s a pleasure to heed Martin’s call to discuss the interface between the environment and volunteering. It’s a union which also has a proud history. When the Kinder trespassers volunteered, yes volunteered, to take part in a movement which led to hundreds of them coming to my constituency in April 1932, occupying land upon which they sought the public right to roam, they moved mountains.

Through their personal commitments to a common cause, their effective grass roots organisations, their common strategy and their long term goals, all of which were organised on a shoestring budget just like the third sector of today, they set wheels in motion which led to the formation of national parks, 16 years later.

In 2001 the Countryside and Rights of Way Act delivered the right of public access to huge parts of what can only be called natural England.

But I wasn’t invited here to reminisce.

There are three offices which I hold from which I would like to report to you on the ‘state of play’ on environmental volunteering:

• I was the Labour Party representative on the Commission on the Future of Volunteering, from 2006 to 2008, under the chair of the redoubtable Baroness Julia Neuberger, now the Prime Minister’s ‘champion’ on volunteering issues. Representing the third sector, political parties, religious movements, local government and the private sector too, the Commission recently published its final report, ‘Manifesto for Change’.
• Since 2004 I have chaired the Community Development Foundation, CDF. We discover, develop and disseminate good practice in community development. As part of this we administer several grants programmes for government departments and this includes Every Action Counts, for DEFRA.
• And I chair the All Party Parliamentary Group on the Community and Voluntary Sector, the group of MPs which takes a particular interest in the Third Sector in all its forms.

In my time I have taught environmental studies to University entrance level, but I am not actually going to talk about the environment as such today.

We all know what volunteering is. Let me just remind you what it isn’t.

It isn’t the ‘cheap option’ of getting something done for nothing. The work of volunteers can complement that of the public sector; and what volunteers bring to the public service table is a set of values, and time, and conscience, and commitments which formal services sometimes cannot make sufficiently available in the right proportions.

The work of volunteers has its own qualities which often arise directly from the needs of communities. In the same way as a mechanic can often see what is wrong with a car by getting underneath it and looking up into the engine, so a community looking up from the grass roots can often identify issues and priorities better than can the Chief Executive at the Council offices or the garage owner looking down from the skylight.

In my experience ‘local issues’ which inspire campaigners to come together as volunteers are very often focused on the environment: in my own constituency three recent campaigns spring to mind:

• Residents of a housing estate fed up with drug users’ needles littering the footpaths and play areas on a housing estate organised a litter pick and scrub clearance with council support;
• People from a wider area, supported by third sector groups of national importance, mounted a campaign to preserve the Woodhead Tunnel so that it might one day be available again for rail traffic;
• And in Martin’s home town of New Mills, volunteers raised funds for a community hydroelectricity scheme at the conflux of two local rivers. They organised the campaign, recruited the shareholders, raised the cash and created a Community Interest Company to deliver green electricity to 700 homes. Not so much ‘hydropower’ as ‘people power’…

Let me tell you about ‘Manifesto for Change’, the report of the Commission on the Future of Volunteering, and the government’s response to it which was published earlier this month.

As members of the Commission, we don’t disagree with a word of what Phil Hope, Minister for the Third Sector, said in his introduction to the government’s response:

“Volunteering (he said) does not just benefit people who receive help, it benefits the volunteers as well. Helping others can be an empowering experience, with the wider benefits being felt in communities up and down the country. Volunteering can bring entirely different sections of society together, encouraging greater understanding between people; the glue that binds society together.”

The government agreed that we need to raise the profile of volunteering. And didn’t Fiona Reynolds of the National Trust do just that the other week, with her February 29th campaign? Fiona was a feisty and intelligent member of our Commission, a key author of the report, and she hit the headlines in February:

“With 2008 being a leap year,” she said, “the National Trust is inviting everyone to make the most of the extra day by trying their hand at volunteering.”

On a national scale, the government response says, they will continue to support ‘Volunteers Week’, ‘Make a Difference Day’ and in December this year, ‘International Volunteer Day’.

Other days and weeks of particular interest to sectors of volunteers are listed on a website I recently discovered, the ‘Count Me In’ calendar. It is a comprehensive list of dates identified by different voluntary sector groups on which individuals are invited to participate in their campaigns.

I welcome the fact that ‘promoting volunteering’ is now on the new list of 198 performance indicators for local authorities.

‘Making Volunteering open to all’ was our second theme. Some groups in society volunteer more than others and there is not always an obvious reason for this. As Justin Davis Smith, the new Chief Executive of Volunteering England, has said on behalf of the Commission:

“We welcome the [government’s] commitment to removing barriers through the establishment of a pilot Access to Volunteering Fund to increase opportunities for disabled people to volunteer, and through the extension of the Volunteering for All and Goldstar programmes.”

Goldstar is a two year programme which started during the time the Commission was sitting, to promote volunteering by people who are least likely to volunteer. These include those with no qualifications, people from Black and Minority Ethnic groups and people with disabilities or long term illness.

The Access to Volunteering Fund has already been announced as a response to our report; between 2009-2011, £2M will be available to help disabled people become volunteers in three pilot regions, much in the same way as Access to Work funding is available to support disabled people get into or stay in work.

As far as removing obstacles to volunteering is concerned, better guidance and smoother regulation will be applied to risk management for volunteers and accessing Criminal Records Bureau checks, for example.

The Department for Work and Pensions will issue clear and unambiguous advice that people in receipt of benefits can take part in voluntary work without jeopardising their benefit claims.

We didn’t get everything we asked for. Whilst the minister acknowledged that the infrastructure which underlies volunteering is often under-funded, our specific call for a £5 million matched fund for the strategic development and modernisation of volunteering infrastructure was turned down.

However, such projects will be considered for funding, amongst other voluntary sector projects, by new tranches of money coming available through Capacitybuilders and other funding programmes.

I think that employer-supported volunteering is a much under-used resource in this country although it is the norm in countries like America. Where it does happen, it feels as though it is magistrates and school governors, middle class or management volunteers, who are supported by their employer with time and resources for their ‘good cause’.

In fact, employer-supported volunteering does go much further and I have heard of environmental projects which have benefited from it, such as teams of office workers with wellies and buckets clearing debris from a local stream in office time.

As a result of our report, the Office of the Third Sector will be taking the lead in encouraging other parts of government, in their role as employers, to promote employee volunteering: excellent.

Another area where we found a large measure of agreement with government was the need for better training and skills. We were delighted when the Department for Universities, Industry and Skills announced in November that the government’s ‘Train to Gain’ programme would be extended to volunteers. Train to Gain is aimed at small and medium enterprises, is provided by the Learning and Skills Council and is aimed at providing impartial, flexible, responsive and timely advice on skill acquisition to employers.

However, it is not clear whether Volunteer Centres, for example, will be included and we will be pushing for them to be so.

Our call for a select committee of Parliament to focus on volunteering issues across government was turned down, with the minister arguing that several select committees had already looked at areas of interest to the sector and scrutiny of such work appeared to be working.

But the government’s commitment to strengthen the Compact and to

         “closing the gap between good intentions and delivery in practice,”

as Phil Hope put it, were just what we wanted to hear. The Compact remains the rulebook which governs the relationship between public sector and third sector partners in delivering joint projects in the name of public service.

The Compact had a shaky start but where it works, it works well. A new push is required to ensure that government as a whole (including agencies and departments) treats volunteers with the dignity and respect they deserve when working together.

Prejudices and false impressions lead to one partner misunderstanding the competence and capacity of the other partner and this is just as true of the third sector as in its public sector partners.

All in all, I reckon we scored 8 out of 10 in the government’s response to our report, and few select committees can claim to score at consistently that level.

Phil Hope is responsible for the Office of the Third Sector in the Cabinet Office, but other government departments also have close links to volunteering organisations. Not least, of course, is Natural England’s sponsoring department, Defra.

As I said previously, Defra’s Every Action Counts grant programme is administered by CDF, the organisation which I chair. But please don’t lobby me because I am not involved in decisions about who gets what!

What I didn’t tell you earlier was that for four years I was Hilary Benn’s Parliamentary aide or PPS when he was Secretary of State for International Development. In particular, we worked together on the Make Poverty History campaign. He was the ideal person to lead for the government on that issue: approachable, informed, intelligent – and with a name that carried public recognition!

So when we spoke recently about a mobilisation of volunteers and voluntary sector organisations to ‘Make Climate Change History’, to raise not just public awareness of the issue but individual and community action, too – he was well and truly up for it.

Our discussion was in the context of Every Action Counts and I was wearing my CDF hat. A three year programme, Every Action Counts comes to an end next year but I am sure that its positive impact on local environments across the country will be felt for many years to come. Its Community Champions, have skills, knowledge and enthusiasm which will have been embedded, one hopes, for life.

I am not suggesting that ‘Make Climate Change History’ will replace Every Action Counts in 2009 but something worthwhile will, I am sure.

I don’t need to tell Natural England, of all people, of the importance of tackling climate change and I am sure that this will be one of your priorities for the future. I hope you will consider how best you can mobilise volunteers in this particular cause.

For several years now I have hosted an annual event in Parliament to celebrate the work of older volunteers. MPs each bring a volunteer to London for a photocall, a speech from a celebrity and a tea party on the Terrace. They love it! My last year’s volunteer only started volunteering in her mid-50s, 30 years ago.

This year I am doing a second such event, but this time my partner is ‘V’ (the body which promotes youth volunteering) and we will celebrate the work of volunteers under the age of 25. This time, the sponsoring MP will be asked to visit the volunteer at work, first. The aim is to raise the profile of young volunteers, to give public recognition to young people who defy the stereotype of the popular press by ‘doing good things’ and to encourage others to do something similar.

My guess is that a high number of young volunteers will be involved in environmental projects but that is no reason not to encourage more. Green projects have the advantage of being capable of easy wins, tangible outcomes in a short period. Campaigns which actually achieve something positive are very good motivators.

As I draw my remarks to a close, I want to consider briefly four issues which could affect the future atmosphere for green volunteering.
The first is ‘compulsory volunteering’. This is, of course, an oxymoron but there are some morons who would give the idea oxygen.

There is no place in volunteering for compulsion. Schools in particular should, by all means, encourage community service and timetable it into their curriculum – but they should not call it ‘volunteering’.

But schools should encourage volunteering – why not? It should be out of school and off the curriculum. There has been a fear that sloppy use of language in legislation and guidance may encourage ‘compulsory volunteering’ but I have drawn these concerns to ministers’ attention and they do understand the fine distinction. I am hopeful – if not yet entirely confident – that ‘compulsory volunteering’ will not rear its head.

Secondly, the Local Government Act, passed last year, allows communities to oblige local authorities to act on issues relating to antisocial behaviour through a process called a ‘community call for action’. Why is this restricted to antisocial behaviour? The same power should be there to force local authorities to act on local environmental black spots.

Perhaps the ‘community call for action’ could start with graffiti and fly-tipping?

Finally, the discussion of community ownership of community assets is something which is starting to take off. As Campbell Robb of the OTS told the Development Trust Association in October:

“The aim of the Community Assets Fund is community empowerment; to release the potential and imagination of the sector to find new ways to deliver services and create places that bring people together.”

The phrase ‘community assets’ is normally held to refer to community halls, playgrounds, etc, but there is no reason why woods, wild areas and even parks should not be included, as government reports have envisaged.
 
I’ve enjoyed this speech. It was fun researching it and pulling the strands together and I hope you have enjoyed it half as much as I have.

So I am not going to spoil it by pointing out that, contrary to what you may have heard, there is no political consensus on these issues. Indeed there are people out there

• who believe that voluntary action should replace the ‘heavy hand of the state’ rather than complement it;
• who believe that ‘small is beautiful’ to the extent that even large voluntary organisations are regarded as part of the problem and not part of the solution;
• who hate the quangocracy that includes Natural England;
• and whose plans for the National Lottery, for example, include major cuts in the budgets for ‘good causes’.

These people are not community activists; they are anarchists.

They portray young people, the seedcorn of green volunteering, as hooded devils and they dismiss ten years of progress on the environment, community development and the volunteering agenda as ‘Breakdown Britain.’

These people are not to be trusted on the environment – or anything else.

But let’s end on a positive note: thank you, Natural England.

Your mission is to work for people, places and nature to conserve and enhance biodiversity, landscapes and wildlife in rural, urban, coastal and marine areas

and you can’t say fairer than that. I know things aren’t easy on the funding front but I know also that this is not the reason why you are taking a special interest in volunteering today.

If you are indeed to ‘work for people, places and nature’ then the people have to be voluntarily on board with that aim; that means they must be involved in a practical and tangible sense.

Too often government agencies are seen as distant and unaccountable; but if you develop volunteering in the way that you want to, you brand your work as done with communities and not to them and you bring young people and the third sector into the wider environmental network then you will have done the nation a major service.

And I am sure you will want therefore to join with me in saying “Hands up for volunteering!”