On 2 November Tom, as Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on the Community and Voluntary Sector, spoke to 100 delegates at a conference on 'Volunteering and the Inland Waterways' in London. He made several references to the wider issues on the future of volunteering and voluntary organisations.

Speech to the AINA conference, 2 November  2009

Members of the Waterways fraternity will know my High Peak constituency best as the home of Bugsworth Basin and the Peak Forest Canal.

I am not pretending for a moment that it was built by volunteers, back in the 18th century, but I do know that for the last 40 years it has been the home of many waterways volunteers on at least half of all the Sundays of each year.

I know from the IWPS website that the volunteers who have worked on Bugsworth Basin are extremely proud of the work they have done. Whilst their website is full of fascinating information about the history of Bugsworth and its place in the waterways system on England, it actually says very little about the act of volunteering over the last 40 years.

Nevertheless, volunteers here have this in common with others across the nation: it is the cause which unites them and not just the act of volunteering itself.

Organisations like those which operate on our waterways and care for our waterways could not do what they do if it were not for the work of volunteers. People driven by passion can always provide levels of commitment, reliability and expertise that are required to get a job done and done well.

Now I am no expert on the politics of the waterways but I do know that politics plays a part – for good or ill – in the life of many voluntary organisations. I note that the Inland Waterways Protection Society was born in 1958 as a result of a split in the Inland Waterways Association, which itself had only started 12 years previously.

When I was at Bugsworth Basin a few weeks ago, brandishing my wire brush to get the rust off the railings, I found what I expected to find: people who live and breathe waterways and who are willing to turn their hand to anything and even travel many miles to indulge their passion. On that particular day it might only have led to the repainting of a railing, but all around Bugsworth Basin there is so much evidence of the work of volunteers over the years in a very practical sense.

Volunteers do not just clean railings.

In the Bugsworth case they take part in fundraising, a sine qua non in seeking to fulfil their desire to establish a visitor centre on the site. No doubt it will be volunteers who will staff that visitor centre in future, just as they staff the (- I was going to say portakabins, but nothing so sophisticated! -) the metal containers from container ships that house the Bugsworth Basin Museum today.

No doubt it was volunteers who acquired and negotiated those containers too.

Looking at volunteering more broadly, there is really no aspect of life where volunteers are not willing to get engaged and get their hands dirty, in either a metaphorical or very often a literal sense too. Politicians all start off as political activists and political activists are essentially volunteers.

You can go into a modern hospital today and find, quite readily, 15 or 20 different roles being carried out by volunteers, either in the hospital itself or as “friends of” this facility or that.
But there have been big changes in volunteering over the last 10 years or so.

I believe that there should be no barriers to volunteers and the organisations of which they are a part achieving the aims which they set themselves.

I believe that partnerships between voluntary organisations and government in all its forms, and yes, even increasingly between voluntary organisations and the private sector, will play a key role in achieving the aims that the volunteers have collectively set themselves.

Sticking to their mission, or amending or evolving it where that is the right thing to do, is the responsibility of an organisation’s trustees, a much under-rated group of volunteers. No trustee board should change their organisation’s mission under duress, from the stress of fundraising or at the behest of a contracting partner.

The delivery of care for the elderly, or improving our environment, or delivering high quality advice on debt management at a time of recession are examples of roles which have traditionally been carried out by the state or public sector. But they are also examples of where there is a massive and growing, complementary and positive contribution from volunteers and voluntary organisations.

Ten years ago local authorities, for example, saw volunteers as a cheap way of getting service delivered and local authority staff saw volunteers as a threat to their jobs.

Today, in the best councils around the country, that distrust has gone. Volunteers provide services which complement, enhance and improve the services which local authorities provide. This is done through increasingly sophisticated contracts which, when they are done properly, pay a fair price for the job whilst improving the personalisation, quality and flexibility of the services provided.

Ever increasing levels of partnership are the way in which increasing numbers of services on which we depend will be delivered in the future.
But that is not to say that professionalisation of the voluntary sector is the only way forward – far from it.

Volunteers, like the mechanic who gets underneath a car to look up and find out what is wrong with it, are in the best position to look up from within our communities to see what is wrong and fix it themselves.

Community action is voluntary action. Whether it is sharing giving the children lifts to school, washing the team’s kit after a football match, litter picking or listening to children read in classrooms, volunteers offer so much. So do magistrates, prison visitors and councillors.
Three quarters of us will volunteer at least once during the course of the year.

It is important that these two strands, the spontaneous, local, community-orientated element of grass roots volunteering as well as the more professional side which involves partnerships, training and significant and organised commitment, both have a role because both are valuable.

I am sure that this is something that the Inland Waterways Association recognises and holds dear.

What I fear about the future of the voluntary sector is that we may return to the dark ages of “stand on your own two feet,” where small and relatively disorganised voluntary sector organisations are expected to take over completely some local functions which have hitherto been the preserve of the public sector in one form or another.

A philosophy which says ‘big organisations are always bad’, whether in the public or the third sector, simply misses the point. There is not only a place but a need for large organisations, as well as small ones, as well as individuals acting alone.

But there has to be a supportive and organised framework for public service delivery, however wide that word ‘public’ is defined. Only the public sector can provide that framework yet the qualities and flexibility that are required for the delivery of modern public services are often best provided by partners in the third sector.

I am aware that there is a big issue at the moment as to whether British Waterways should continue to be a quango or launch itself as a third sector organisation. It has become increasingly an arms length organisation, semidetached from government not just organisationally but also financially, and that is no bad thing.

I fear that if BW were to become completely detached, or obliged to become completely detached by an incoming government to whom the principles of partnership are less important than they are to the current government, then that organisation may find itself caught between two stools; the appropriate metaphor is surely ‘sink or swim’.

I do not want that to happen. I do believe the government must and should retain an interest in the condition, use and purpose of our waterways network, but that those who know the waterways best and care for them most do need to be integrally involved in that management.

That can be done by a quango and it can be done by a voluntary sector organisation. But if there is to be a move from one status to the other it has to be a natural, voluntary and organic one, it has to be seen against the background of funding being fairly available both for specific waterway management issues but also in what we might call the free market of lottery and other types of grant aid.

Any new or revamped organisation has to work in conjunction with those other volunteers and voluntary organisations who already populate our waterways, not only at weekends but also within their hearts every moment of the day!
What I do not want to do in this brief discussion is to tell you, or British Waterways, or other voluntary sector organisations sharing your field of play what you ought to be doing.

What I can say is that the voluntary sector is a hugely varied and increasingly sophisticated beast, where there is a place for tradition as well as innovation, for outside support as well as dedicated fundraising and for enjoyment as well as responsibility.

The amount of money that is available to the third sector from the government has never been higher than it is today. Although much of it has strings attached, those strings must not be allowed to divert organisations from their core missions – unless those organisations freely decide that their own core missions need to be brought into line with Britain of this century rather than the 20th or 19th.

Or even the 18th, which was the heyday of our waterways and the time when my favourite place on the whole of the canal network, the best canal Basin I have ever reopened, was built.
Volunteering is an even older tradition than the waterways.

Whilst both face challenges, both are well worth preserving – not in aspic, but as vibrant, positive entities offering something practical to society and something tangible to assist in the defence against the materialism, conformity and greyness which threatens to be the hallmark of the 21st century.

But that's another story.