Local Government and Communities Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Official Report 618KB pdf

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“A Volunteer Charter: 10 Principles for assuring legitimacy and preventing exploitation of workers and volunteers”

Agenda item 4 is consideration of “A Volunteer Charter: 10 Principles for assuring legitimacy and preventing exploitation of workers and volunteers”. The charter was written by Volunteer Scotland and the Scottish Trades Union Congress and launched at the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations “the gathering” event in February 2019.

I welcome to the meeting George Thomson, who is the chief executive of Volunteer Scotland, and Dave Moxham, who is the deputy general secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress.

I will start with a question. What are the main differences between the new charter and the previous version? Why has the charter been updated and what is the “new context” that is mentioned in the charter?

I can speak a little bit to the context and George Thomson can talk to the detail.

From our point of view, it is generally accepted that the world of work is changing, to some extent. The headlines on that are about the new gig economy and the forging of new relationships between the worker and the client—for want of a better term. There is also a blurring between work and free time. Some of us are guilty of doing that by looking at our phones every other minute to write an email when we should be relaxing. There are other examples of that, such as when company time starts to reach into the free time of an individual, which is sometimes freely given, but sometimes is not.

Over more than a decade, we have developed our idea of employability. There is a view, and cases are being made, that there is an increased responsibility on the individual to make themselves work ready. We argue that that has gone a bit too far, and that there should be more responsibility on the employer to bring on, develop and support people into employment. There is definitely a changing context.

We first wrote the charter at a time of contracting public spending—arguably, we are not out of that situation yet. The trade union movement was particularly concerned about the organised replacement of paid labour by volunteers, particularly in public service. To be fair, that was taking place at a more accelerated rate down south than it was here but we definitely saw some examples of it. There were suggestions that volunteer labour might be used during industrial disputes to replace paid labour, which we argue would be strikebreaking; as a matter of democracy, we were concerned about that as well.

That was all in the context of the trade union movement embracing volunteering as a positive thing. We are an organisation that is populated by probably 20,000 volunteers—people in Scotland who have some sort of position that makes them a named volunteer. A large number of other people are involved, too.

We want to be sure that all the positives—frankly, the beauty of volunteering—can be preserved and not contaminated because of genuine concerns from workers that their work could disappear as a consequence of the wrong application of volunteering.

George Thomson will talk about the specifics, but our particular aim in updating the charter was to move on from those earlier concerns to look at some of the new forms of work and how we might protect volunteers and workers in that context.

A different emphasis in the new charter is the question about what legitimate volunteering is. Over the 10 years since the first charter, different voices have come into this discussion in a more contested space. Young volunteers have come to us and said, “We are challenging this—we do not see what we are doing as legitimate volunteering.” That inspired us to revisit and strengthen the charter, and to provide a process that people can work through, looking at different stakeholders. It is about having a consensus that volunteering opportunities are legitimate. That is a key difference.

The charter has been strengthened somewhat, but it is largely based on what we had 10 years ago. It mirrors the Trades Union Congress charter that operates in England and Wales; there is one in Northern Ireland, too.

Another difference in the new volunteer charter is that, as well as showing what we do not want—circumstances that we would like to avoid—there is a positive picture about what we want. That is quite significant from the point of view of helping to project a different picture about what volunteering is, based on the evidence that it is largely a social networking, participative, helping-out activity.

I think that we have all fallen into the trap of overidentifying volunteering with formal roles—the transactional type of volunteering, which we know and love. We are looking at it from the unsung hero perspective, rather than seeing it for what it largely is. That poses quite a major challenge for us all, especially with regard to having an inclusive growth agenda and the benefits of a more participative society.

The charter is an invitation to evolve and to look at not just what is legitimate but why so many people are not engaged. We need to look much more closely at those people and their circumstances and find out how we can bring about a more participative society in Scotland.

I am glad that you mentioned that latter point. Is there not a fear that such a charter might put people off volunteering, unless you can sell the positives of volunteering? As you said, quite rightly, to an extent it is about what we do not want volunteering to be.

There is strong evidence about the views of those who are least involved. At the moment, the sad statistic is that more than half of Scotland’s population say that they have never been engaged in any volunteering. When they are then asked what volunteering is, people tend to refer to the formal type of role, which they do not find attractive; that is especially true of those who are the least engaged and are in more difficult circumstances. The idea of doing unpaid work, taking on shifts and so on, is just not attractive to them.

From that point of view, volunteering gets a bad name rather than being seen as something that is much more social, engaged and friendly; as we know, volunteering brings about friendship building, solidarity and many other benefits. It is up to us to change the narrative and how we communicate with and listen to people so that we embrace their terms and meanings in their contexts rather than impose our notion of what volunteering can do for them.

I accept that. I suspect that many people volunteer without realising that that is what they are doing. Running a football team, for example, would be part of the volunteering process; I give that example as somebody who did that for many years.

Do you mind if I challenge that notion? We tend to use that idea as a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free card. We sometimes say, “We know that it is not all about formal volunteering, but when we look at what we are not capturing, we see that a lot more is happening.” The Scottish household survey does not ask anyone whether they are a volunteer; it asks them whether they are participating in a wide range of things. That is a significant piece of research, which gives us a great understanding about what is and is not happening. Largely, we have a disengaged population at all levels of activity.

Yes. I am sorry; I was talking not about the information that you have gathered, but about the individual not recognising the fact that they are involved in volunteering.

That is true. That is a different thing.

Who is the charter aimed at?

It is aimed at all potential parties in the volunteer transaction, for want of a better term. From George Thomson’s point of view, it is aimed at the organisations that Volunteer Scotland engages with, which provide volunteer opportunities.

I imagine that the charter would also be aimed at all organisations that seek to promote community empowerment, so that we can begin to understand volunteering in terms of the collective activities that people undertake voluntarily in order to change and improve their circumstances. As George Thomson said, there are areas of society that are currently less likely to engage in community activity and volunteering—working-class communities, for want of a better term.

From our point of view, it is about empowering unions to engage formally in discussions. Nothing is ever resolved by a bit of paper; it is resolved only by using a bit of paper to empower people to have positive discussions rather than defensive discussions about the issues that they might face.

Increasingly, we engage with young people who are not yet part of the formal trade union movement through campaigns such as better than zero. We are having a different discussion in Scotland than in the rest of the UK. We are discussing with young people the nature of work, their expectations of work and how that fits with their sense of themselves in wider society. The charter provides something to have a discussion around. As I say, “It ain’t a contract—there’s no such thing as a contract”, but it is a tool for all those players to use so that they have the right discussions about volunteering and how it interfaces with paid work.

The launch of the charter at the SCVO gathering was nearly a sell-out—about 80 people came and they represented all the different sectors. At the launch, the Scottish Countryside Rangers Association spoke about how the charter would be a highly relevant document for processing its dilemmas about how volunteer rangers fit in alongside professional rangers.

That stood out for me as a perfect example of how the charter could be applied. In that context, there is no black-and-white answer but there are real concerns about, for instance, 37-hour, seven-month posts being advertised as volunteer positions. The association is grappling with the decision makers to get the right balance between the volunteers and the professionals, and it has publicly stated that it would use the charter as a means of assisting it to do that.

The charter refers to

“volunteering based on the United Nations definition”.

It goes on to say:

“We envisage that this Charter will be most relevant in formal service”

—for example, where people are on the board of a charity or something like that. What would you define as “formal service”?

10:30  

It would be more like the ranger example that I just gave. Someone would have almost a contractual role as a volunteer ranger with training and responsibilities, set times and so on—that would be the formal service. It could cover all the elements that are typically involved when people work in befriending or in charity shops, or as drivers or sports coaches. In all those roles, the person would clearly know that they were a volunteer—they would describe themselves as a volunteer swimming coach, for example, and that would be a formal service activity.

We are trying to get across the point that we have become fixated on such roles, which make up a minority of volunteer activities, rather than looking at people who are helping out and at the less formal roles for which we need to engender much more support.

The charter says that it

“will be most relevant in formal service volunteering contexts”.

The reason for that is that the contentious issue of displacement relates mostly to unpaid-work type positions. The charter is most relevant in that area as it can guide people in deciding whether a role is legitimate or whether it could be criticised because it displaces somebody who was previously a worker in that setting.

In a sense, therefore, that statement is not targeted at volunteering as a whole—instead, it is about focusing on where problems have occurred and trying to resolve them.

In many respects, it is. However, as I said earlier, the charter is about what we want as much as what we do not want. It is about trying to project a focus on growth and inclusion. For example, can it help us to shift our way of thinking to be more expansive as well as protecting workers and volunteers from exploitation where that might be a risk?

The charter refers to

“formal service volunteering contexts ... such as recruitment, management, induction”.

Those are areas in which there have been legal challenges and conflicts. Can you say a bit more about the nature of those legal challenges, or give some examples?

Yes. My examples will not be very specific, but I hope that they are specific enough to enable the committee to elicit the necessary information.

Where a person enters into a voluntary relationship with somebody who acts as an employer and contracts—although it is not an employment contract—to do some work, questions can arise, and they have done, about whether that essentially evades minimum wage legislation. That person is being asked to work a number of hours without being paid, and they are voluntarily agreeing to do so. That agreement does not necessarily make an employer or an authority exempt from a range of employment legislation, the most likely being minimum wage legislation.

Where we have been able to identify that such an arrangement cuts across minimum wage legislation and that a breach may be taking place, we have tended to use that as a way to, shall we say, discourage what we consider to be a bad volunteering situation. In a sense, the charter would, if it was adhered to, make such a situation safer; fewer employers who contract with voluntary workers would be likely to fall foul of minimum wage provisions or other employment legislation.

Have there been any legal challenges that have led to a resolution in law?

There have been companies that have decided to stop doing what they are doing as a consequence of legal letters and approaches.

But no cases have actually come to court.

No. In addition to volunteering, practices such as trial shifts sit in a legislative grey area. Trial shifts are a good example. There is an understanding that, in an extreme example, a free trial shift would fall foul of legislation, but there is no definition of how long such a shift should be. Stewart McDonald, the member of the UK Parliament for Glasgow South, tried to introduce legislation in Westminster to clarify the situation.

Volunteering is similar, in the sense that there are not a lot of test cases out there. There is a general understanding of the risk that bad volunteering runs, but there are no test cases that I am aware of.

Your engagement with people who employ volunteers has led to their stopping doing things that they probably should not be doing. Do you envisage that the charter could develop into an accreditation scheme? Like the Living Wage Foundation living wage employer accreditation, you could have a Volunteer Scotland volunteer employer accreditation.

My daughter volunteered for Celtic Connections, where she looked after artists and did other stuff but was not paid for doing so. Many young people volunteer for music festivals and such events. They will be fed and watered—they might even get accommodation, but that is rare. They also get a free ticket for the rest of the weekend. Is that situation a bit of a grey area in compliance terms? Would an accreditation scheme help to deliver the charter?

We certainly use the online national volunteering database as a form of accreditation. We ask any organisation that wants to promote its opportunities to agree to the charter’s principles.

We see the charter as a guide and a process for looking at an employer’s motivation. If the motivation behind a role is clearly to do with fundraising and providing mutual support, that will not be an issue. However, if the motivation—it does not matter who it is, and it can change—is to avoid paying for somebody when providing a wage would be a better approach, that would raise questions about the role’s legitimacy. We cannot really foretell what the circumstances are. It becomes a matter of trust between the different parties when looking at that question.

In the past period, a lot of interest has come from outside the normal quarters. We have been looking at companies’ opportunities and asking them why they are not paying for a role when they paid for it the previous year. We have also been asking why a company would set up more than a hundred volunteer opportunities when those roles were previously paid for.

That would be a clear breach of principle 5 of the charter.

Yes.

Such a breach can be well evidenced.

Yes.

On the extent to which the charter is a standard or a mechanism, I will make a comparison with the fair work framework. It would be very clear if certain aspects of the framework were breached. We are looking for public service employers and other employers. Many have to adopt the fair work framework, because it outlines a number of ways in which we think that public authorities and other employers should act. That is not as enforceable as something that would sit under the black and white of procurement legislation, or anything that would be covered by employment law. However, it is legitimate to ask anybody who offers volunteer opportunities why they have not adopted the charter and whether they believe that they can legitimately say that they are offering volunteer opportunities if George Thomson’s organisation and my organisation, on the back of the charter, have not said that they are.

The charter is short of a rule-making mechanism, but it is useful in asking people increasingly to adopt it as a way of judging whether their opportunities are significant.

I have a positive example. Stirling Council has set a very ambitious target to achieve a 50 per cent participation rate, which is a significant move; it already has a rate of 36 per cent. The quintile 1 areas have a particularly low rate, which is down at 16 per cent. The council has made a big commitment and it is working hard strategically to look at ways of reaching the target. It has signed up for the charter on the basis of establishing trust between all the parties that its motivation is not to come in and take a displacement approach.

There can be distrust. Why would a council be trying to develop more volunteering? Is it just a means of saving money while the council is in financial difficulties? Signing up to the charter can also be used at the outset of the process to say, “We are buying into this; this is where we are coming from. We are building trust and we will work on a variety of ways in which volunteering can manifest itself. We will not fall into the trap of looking at volunteering as a displacement activity.”

Andy Wightman mentioned specific events such as music festivals, which are an interesting example for us.

The principle is that lot of people—largely, although not all of them, young people—enter into an arrangement, for want of a better term, whereby they might get transport and free access to a gig in return for two eight-hour shifts over a period of two days. From our point of view, the fact that the individual concerned has voluntarily consented to that arrangement does not obviate the examination of further issues. If we saw a large profit-making company with a questionable ability to describe itself as simply undertaking that function for the public good, because it is making a profit, we would still say that there are questions to be asked of that company and that there could still be circumstances under which it could fall into the grey area of the law that we talked about earlier. There needs to be discussion about that.

We think that the charter would come in useful in a different situation, in a context such as the Commonwealth games. George Thomson will be able to tell me how many people volunteered to work at the Commonwealth games.

It was 13,000.

I knew that it was in double figures of thousands, but I thought that I might be guilty of exaggerating.

Is the situation the same in all circumstances for a large, money-making, commercial festival that chooses to employ its bar workers through a voluntary mechanism? We would say that it is not necessarily the same. There are things in the charter about profit, the common good and motivation that will allow that question to be explored. We think that that is really important.

A good example that could be used to illustrate those points is the Ryder cup. It was a great volunteering experience, but some roles, such as shop assistants, were volunteers. Those shop assistants were selling merchandise, which would breach the eighth principle of the charter.

We are closely involved in supporting the Solheim cup, which is coming up in September, and it is good to be able to say that that practice has been stopped. There has been a shift to saying that that is not the right kind of activity for volunteers, but the Solheim cup will continue to have volunteer stewards and there will be a big youth engagement. The tournament will be more inclusive than it was before. A lot of good changes are being made, and that is a specific example of how the charter shows that it is not acceptable to have a volunteer worker selling T-shirts and merchandise for private profit in such a context. That principle has been accepted.

Alex Rowley wants to come in here.

Nobody would really disagree with the principles of the charter, but I want to raise a couple of points with you. You talked about displacement. If you look at what has been happening in many local authority services in recent years, you see that the biggest cuts have been in areas such as the local environment. Most parks departments in most local authorities will have taken massive cuts in the number of workers that they have, and you can see that across a range of areas. Is not the danger that, as the gaps appear in public services, they are increasingly being filled by volunteers, who are indirectly filling those jobs?

On the deal for the volunteers themselves, you talk about effective structures being in place to support, train and develop people. Should volunteers in large organisations have rights so that they understand clearly what they will get from the process, such as employability and skills?

10:45  

Shall I do the first bit and George Thomson can do the second bit?

On you go.

The risk that Alex Rowley referred to exists; he and I—and most of us—are long enough in the tooth in local government to know that local services sometimes disappear because of budget cuts. Alex Rowley and I have witnessed circumstances in which, to fill a gap, communities have got together and worked to replace a service.

A definitive view on whether a community that was left to its own resources—because of what we would argue were bad budgetary and fiscal decisions—should be able to do anything about that by creating a new facility and working together, would be well beyond the charter’s realms. We should remember that aspects of the charter were developed in 2009 and 2010, when ideas were being promulgated as policy about how sections of public service should no longer be funded because the responsibility should be passed to the community. That is a slightly different thing.

I make no comment on the decisions that councillors, councils and other public service providers must make when a service is cut, but supporting community resilience when that happens is different from basing strategic and budgetary decisions on the policy view that some services should not be funded. It is a bad idea to decide no longer to provide libraries because the community can provide them. However, if a service goes and the community decides, and is supported in some way, to make alternative arrangements, the idea that that should not happen would be beyond the charter’s practice and scope.

My view differs slightly from David Moxham’s. I will go back a few years. I remember having a conversation with the Carnegie UK Trust about why some library closures generated trust and resolution while others led to conflict, protest and difficulty. We did not really have an answer, but we guessed that the circumstances were affected very much by motivation, the information that was shared and the different negotiations that were at play. I would like to think that the charter is a guide for negotiations as much as anything, rather than a black and white matter.

It is legitimate for protests to continue because people do not want a library to close and it is legitimate for some people to want to play a role. In an Ayrshire library, a group of 20 volunteers provide all the information technology help for people who come in to use computers. Mutuality can be found; it is a matter of working through the reality of the circumstances that we are in, building trust between workers, volunteers and other players and finding the right resolution. We should not fall foul of the temptation of thinking that we could save money on wages by transferring a service; that is when people would conclude that the approach was not legitimate and would not accept it. That is a grey area.

My other question was about whether volunteers should have a right to, for example, an individual learning or training plan?

We recognise the need for good treatment, support and safety—we absolutely agree with that. However, the word “rights” is emotive. Given where I come from, I would avoid the temptation of talking about volunteers’ rights, because that would move us into the territory of seeing volunteering as an unpaid work paradigm, whereas the vast majority of us volunteer in a helping-out context, as I said. Rights do not quite work in that sense. Taking good care of volunteers, providing good management and following good practice with them are essential, but I would not move into rights, per se.

Good morning, gentlemen. I will pick up on the broad area of potential gaps in state provision. The other Saturday, I happened to visit an open day coffee morning of the Cowdenbeath food bank, which—impressively—has some 30 volunteers. Their activity is very much in the helping-out vein—where there is a failure in the safety net of the social security system of the state—that George Thomson spoke about. It is very much helping-out activity that goes on there and I pay great credit to all those who are involved.

On promulgation of the charter, what do you envisage in terms of information and awareness raising for volunteers, those who will have volunteers working alongside paid workers, and paid workers who are in employment? How do you see the charter being rolled out in a way that makes people aware of it? It is all very well for it to be there, but it would be a pity if people were not aware of it.

I used to sit on the Parliament cross-party group on volunteering, and it occurs to me that the charter could be a recruiting sergeant for volunteers—to use that phrase—because it is taking the debate on a bit, raising interest and setting parameters within which activities can be performed. Do witnesses have any thoughts on that?

We are delighted that, any day now, your own Cabinet Secretary for Communities and Local Government, Aileen Campbell, will launch a new volunteering outcomes framework. Its key phrase is “volunteering for all” and much of what we have been saying here is absolutely coterminous with that. The framework is part of a real effort towards a shift in mindset and activity and it will be a good shot in the arm. Within that, the charter is an enabling type of support.

The charter has generated a lot of connections with us. Just the other day, Volunteer Glasgow discussed it with its constituency and offered to work with us to generate more case studies. That will be an important part of sharing it. The principles are there, but how do we bring the charter to life? We can do that by giving examples of different settings and of how the principles have been fallen foul of in some cases and applied in others.

You are absolutely right. In a sense, encouragement of the committee is part of what you asked about, as you are giving us feedback on the charter’s value. We will absolutely have plans in place for putting it out there over the next year and fitting it in with a number of different things. The gathering 2019 was a major launch pad and got a good bit of coverage.

There is a point about structural influence and promoting the charter through the structures. It is worth pointing out that Volunteer Scotland is the portal for an awful lot of volunteering opportunities. The simple fact that Volunteer Scotland exists and that organisations already refer to it is a fairly big factor with regard to the charter’s use.

Obviously, we will promote the charter—in a positive way, as has been suggested—so that our branches ensure that those organisations with which we interface with employers are aware of it. Going back to the convener’s point about ensuring that people know that they are volunteering, all the people who were involved in the discussions to do with the interface between volunteering and work realise that they are volunteers and doing valuable work. We would like to promote that.

We also undertake an extensive range of school visits from a trade union point of view through which we talk about the nature of work and rights and responsibilities at work. We will incorporate the charter into those visits, so that young people hear from trade unionists about the positive value of volunteering. That is particularly important, because there is, in some cases, a growing expectation that young people will somehow present themselves as work ready before they have even had a job.

My daughter, of her own volition, decided to work in a charity shop on a Saturday morning. That was great. She wanted to do that partly because she supported the charity, but she was also acutely aware that doing so would not be unhelpful to her when she went for her first university interview and job interviews. It is really important that we get this right for young people as they consider the interface between their voluntary activities and work. There is stuff that we can do on that.

We would also like to promote the charter through local authorities and people who are writing up contracts, particularly contracts for events, so that when they are writing up procurement contracts that include community benefit—some of which will be really important—there is a clear understanding of what community benefit means for the volunteer and the wider community. Contracts for major events have to be written in such a way that they are consistent with the charter.

That is very interesting. What about businesses? It is important that the Federation of Small Businesses and other larger business organisations are aware of the paid worker aspect. Are there plans afoot for that engagement? Perhaps it has already taken place.

There are now. Thank you for mentioning that.

As long as I have been involved in this work, we have spoken about employer-supported volunteering. It is a bit of a sleeping giant. The problem is that the facts show that very few people source their volunteering activity with the help of their employers. The main reason why people take a break from or stop volunteering is the time pressures on them, so we have a lot more to do to get commercial employers to embrace the common good agenda and think about how they can facilitate more time for their workforce to take part in community things, which would allow us to move away from the “Challenge Anneka”-type activities, which are all too common. I am talking about team events such as painting classrooms.

Unfortunately, too much of the thinking is based on that approach rather than a more modern approach to engagement. I think that we have a big job to do to shift that thinking. The charter is as an aid for commercial companies when looking for volunteers, such as for festivals and other things. In Scotland as a whole, the participation numbers are very low.

Do some of the larger organisations not do good work? Some of them give their staff a day a month or whatever—I am not sure what it is—to volunteer. Would they not be able to help you sell the benefits of volunteering to other companies?

I am not the paragon in respect of ideas on how to deal with the situation. My company, Volunteer Scotland, makes available three days for staff, but there is not a great take-up, so I cannot really criticise others. However, I would say that that approach does not work.

As has been mentioned, there has to be a move from transactions to relationships. You could build relationships among staff by, for example, taking up the wonderful step count challenge and getting people out and about and doing things as teams, or getting people to walk to work. Such activity has a lot going for it, but people do not relate to the transactional side. If someone has a day available to take once a year, there is not a great take-up.

Okay. You mentioned “Challenge Anneka”—seriously?

I know—I am sorry. I am showing my age. [Laughter.]

I am just wondering what “Challenge Anneka” is. I have never heard of it.

No misinformation should be provided at this point.

That was just because he did not have a telly. [Laughter.]

That is true.

I am reflecting on your discussion with the convener and thinking about my experience. I used to work for The Scottish Sun. That company probably had the kind of volunteering set-up that George Thomson is not in favour of, because it would give its staff a volunteering day every couple of months and organise certain things. I took part in tree planting in Glasgow. That is a bit like fence painting. It is just a one-off activity; it is not a regular thing. You do not need to respond to that—I am just reminiscing.

Dave Moxham mentioned procurement. A number of organisations that get public contracts use volunteers. The SCVO advocates

“that organisations who want government support must offer proper contracts,”

not zero-hours contracts, and

“pay the living wage”.

Do you have thoughts on how the Government should tackle that?

11:00  

We have a big shopping list of standards that should be laid down for contracted companies in relation to their employed staff. I would very much like the charter to be adopted by companies and insisted on by procurers for companies that deliver volunteering as part of a wider contract. We certainly do not take the view that companies that use volunteers should not get procurement contracts—I am not sure whether that was the point of your question—or take the view that it should be insisted that they do. There is a mixed economy of provision.

I am sorry; I did not get the other part of your question.

I suppose that the SCVO is saying that when the Government or a council hands out contracts to organisations that have a large body of volunteers, the contracts should specify what is required.

We absolutely support that. To be fair, in a lot of the environments in which we observe a lot of volunteers, clear expectations, rights—although not the rights that Alex Rowley talked about—and responsibilities are laid down on safety, supervision and a range of things. That should be stipulated, but I do not pretend that that does not currently exist. There are many fairly positive examples of such relationships working quite well.

I return to the question of motivation, which can never really be answered in the abstract. We are clearly not saying that there is no role for volunteers; we want more volunteers to help and provide a service. However, if the motivation for such engagement was to have a competitive edge over another contractor because savings could be incurred, that would open up questions for the system about whether that was legitimate. If the motivation was about engagement, wellbeing and the community interest from what was happening, that could shift the judgment.

Graham Simpson asked about the role of companies and gave the example of the day off for tree planting.

The trees are still alive, apparently.

Are they?

We do not disagree in principle with a company saying, “Let’s all go off for a day and do this instead of work,” although that gets close to the question whether that is volunteering. Giving people a day off so that they can volunteer to do something that a company wants them to do does not quite do it for me.

In relation to flexibility, what is more important is companies recognising that people do things out there for the common good. That can be anything all the way through to sitting on a children’s panel. An activity probably ceases to be volunteering if a company gives someone three days off to do it, but there are important flexibilities. A person might not ask for additional hours to do their volunteering, but they might ask for flexible hours so that they can do something on a particular morning—as we know, a 9-to-5 pattern does not always assist with such things. Employers—particularly in the private sector—could look at how they support their employees’ volunteering activities by providing the flexibilities that recognise that such activities are a public good that should be promoted.

My former chair, Bill Howat, gave evidence to a parliamentary committee and shared with me what happened then. It strikes me that the commercial sector tends to look at volunteering as a charity thing. The sector looks for possibilities to go and do some work with charities, thinking—largely mistakenly—that there is a need for it. There is good evidence and research showing that it is a burden on most charities when a group says, “We want 10 to 12 people from our team to come and do some work with you.” The group thinks that that can somehow be done without cost to the charity.

We are starting to see a shift in that thinking. The companies now say, “This is not really that meaningful, so how can we take part in more meaningful activities?” I would like to think that the charter can help with that. It is about a shift to more community building and community relationships; it is about finding out about the community where the company is based rather than thinking, “Oh, there is a poor charity that requires a day’s activity from us and it will thank us from the high heavens because of what we’ve done.” I am exaggerating, but it is a bit like that.

I completely agree with you—it is the kind of thing that looks good in the company newsletter and makes the company feel good about itself but does not provide any long-term help.

Moving away from the third sector, I have a question for Dave Moxham. What is your view on the use of internships? MSPs occasionally offer internships.

Again, I am not even sure whether this is a grey area. We are against unpaid internships. We do not see them as being necessary, as there are plenty of ways to provide opportunities. The STUC is about to agree on a very well-structured internship, which is essentially paid by the funding organisation and provides genuine opportunities, which we think is a good thing.

The concern about unpaid internships is fairly well rehearsed. They are more available to people of certain financial means than they are to others, so we are against unpaid internships.

All I would add to that is that any volunteer activity which requires a lot of hours to be given starts to shift the activity away from what we would normally see as volunteering into a different domain. That is not to say that it is necessarily wrong, but it would need further attention.

I will just turn that around slightly. In the Scottish Parliament, a university might approach MSPs and say, “We’ve got X students and, as part of their course, we would like them to spend time in an MSP’s office. We are not asking you to pay them—it’s part of their course and, at the end of it, they will produce something. It’s short term.” Is there anything wrong with that? The MSP is not looking for anyone in particular; they are just helping someone out.

Let me be clear: we would differentiate between something that it is part of a structured educational opportunity—one presumes that due diligence would have been done on such an opportunity—and somebody simply saying, “Come and work for me for free for three months.” In general terms—not that we would say that every single example is fine—we would make a distinction between a structured educational opportunity and a general arrangement where someone says, “Come and work for me for free. It will be to your own advantage in the long term.”

I was going to say something similar to Graham Simpson; 100 per cent of my staff budget is committed, so if I was to take on an intern, it could only be on an unpaid basis. Otherwise, I would have to make room for them by taking something from the salaries of my existing staff.

Dave Moxham alluded to the big society earlier, which was an idea that sank without trace. It came, of course, from Dave “Where is he now?” Cameron, back in the day.

I think that everyone now accepts that volunteering should grow but not at the expense of paid employment. I would suggest that we want paid employment and volunteering to grow, and to minimise the overlap. From my perspective, it is about how we manage and minimise the overlap, and address the issues without conflict. The charter states that it can be used as

“A tool for conflict resolution and addressing media interest.”

You talked about countryside rangers. Do you have any other practical examples of how the charter might work?

You also talked about employers assisting volunteers. An obvious example would involve an employer allowing someone to take time off work to crew a lifeboat, which is a very important community task.

There are quite a few things there. What struck me about the big society was that it was a statement that said, “The state is withdrawing, and more will fall on you.” In that sense, it did not work.

As a counter to that, there is real willingness among our population—it is absolutely palpable—to engage and do things. I did some door knocking myself—I went to 400 different doors and spoke to 100 people in five different communities, well over half of whom were willing to be part of something.

Local government—the local state—and community planning partners have a far greater responsibility than they currently take on to generate the circumstances to promote community participation and the common good. Instead of being overly reliant on the charity sector as a way to bring things in, we have to do a lot more on that front.

I have made my soapbox point, and now I cannot remember the question. [Laughter.]

That is how rambling the question was. It went round a few houses.

There are two almost diametrically opposed ways of looking at the big society and what it should mean. Kenneth Gibson mentioned David Cameron, so I will, too. As George Thomson suggested, Cameron was talking about withdrawal of the state. We all know—I think that most of us would agree—that that leaves resilience only among those who are most organised and who are, to be frank, most well-off. Those communities where such resilience is possible are held up as shining examples, and we ask why people in other communities with lower levels of resource and resilience are unable to do the same. We get into what is almost a blame dynamic in which people are told to stand on their own two feet because the poshos round the corner—to be frank—are managing to cope.

There is another way of looking at it. An increased level of community resilience and working together should be engendered, and that should start in our working-class communities and in our towns and cities. I will give an example. I am a member of a 40-strong allotment community, and we get to do quite a lot of things through our committee. There are certain things for which we take responsibility—for example, we run food initiatives with the local community, and schools come to see us.

However, we operate within a framework that is supported and promoted by the local authority. Some of the work is done by the local authority, which makes grants and provides support, and some of it is done by others. Sometimes the work is done well and sometimes not so well; that is always the dynamic between communities and community organisations and local authorities.

Nonetheless, as a framework it works, because the local authority puts resources into areas where resources are needed. The authority promotes our work on additional things, which are correctly targeted. That is diametrically opposite to saying, “We are not going to fund allotments any more, but we know that the ones in the west end of Glasgow will manage to stay on their feet, while the ones in the east end and the north of Glasgow will probably not.”

You have touched on the really important issue of community capacity and resilience. In my constituency, there are huge differences. When a community organisation was set up some years ago, there were no retired professionals, if we want to put it that way, who had the time and experience to commit to making the project work. It is sometimes difficult to get significant projects off the ground without a certain level of community capacity. How do we extend and boost community capacity and resilience so that all communities can gain from volunteering?

There are so many different elements. Our take is that we have to create starting points for people to meet—perhaps for the first time, in a neighbourhood—to discuss their community context. We have been experimenting with a community bubble, which is a wonderful tent—I wish that the committee had the time to hear more about it—that we have taken to Tillicoultry and Brussels, of all places.

11:15  

More important, in our Stirling-based work, the community bubble will be our outreach effort when we go into communities to find legitimacy for the first point, which might be survey work, photography, community radio or other things that generate interest and get people talking about the community spirit of their place, including what builds it and what detracts from it. From that dialogue, we work out what people could connect with. If it is a group of guys, they might connect with the local men’s shed, so we can make that reference.

In Tillicoultry, three things emerged from our community bubble events—drugs conduct, festivity and housing management—and there are now three groups working on the different elements. We are nurturing that to see where it goes. Starting points are of the essence.

An issue in my constituency, and I am sure in many others, is lottery grants. In applications to the awards for all programme, there is a 70 per cent chance of getting a grant of up to £10,000. However, with major project grants, the success rate is only 6 or 7 per cent, because community groups are expected to put together a 100-page or 200-page business plan, and not everyone has the time, experience or ability to do that, which sometimes holds back major projects.

That is a fair point, but there is another way of looking at it. We are a rich nation and when people have an idea—say, for example, a group wants to set up a recovery cafe—they can find the resources to help them to achieve it. It is a question not so much of people finding the resources to do what they want to do but of getting people together in the first place to have the ideas or to work out for themselves what is important.

We have a crisis on our hands, which is shown by the statistics. In quintile 5—the better areas—of Perth and Kinross and Stirling, half the population is involved in volunteering, but that figure is 13 per cent in quintile 1 of Perth. In quintile 1 of Stirling, where we are working, it is 16 per cent, which is below the national average. It is not that people are any different—it is just that, across the playing field, the circumstances mean that we have been unable to listen humbly to where people are at and what makes sense to them, and work it out from there. It is a long journey, but when the opportunity is given, the results are encouraging.

I was a member of the predecessor committee 20 years ago and we did a major inquiry into volunteering. One of our recommendations was that public agencies should be funded for three years, yet that is still a problem. Will you comment on that?

I agree. There are so many reasons to go for a more stable long-term-assured funding mechanism for delivery of public services outwith the direct sector, and volunteering is only one of them. If you want organisations to provide services and have plans—including plans for how they engage with communities and develop strong and robust volunteer policies—security of funding is a major component. I do not pretend that that is just about volunteering; there is a list full of reasons why that should be the case.

Today, we have talked about the benefits of individuals giving of their time and talent to support the volunteering sector, and there is no doubt that the benefits are immense. I have volunteered all my adult life and I still volunteer each week. The benefits of putting back into the community have been shown. Individuals are given accolades—I had an accolade for my volunteering in the past, which was fantastic. It was not the reason why I volunteered, but being commended and congratulated came from doing the work.

The social enterprise sector is now a big sector, and it has become a much bigger part of our economy. Social enterprises are there because individuals want to be involved. However, although they plough their funds back into the social enterprise or the community, they are businesses to some extent. How can your organisations ensure that people who are part of a social enterprise are not being used to financially support the management or owners of the enterprise, given that the whole sector has become much more prevalent in our economy?

That is a good challenge. It is an area that we have not looked at enough yet, but it is something that I will certainly take away from today’s meeting. I will look at the case studies and seek out social enterprise settings, within which we will look at volunteer participation—the overall agenda is to increase such participation, and social enterprises are clearly a good opportunity to do so. Your point is that increased volunteer participation can come with difficulties. I have not focused on that issue, so I do not know enough about it to be able to give you a better answer, but I am very happy to look at the issue as a case study in the future.

I am not saying that this is a mistake that Mr Stewart is making, but I think that it is important that we make a clear distinction between what we call the voluntary sector—by which we mean the third and non-profit-making sector—and volunteering. They share a word, but there are very large third-sector organisations that do not have any volunteers at all—they are simply service providers. I have no particular argument with that, but sometimes we tend to think that there is more of a crossover between the non-profit-making motive and the provision of volunteer services—which, as we have discussed, cuts across all sectors—than there really is.

When we talk about social enterprise organisations, the first question to ask is whether the organisation making a profit and is it doing so because of the work that its volunteers are doing. That is in the charter. Clearly, it is possible for an organisation to make a profit, but the volunteering aspect is not the reason for the profit. Can we see a clear correlation between profit-making activity and the use of purported volunteers for that activity? My argument is that, at least by that test, most social enterprise organisations would pass. Therefore, as an organisation, they are not guilty. We are really talking about whether the role that the organisation is undertaking is, by design, replacing a role that previously would have been undertaken through more direct means. In some cases that might be the position, but in most cases it will not.

The second question is whether the organisation’s volunteer policy is a good one. That standard should be attached to all organisations, in all sectors. Therefore, it is not about looking at it as one big amorphous sector, which includes the social enterprise, voluntary and third sectors, and making a statement about the sector as a whole, but about breaking it down into profit, function and good process. If the organisation is not making a profit, and its function and process for volunteers are good, it will pass the test effectively.

I have a question about community bubbles. Could you send us some information about those, because they sound like a good idea and could possibly be used for volunteers in our constituencies?

Yes. We are taking them to Brussels next week.

I am happy to come with you.

Aye. Come over. The reason I mentioned the trip to Brussels is that we have made an installation for it. It has 5m by 5m panels, which contain wonderful images of the participants in our four-country volunteering project and their stories. We have asked Parliament if it would like the installation to be put up here, so I could come by with an invitation for you to try one of our bubble experiences. I can also send you more information about it—it is definitely taking off somewhat.

That sounds very useful, thank you. I thank our witnesses for their evidence today, which was helpful. The committee will consider the evidence when it considers its work programme in private at the end of the meeting. I will suspend the meeting briefly to allow the witnesses to leave.

11:24 Meeting suspended.  

11:27 On resuming—