Social Inclusion, Housing and Voluntary Sector Committee, 05 Apr 2000

Meeting date: Wednesday, April 5, 2000

Official Report 224KB pdf

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Voluntary Sector Report

The next item on our agenda is the voluntary sector report. We will consider a report from Karen Whitefield, which Karen has supplied to the committee.

I suggest that we be allowed a short time to read the report, as we received it only this morning.

Members may take a couple of minutes to study the report. The meeting will be adjourned for two minutes.

Meeting adjourned.

On resuming—

I reopen the meeting and ask Karen Whitefield to introduce her paper on the voluntary sector.

The paper gives an outline of what has been happening in the voluntary sector over the past few months, along with the things that I have been doing. I am sure that the committee appreciates that because of the death of my father I have been away from my parliamentary duties for some time to deal with family commitments. For that reason, I have not been as active in the past few months as I had hoped to be.

The one thing that is not included in the paper and that I would like to flag up is the invitation that I received to speak at the Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation conference in February. The purpose of my being there was to speak about the work of the committee and, in particular, how we would interface with the voluntary sector. I took up the invitation and went to the conference, which was very well attended—more than 300 people were present. Fiona Hyslop attended as a delegate from former coal-mining communities. Representatives spoke about how the coalfield regeneration money might be of assistance to miners' welfare and to communities. The conference was useful, as it enabled me to make some good contacts, which I will follow up in the next few months.

I have highlighted the issues that have been brought to my attention in recent months by organisations and individuals who have contacted me. The main thrust of my work was an article that I wrote for "Third Force News", the weekly newspaper of the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations. The response to that has been varied. I have received some responses and responses are still coming in—I received one this morning. I will give the committee a full run-down after the recess of what they say about priorities for the voluntary sector and for the committee.

SCVO has written to me separately to flag up issues about the lottery and the need for it to be more focused on Scotland. Much of that area is reserved, but the committee may have to consider it and then make representations on the matter to our Westminster colleagues.

I hope to visit some councils for voluntary service over the recess. SCVO has been very helpful in giving me a list of contacts around Scotland. Some of the work that I will do over the recess will concentrate on that. That will give me a better feel for what is going on in volunteer bureaux across the country and how they think that the consultation is going. I will feed that back to the committee.

Obviously, many voluntary organisations are interested in Scottish Criminal Record Office checks. We will do some work on that this morning. I was keen that the voluntary sector should get a little bit of the committee's time before the recess. I think that the organisations that are present this morning will welcome the fact that we can have some input into the Scottish Executive's review of SCRO checks.

Finally, we will have to consider charity law reform. Last week, the Executive announced that it had established a review group, whose members the Executive listed for public information. They include representatives of various voluntary bodies, lawyers and accounting professionals. The committee will have to examine that issue and have some input into the review.

Are there any general comments before we go into the details of how the committee will pursue issues?

I would like more information about how Karen Whitefield thinks that charity law will develop and what the key political issues are. We could have a useful, brief discussion about that.

We are conscious, particularly in relation to the drugs and anti-poverty inquiries, of the issue of how voluntary organisations should have access to the committee. An exciting possibility, which we should certainly consider, is using the internet to enable a larger number of people to access us. We should set ourselves the task of producing a paper on how we expand involvement in our inquiries.

Karen touched on the lottery. The paper does not outline the concern that many arms of the lottery and new opportunities fund do not have a separate Scottish allocation. There has been a great improvement when there have been separate allocation bodies. The new opportunities fund takes such a huge part of the lottery's distribution that there is a strong case for our examining the operation of the fund—perhaps a member could be given that task—and presenting a view.

Those are the three most politically sensitive issues. We should give ownership of them to individual members rather than letting them lie for a long time.

The paper on the drugs inquiry recommends that we use the internet as a way of getting evidence. Embedding the use of the internet in all our inquiries is a useful strategy and I hope that all reporters and anybody who heads up preliminary work for an inquiry will bear that in mind. I hope that work has already started on that and that we will receive progress reports. We need to have a brief discussion now about the new opportunities fund and charity law.

I agree that someone should present a paper to the committee on the lottery, the new opportunities fund and so on. One of the problems of voluntary sector funding in general is that it has always been time limited. Good projects are given pump-priming money to start up, but they then run out of funds and disappear. The national lottery new opportunities fund repeats that mistake over and over again. The committee must address that fundamental problem.

Yesterday, the Minister for Health and Community Care emphasised in a speech the importance of diet and establishing breakfast clubs and so on. Such clubs existed in Dundee 10 years ago, but no longer exist because the funding ran out. We are always reinventing projects that existed in the past but did not have funding to continue. The voluntary sector must have stable funding, but the way in which it is funded at the moment is not stable. The committee must address that point.

Would it be too much of a task for the committee to begin with a review of funding strategies for the voluntary sector?

I echo Fiona Hyslop's point about the new opportunities fund. I have experience of the passage of the National Lottery Bill in another legislature, when the six good causes, as they were termed, and the new opportunities fund were being established. An attempt was made to write into the legislation a Scottish arm of the new opportunities fund, in the same way as there is a National Lottery Charities Board for Scotland. However, that attempt was unsuccessful, although there is a person who is meant to have responsibility for Scotland. I would like to examine the extent to which that approach has been effective in the first year or so of the operation of the new opportunities fund. We need to consider the fund's focus on Scotland and I would like to build that into any review.

John McAllion's comments were self-evidently important: we must consider continuity of funding in more detail. However, the overview that you suggested, convener, would be helpful.

Karen mentions CVS under point 4 of her presentation. Does that stand for Community Service Volunteers?

Yes.

Does it not stand for councils for voluntary service?

Yes.

CSV Scotland, which stands for Community Service Volunteers Scotland, is an important organisation. I would like to examine the extent to which volunteering as an activity might be enhanced. There are gaps in volunteering because people are not aware of the activity or are not able to take it up for a variety of reasons.

I should declare an interest—I am on the board of management of the Volunteer Centre in Glasgow and, for that reason, I would like to be involved in an examination of volunteering in Scotland. I think that more people could become involved in volunteering if only they knew about the opportunities available to them.

I echo what members have said on funding. I think that we should broaden our review and take it beyond the new opportunities fund. Many voluntary organisations—particularly smaller ones—play a vital role in society. They spend an enormous amount of time and, more important, money on making applications for funding. The knock-on effect of failure is that they must curtail their programmes for the next few months or year, because they have used funding that they have raised in order to make applications for other funding.

I have spoken to a great number of organisations, including smaller organisations and umbrella organisations. They share the belief that it would be a great advance to create a centralised grant applications support system for the smaller organisations, which could be related to the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, CVS Scotland or Volunteer Development Scotland. That would make such applications a cost-negative exercise for smaller organisations and would be a way forward.

To examine only the new opportunities fund has certain implications. Problems include the complexity of making applications to that fund and the limited time scale within which it demands applications. People have told me that the process of bidding for funds forces them to put all their eggs in one basket. The committee should also examine that.

I have been contacting voluntary organisations across the country since the members' business debate on SCRO checks. They seem to agree with the general theme of that debate, which Angus MacKay noted, although I do not know how far advanced he is in taking the matter forward. I have spoken to him privately but we are not getting anywhere. We must extend the parameters of SCRO checks to cover those working with vulnerable people as well as those who work with young people. We know of incidents where elderly people have been abused, but the current plans for the use of SCRO checks will exclude that area.

The committee has to consider seriously not just the cost implications of SCRO checks but whether, by recommending that SCRO checks are used in organisations that deal specifically with youth, we would be leaving a large number of elderly people and vulnerable adults with learning difficulties open to dangers. We should consider the situation holistically.

Three-year funding dominates the issue. The problem is that, despite statements of good intention by the Scottish Executive, there are funding problems at local government level. There is no doubt that there is broad agreement about the nature of the problem; the question is how we resolve that problem. It may be that changes in the funding arrangements would be of assistance. Some of the proposals are innovative. Some of them work and some of them do not. Obviously, there must be a much greater ability to retain the better projects, not least in the drugs field. It takes a long time to build some projects up and, if they are destroyed, they must be built up from scratch, which is a huge waste of resources. We must try to secure repeat lottery funding and so on for such projects and hit on some way of assessing projects that will enable us to sort out the wheat from the chaff. It would be desirable if that process was owned more by the voluntary sector itself.

I agree. However, we must ensure that accountability is not undermined.

We should not restrict our examination of the funding issues to the lottery. Many other funding issues are relevant to the voluntary organisations, such as how they are affected by VAT and so on. Many of those issues are reserved matters but, as Karen said, we should make representation to Westminster on them.

Many organisations, particularly smaller, locally based ones, have difficulty weaving their way through the huge number of funding sources, some of which are large and some of which are small. The lottery is a good example of that problem. Numerous agencies disburse lottery funds. A rationalisation of the public sector organisations would be useful, as would a one-stop shop that local organisations could go to when they were trying to put together a financial package. I am working with a local football team that is trying to develop its facilities. A one-stop shop would help us. One-stop shops are being set up to assist enterprise and they should also be set up to help voluntary organisations.

John McAllion's point was important. The lottery will not provide revenue; it will provide only capital for the set-up costs. No one wants to be a funder; everyone is scared to dip their toes in the water. We should be innovative and entrepreneurial in our approach to funding new types of projects. The terms and conditions on which money is made available should be reconsidered. Organisations with genuine cases can be put off in their attempts to secure funding because they have to go round the houses. Ironically, the ones that suffer the most are the ones that can least afford it. The ones that are well resourced employ professionals to secure funding. We end up with a situation that is the opposite of what we are trying to achieve.

I think that we are all agreed. There is consensus that we need to broaden our scope to include funding, but the lottery would be a key part of that investigation. The key question is how we should take things forward. Karen is pursuing general voluntary sector work. What is your view, Karen?

I am happy to come back to the committee after the recess with a paper suggesting some of the avenues that we might want to explore. That would give everybody a chance to have their say about what else needed to be included, and we could discuss that as a committee.

That would be useful.

Through my contact with the voluntary sector, I know that funding affects organisations daily and is high on their list of priorities. However, we must be careful about building up the expectations of voluntary sector organisations and then not delivering. If we are to do something, we must make a commitment to include it on our timetable. We must not just say that we will do it and not deliver on that promise.

That is right. We need to keep an eye on the situation. Much of the analysis that we will need to help us grasp the issues can be gathered from written submissions or informal discussions. We will be having witnesses in for the drugs inquiry, so there is no reason why we cannot set aside half an hour at the end of that session to discuss other issues. We must learn to work in that way, with a block of witnesses on one theme and another part of the meeting to keep us up to date on the other issues that we are considering. More information needs to be developed on the funding strategy before we produce a report or move to a more detailed investigation.

Perhaps Karen could consider whether we need a special adviser on funding. It is a wide field and there are experts who know all about it.

Could you consider that in your paper, Karen?

Yes.

I suggest that we ask the Scottish Parliament information centre for a mapping exercise on the voluntary sector. [Laughter.]

I am laughing because I keep having meetings with SPICe and the staff there keep asking what we mean by a mapping exercise.

Okay. I shall leave that to you to define for them. Large parts of the voluntary sector are becoming tied up in the delivery of policy, but other parts of the sector are not in the business of delivering policy, particularly in the arts and sport. Those are vital organisations, but they are finding themselves more and more marginalised as the cake gets smaller or is apportioned in large blocks to organisations that are tied to the delivery of social inclusion projects.

Although we all agree that it is vital that the voluntary sector is involved in such policy areas as the regeneration and maintenance of communities, it is not just the lunch clubs and food co-operatives that form an essential part of that fabric. The local choir and the amateur dramatic society are also important in providing good community resources, and such groups are finding themselves marginalised. We must champion those voluntary organisations that do not have access to the new funding that has been made available in the past few years, which is tied directly to the structuring of social policy. We must defend them.

Absolutely. We have some information from SCVO, which gives a map of the voluntary sector in Scotland. There is an interface with what I call the community sector and there is a huge overlap between the community sector and the voluntary sector at the smaller scale. The voluntary sector is vital to community infrastructure. We will not be doing our job if we deliver only half the policies that we are supposed to deliver.

SCVO is the largest of the umbrella organisations, but we must remember that there is diversity within those organisations, particularly on the issue of the compact. We must not always simply take the line that SCVO puts. I am not saying that it is necessarily the wrong line, but we must always remember that it operates more or less on a majority voting system. If most of the bodies in that organisation take a specific line, that becomes SCVO's line. We must remember that a large number of voluntary sector organisations may not go along with that view. The umbrella organisations present a view, but there will also be disparate views among member organisations.

Some organisations are involved in the delivery of public policy on behalf of public agencies. We must consider displacement. I get the feeling that some lottery funds are now being used for what general mainstream taxation revenue should be used for. The whole point of the lottery was that it would generate additionality, to use the in term, not that it should replace funding by the state or by local government. That is an issue that we must address up front.

I refer that to Karen Whitefield. We also need to talk about charity law. What is the situation, Karen?

In the past week, the Executive has announced a review of charity law and has said who will sit on the review panel.

Is a timetable attached to that?

I know that an announcement was made last week, but there was also an announcement last August. We must get on the Executive's case about this. Angus MacKay and Wendy Alexander have both announced that they will consider it. Back in September, I lodged questions about who would be in the review group, but I have not yet had a reply.

I know that it was made public last week because I received a press release about it.

I know, but it was announced a long time ago. I want to know what happened in the interim.

Do you suggest that we write for clarification about time scales and subject matter?

Yes.

It would be useful to have a copy of the press release, as I certainly did not get one.

I do not think that I have seen the press release, but I will double-check, as that could be due to my failure with new technology. We will ensure that everybody receives a copy. We will write to the minister for clarification of the role, the remit and time scales, and on whether the committee will be informed of the work.

I assume that we will want to express a view at some point, so we will need to organise the taking of evidence. Karen, could you examine that as well? It will depend on the timetable, but could you begin to schedule a recommended programme of work on charity law?

It might be helpful if Karen outlined some of the contentious issues in relation to charity law. Rather than addressing that in a mechanistic way according to what the Government plans to do, we should find out what the issues are.

I am happy to provide an outline of those issues.

So you will put that into your paper?

I think that there will have to be two separate papers. Although the issues overlap at times, charity law should be kept separate from funding.

I think that you are right that we need to keep the matter on the agenda. We will ensure that voluntary sector issues are embedded in our other work anyway.

Is there anything else in the paper that we should highlight before we move on? We will consider Scottish Criminal Record Office checks, and I am sure that Lloyd Quinan will keep raising general points. Karen Whitefield will liaise with Martin Verity about the agenda for our meetings.