14 March 2008
The government is to give a £6m boost to volunteer training as part of its response to recommendations from the Commission on the Future of Volunteering.
It also committed itself to setting out guidance to help avoid unnecessary criminal records checks being carried out which, the commission says, is one of the main bureaucratic barriers to volunteering.
The government also pledged to examine the possibility of including volunteering in the inspection of public services.
The pledges coincided with a report, Volunteering in the public services: health and social care, published on March 10 by Baroness Julia Neuberger, the commission's chair and the government's independent volunteering czar.
Her report, the first of three examining the role of volunteers in public services, stressed the importance of putting service users at the heart of voluntary work. Neuberger called for a pilot project, based on a US model, where people with health conditions who have largely recovered volunteer to help those with similar problems.
'We need to move away from seeing care users as passive beneficiaries of services, and think instead about how we can use their experiences, and the knowledge they have gained, to improve the future experience of others and ultimately the design of services,' Neuberger said.
Among her other recommendations are a new board to encourage more volunteers and ensure they are properly managed, and the creation of 'hubs' inside health and social care services to make volunteering more mainstream.
Neuberger also called for Criminal Records Bureau checks to be relaxed when the volunteer has no involvement with young people or vulnerable adults. She said that too often bodies demand checks on all potential helpers.
'This is clearly unnecessary. Managers need to show some common sense and stop, for example, requiring CRB checks for people working on hospital radio stations,' she said.
Alan Johnson, the health secretary, welcomed the report. 'It is a powerful insight to volunteering in health and social care, provides a welcome boost to the profile of volunteering and represents a significant contribution to the strategic reform agenda.'
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