Unshackling Good Neighbours

Today's All Party Parliamentary Group on Civil Society and Volunteering covered Lord Hodgson's report on Unshackling Good Neighbours. The full document can be found on the Cabinet Office website. Particularly intriguing is the list of 20 things that you can do without permission!

The report details over 600 examples under three headings:

What stops people volunteering?

What stops people giving money?

What stops charities growing?

Taking each of these in turn. The main issues around volunteering around risk of litigation, the perceived need for insurance, the CRB process and the myth that volunteering impacts on benefit claims. A couple of actions have been implemented - especially around standardising insurers approaches to insuring volunteers - and displaying posters in Job Centres to spell out that volunteering does not in fact impact on benefits.

There is a public attitude to risk which inhibits organisations. A prevailing presumption of failure ties services in knots with ever more detailed risk assessments and preventative plans. There is a need to differentiate between systemic failures and random events.

Giving is inhibited in part by local authorities attitudes to licencing eg of collections, non-standard regulations around lotteries and a need to find a way to encourage social investors who may seek a return on their money, which would then be reinvested.

Not all charities will want to grow - and where their focus is local then why press the matter. Regulatory overlap is a big inhibitor. A hospice might well be subject to 11 different regulators and servicing their needs increases back office costs. Regulators overlap eg OFSTED ask about health and safety and CRBs.

Withdrawal of cheques would have impacted on smaller charities - where two cheque signatories are required and financial controls would have been difficult. However, the decision to stop cheques has been reversed.

Commissioning approaches have also caused problems - and the costs of participating in tenders needs to be restricted and commensurate with the size of the tender. Equally monitoring arrangements need to be lighter where smaller figures are involved, and remain consistent throughout the term of the service delivery.

Paul Emery then presented a new innovation - My Community Starter - an online tool for groups providing end to end solutions to setting up community groups. The process can be completed in about an hour - at the end of which all the governance documents needed can be downloaded. There have been over 14000 unique visitors to the site to date. Zurich are behind this, though their insurance is not pushed. Even though they have a £75 insurance package providing £5m of cover for upto 50 volunteers.

A really interesting meeting - and I saw Andrew Marr in the corridor!

I am very interested in testing the My Community Starter approach for small organisations - please get in touch if this is something that you need, and we can test it together.