APPENDIX 9
Memorandum submitted by the National Centre
for Volunteering (NCVO) (CP 6)
SUMMARY
The Centre welcomes the Government's emphasis
on the need for a fundamental reform of the welfare contract between
state and citizen.
We believe that this contract should provide
practical recognition that volunteer work put into service of
the wider community creates reciprocal entitlement to draw on
public service support. In particular we suggest that a system
of citizenship credits could become an important mechanism for
recognising that volunteer work invested in helping others should
earn a right to reciprocal assistance to society at large.
Currently we are looking at the application
of citizenship credits in four main areas:
— Community Partnerships and Self-Help.
— Health and Social Care Provision.
The paper also explains how a system of citizenship
credits relates to the eight principles set out in the Government's
welfare reform green paper.
CITIZENSHIP CREDITS
FOR VOLUNTEER
WORK?
National Centre for Volunteering response to the
Social Security Select Committee enquiry into the future of the
contributory principle.
The National Centre for Volunteering welcomes
the Government's emphasis on the need for a fundamental reform
of the welfare "contract' between state and citizen. However,
we are concerned at the lack of any indication of how welfare
will be funded in a world where, as the RSA's Redefining Work
report argues, permanent full-time paid employment seems to be
becoming a thing of the past.
The great welfare problem is that, although
people's needs for health and welfare support services create
plenty of work needing to be done, the resources of conventional
labour markets can't pay for it. The gaps and unmet needs have
always been highlighted and fulfilled by volunteers—sometimes
providing distinctive support which statutory services and paid
work can't match (for instance, advocacy, befriending and neighbourly
help); and often filling gaps in the statutory services provided
by paid practitioners. Applying the reciprocity principle should
entail ensuring that voluntary work is recognised as creating
entitlement to social and welfare support.
PRACTICAL RECOGNITION
OF VOLUNTARY
WORK
The main focus of our submission is to propose
the need for the new welfare contract to provide practical recognition
that volunteer work put into service of the wider community creates
a reciprocal entitlement to draw on public service support. In
particular, we suggest that a system of citizenship credits
could become an important mechanism for recognising that volunteer
work invested in helping others should earn a right to reciprocal
assistance from society at large.
The National Centre for Volunteering suggests
the introduction of a system of citizenship credits for those
undertaking voluntary activities. A credit could tally the time
a volunteer donates and be redeemed in a number of different sectors
such as health, education, social care and pensions. Currently
we are looking at the application of Citizenship Credits in four
key areas:
Welfare Reform—The recently published
green paper on pensions reform contained measures which are intended
to increase financial security for low earners and carers who
are unable to take up paid employment. In order to boost the pension
entitlements of these groups the government will pay their contributions
based on a notional earnings figure of £9000 a year. We suggest
that this kind of support should be extended to volunteers.
Lifelong Learning—As part of its
"Learning Society" agenda, the Government intends to
establish Individual Learning Accounts. A three-way financial
commitment from individuals, employers and the Government will
facilitate saving towards the cost of learning. This could include
anything from evening classes to training courses and childcare
cover. The Centre proposes that volunteers receive credits towards
these accounts from the Government to help them invest for their
future educational needs.
Community Partnerships and Self-Help—In
the US "Time Dollars" schemes have been funded by state
governments as a way of banking volunteer help to others against
future care needs provided by statutory provided services. We
believe that this may provide a model by which the Government
could acknowledge the value of voluntary activity.
Health and Social Care Provision—It
may be possible for volunteers to be given credits towards their
future health and social care needs. Research into "time
dollars' schemes operating in the United States, which are very
similar to our suggested citizenship credits showed that old people
involved in such schemes stay healthier longer. As a result, the
Brooklyn Health Maintenance Organisation (HMO) Elderplan was able
to offer 25 per cent discounts to health insurance in return for
time dollars.[40]
Volunteering is the active citizenship creating
community capacity and social inclusion which the Government wishes
to promote as part of "The Giving Age". This wider understanding
of citizenship should, we argue, complement and add to the Government's
expressed intention of providing security for people putting unpaid
work into family care.
THE EIGHT
PRINCIPLES OF
WELFARE REFORMWe
note below how a system of citizenship credits relates to the
eight principles set out in the Government's welfare reform green
paper.
Principle 1: The new welfare state should
help and encourage people of working age to work where they are
capable of doing so.
It is important that the Government recognises
how much useful work is done unpaid, by volunteers—this
is the `active citizenship' that much Government policy aims to
encourage. At present, however, people contributing voluntary
work and without paid employment face disincentives which deter
many from getting involved in volunteer action. This discourages
self-help, deprives the community of the contribution they might
make, and escalates the spiral of social exclusion.
Volunteering is, by definition, done for reasons
other than financial reward. Often, the possibility of payment
for work crying out to be done is simply not available, and volunteers
step forward to create solutions or fill the gap, without waiting
for funding to materialise. However, volunteers do expect certain
returns for the work they put in—for instance, acquiring
skills and experience, achieving something worthwhile, and feeling
valued.
At present, as the 1997 National Survey of Volunteering
shows, people from well-off households are more likely to be involved
in volunteering (63 per cent of respondents with household incomes
above £25,000) than those from low income households (23
per cent of those with household incomes less than £4,000).
We believe this is largely because people who put a high value
on their time are more motivated to see it as being of potential
value and benefit to society. Conversely, people who feel their
time and lives are unvalued do not feel that their contribution
will count for anything.
Broadening the concept of the contributory principle
to recognise citizenship credits earned by volunteer work could,
we suggest, help redress the balance of disadvantage, and enable
many people currently feeling excluded from active citizenship
to see it as creating a more equal reciprocal relationship with
their fellow-citizens.
"Work for those who can: security for
those who cannot", says the Prime Minister in his introduction
to the green paper. Our concern is that those who work unpaid
to create wider social benefit should also be assured of basic
security in return for the time and energy they invest in creating
community capacity and social and environmental capital. It is
not only within families that much essential and valuable work
is done unpaid—as the Prime Minister and other ministers
have pointed out, active citizenship is essential for a healthy
society. That is the rationale underlying, for instance, its Millennium
Volunteers initiative to encourage more young people to get involved
in volunteering.
So it is important for recognition of unpaid
work and the value it creates to be a consistent element throughout
Government policy. This means ensuring that ministers do not concentrate
on paid work and paid jobs while devaluing unpaid work—then
turn around and exhort people to become `active citizens.' It
also means that partnerships and funders should recognise unpaid
work as creating a real `sweat equity' stake in the projects to
which it is contributed.
The Institute for Volunteering Research's 1997
National Survey of Volunteering indicated that 48 per cent
of the adult population are engaged in formal volunteering (ie,
with a formal organisation), giving an average of 4.05 hours a
week. Valuing the economic worth of the work they contribute unpaid
on the national average wage rate gives a total of £41 billion
of work put into the social economy each year. The Institute's
recent Audit of Public Sector Support for Volunteering
found an estimated £300 million a year of public funding
invested in supporting volunteering. This gives an investment
ration of 1:40, or £40 worth of work for every £1 of
public funding.
Similarly, the ONS Household Satellite Accounts
examining how people use their time suggest that the amount of
voluntary work done amounts to one-twelfth of paid work. Again,
a massive contribution of services.
Principle 2: The public and private sectors
should work in partnership to ensure that, wherever possible,
people are insured against foreseeable risks and make provision
for their retirement.
Citizenship credits, could act as a structure
which recognises the massive role played by the voluntary and
community sectors in providing practical community services which
improve quality of life and meet care needs. A new social welfare
system which does not recognise the clear and important welfare
role which has always been played by the voluntary and community
sector, and seek to involve it as an equal partner, is incomplete.
Our interest in citizenship is as a potential
mechanism for ensuring that work invested unpaid in creating community
and social capital can be counted towards provision against risks
and towards provision for retirement.
Principle 3: The new welfare state should
provide public services of high quality to the whole community,
as well as cash benefits.
That volunteers and voluntary organisations
are bearing more than their due share of the burden of meeting
urgent health and welfare needs which should be provided for by
statutory public services is a widespread concern. Recognition
by partners, funders and service commissioners of the value of
unpaid work by volunteers as a real donation to service resources
is one necessary element in giving a true picture of the current
welfare system. Too often, the government considers only the public
expenditure side of the picture.
We do not see the adoption of a system of citizenship
credits as a way of altering the balance between statutory services
and voluntary provision. Other mechanisms would be needed to reach
a fair balance. We do, however, see it as giving people who put
in substantial contributions of voluntary work the assurance that
their needs are recognised as just as deserving as those of people
who have made money.
Principle 4: Those who are disabled should
get the support they need to lead a fulfilling life with dignity.
People with disabilities also have many and
varied abilities which they can and do contribute to society.
Many who cannot secure full-time paid employment are already actively
involved in volunteering, not only with self-help and support
groups but across the range of voluntary and community activity.
The March 1998 Budget's very welcome abolition of the 16-hour
limit on volunteering for recipients of Incapacity Benefit recognised
the benefits, to themselves and to wider society, of their volunteering
work.
Being able to set the unpaid work they do against
the support they need through a citizenship credits system would
help create a more reciprocal, rather than dependent, relationship
in securing support.
Principle 5: The system should support families
and children, as well as tackling the scourge of child poverty.
We note merely that volunteers and the voluntary
sector are important providers of family support and children's
care and play services.
Principle 6: There should be specific action
to attack social exclusion and help those in poverty.
This seems to us the central rationale for the
citizenship credits approach we are suggesting. As our "Volunteering
a `key indicator' of social inclusion" policy briefing argues,
volunteering is one of the main ways that people work to tackle
social exclusion, both by helping others and by self-help initiatives
that address the needs of their own communities.
At the same time, as we note under Principle
1, many people who are locked into unemployment and disadvantage,
feel that putting in unpaid work amounts to lending themselves
to exploitation by secure do-gooders. The aim citizenship credits
would be to ensure that when people do work that creates wider
social benefit, their own needs are not being neglected but that
society is giving them reciprocal support. Reciprocity, as sociologists,
social economists and even socio-biologists from Malinowski and
Titmuss through Mauss, John Davis (Exchange, Open University,
1992) and Matt Ridley (The Origins of Virtue, 1997) have
recognised, is the basis of all social relationships.
Principle 7: The system should encourage
openness and honesty and the gateways to benefit should be clear
and enforceable.
Principle 8: The System of Delivering Modern
Welfare Should be Flexible, Efficient and Easy for People to Use.
It is vital that the informal, creative and
spontaneous character of volunteering should not become deadened
by bureaucratic straitjackets. We can see, at this stage, two
potential avenues for ensuring accountability in linking citizenship
credits for unpaid work to entitlements to public services.
1. People who want their volunteering work
to count towards citizenship credits could sign up to a quality
assurance system, which might be based on a mentoring/personal
advisor model, as is envisaged for the Millennium Volunteers scheme.
2. "Time-dollar" or Local Exchange
Trading Systems and similar brokering schemes might be able to
sign up to manage citizenship credit accounts for their members,
subject to national quality assurance.
These two avenues need not be exclusive, but
could work together.
The cost implications would clearly need examination.
However, we suggest that it need not impose significant extra
public expenditure, particularly when set against the value of
volunteer work it would help make visible. As noted above, most
people involved in volunteering are also in employment and would
be paying tax, National Insurance and into their own savings,
investments and private pensions. For those people who are unemployed,
disabled, or retired, the main difference may well be between
recognition on both sides that entitlement to public support has
been well earned, rather than the current attitude of grudging
and passive dependence towards those seen only as "recipients".
Volunteers, as ministers have pointed out, contribute great value
to society, and deserve reciprocal, practical recognition of their
work.
May 1999
40 Cahn, Edgar S. and Rowe, Jonathan: Time Dollars,
Rodale Press, Emmaus (1992). Back
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