Select Committee on Constitutional Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 175-179)

DR JUSTIN DAVIS-SMITH AND DEREK TWINE

10 JANUARY 2006

  Chairman: Dr Davis-Smith, Mr Twine, welcome. I am not sure whether I should have declared that I am the Vice President of the North Northumberland Scouts, but I suspect that everybody round the table has probably got an involvement in voluntary organisations in some way or other that we probably do not need to go into. Dr Davis-Smith, I think we have an address that you gave that raised some very interesting issues. Mr Twine, we all know that yours is one of a number of voluntary organisations working with young people. I think the Government must have had yours in mind when they drafted this phrase "desirable activity", I certainly hope so. We would like to ask you some questions to help us with our work.

  Q175  Jessica Morden: In the speech that he used as   evidence Dr Davis-Smith talked about how volunteers were worried about risk issues and how that sometimes they were being put off volunteering. Would you both like to expand on that and explain a little bit what the problems are?

  Dr Davis-Smith: A lot of what I have to say comes  from some research that we have recently commissioned when we were asking voluntary organisations, both voluntary agencies and public bodies using volunteers, their attitudes to risk and what they felt the impact of a compensation culture was having on the willingness of people to volunteer and we also asked volunteers and non-volunteers about whether risk was having an impact on their decision and the evidence was quite disturbing. I do not think we should overstate it, but I think it is of enough concern that we do need to start to get to grips with this issue now if we are not going to be losing volunteers in quite considerable numbers in the future because the individuals were saying to us that current volunteers were worried about risk and about one in 20 said that they had considered giving up their volunteering because of a fear of litigation. If we translate that into national figures, that is potentially a million people who may be giving up volunteering because of their fear that they may be litigated against. Organisations were saying to us that they were becoming increasingly concerned about risk issues and they were either closing down some of the more risky opportunities available for people and for us within Volunteering England that is of huge concern because we would argue that an element of well-managed risk is absolutely crucial to volunteering, particularly for young people. Professor Heinz Woolf has talked about "vitamin R" or "vitamin Risk" being of huge importance to young people and how volunteering can provide that injection of "vitamin R". When we see evidence from organisational surveys that suggests that organisations are beginning to become so concerned about the fear of litigation that they are closing down some of these risky activities for young people to develop themselves we are obviously concerned and we want to try at this stage, before it gets worse, to put in place some procedures to try and alleviate the situation.

  Q176  Jessica Morden: Is that what you found, Mr Twine?

  Derek Twine: Absolutely. In the past few weeks we have undertaken a much wider and up-to-date survey within our own organisation and we have identified the figures as being quite a concern to us in that 50% of our existing volunteers are concerned that fear of being sued for compensation is affecting the retention of themselves and their peers as volunteers. 70% of them are testifying that the fear of being sued is a deterrent to recruiting additional volunteers into the organisation because they see that as a very real pressure upon them. Taking into account the last point which you asked not just about the retention and recruitment of volunteers but the impact upon the activities, 94% of them in the past few weeks are identifying that fear of being sued for compensation is detrimentally impacting upon the nature and the range of activities which they are providing to young people.

  Q177  Jessica Morden: Would you say that the fear of litigation was the main problem in terms of risk management or are there other problems to do with the provision of insurance or requirements to conduct risk assessments or whatever?

  Derek Twine: Within the same survey it was quite clear that there is increasing confidence in their ability to respond to the training which we provide—it is obligatory training—in appropriate risk assessment and risk management, but that is common sense. Nonetheless, their concern is not about themselves doing something wrong, it is about parents, whether under pressure from an external third party or of their own volition in what they receive from the media as the projection, taking an accident or an incident as an opportunity to seek compensation for pecuniary gain and taking that almost as a right because that is the culture rather than taking it up with the individual leader. We have track records within our own organisation of claims being brought where it is said to the local Scout leader, for example, "It is not about you and what you did in your activity, but we know that the organisation has insurance and therefore this is scope for a gain from a claim." That is the climate in which these volunteers in their own communities are expressing concern, because whether it is settled out of court or settled as a result of a court case, it is not just the financial consequence upon the organisation that is of concern and of course I have concerns about that, it is the very real human impact upon that volunteer in his or her community, with their neighbours, with the parents of their children's friends and in many cases with their own employer as well. So there is personal standing and the fear of that being addressed which is causing and prompting this issue about should I stay volunteering or will I even volunteer in the first place.

  Dr Davis-Smith: Our survey also threw up concerns around insurance in relation to volunteering in that three-quarters of the organisations we spoke to said that their insurance premiums had gone up considerably over the past few years, sometimes hugely; four-fold in six years was the experience of one organisation. It suggested some quite deep-seated issues that need to be sorted out in relation to communication between the insurance industry and the volunteering sector in that there did not appear to be any link between the existence of risk management procedures by voluntary organisations and levels of premiums. In terms of encouraging organisations to go through these proper risk procedures, I think there ought to be communication with the insurance industry to see whether there could be a better link between proportionate risk management practice being in place and insurance premiums because at the moment that does not seem to be the case. I think one of the problems is the language of risk management because it is very confusing for a lot of small voluntary organisations. The voluntary sector is hugely diverse; it is made up of multi-million pound organisations employing several thousand people at one level but then very small community groups without any paid staff on another. In many ways that is where the real problem lies. It is not so much with some of the larger organisations who have got professional risk managers in place and where you can negotiate reasonable insurance rates with insurance companies, it is at the small community sector end of the voluntary sector, which is the lifeblood of volunteering in this country, because for them negotiating insurance rates is a real problem and adds to the risk averse nature that we have been describing.

  Q178  Jessica Morden: In the debate in the House of Lords on the Compensation Bill it was suggested that there could be a "pooled" approach to insurance and litigation. Do you think that would work?

  Dr Davis-Smith: It is happening to some extent. Going back to our survey, about one in 10 organisations said they were currently operating some sort of grouped or pooled approach, but a significant number of additional organisations said they would be interested in that if they had heard about it or knew more about it. Volunteering England has an important role to play here as well, but the insurance companies equally have a role to play in terms of helping particularly the smaller community organisations to explore alternative forms of insurance provision.

  Derek Twine: Each of the organisations even within similar sectors have their own differences, they have their own track records of past claim experience, they have their own approaches to the training of the volunteers, to the supervision of the volunteers, to the structures of risk management and to the nature and age ranges of the various people taking part. If I look at the voluntary sector, it is possible to explore that area, but we really would caution against that being seen as an immediate panacea. It may be appropriate for some organisations that have a very similar range of provision which they are offering and internal systems, but those variations really are more than just a few words, they really are affecting the liability of what the organisation is exposing itself to.

  Q179  Jessica Morden: Can you just explain a bit more about the practical problems of getting insurance? Is it a problem with premiums and getting cover for particular events?

  Dr Davis-Smith: I think at its root it is a lack of communication between the insurance industry and the voluntary and community sector in that the insurance industry does not understand all too often the nature of the sorts of activities that volunteers are engaged in. There was a high profile example with one of the big environmental agencies, BTCV, a couple of years ago when overnight the insurance company looked into exactly what they were engaged in and became concerned about it and they scrapped all the insurance to BTCV overnight. That situation has now been resolved but I think it highlights that issue of a lack of communication and a lack of understanding. In a sense perhaps it is not surprising given what I have said about the small nature of a lot of voluntary organisations because one of the ABI's own reports Making the Market Work highlighted that one of the main problems of   the insurance industry was getting a good understanding about risk assessment activities within small companies or small organisations and I think that is equally the case, if not more so, for voluntary organisations and the voluntary sector. At its most basic level it is about the insurance sector and the volunteering world having a greater dialogue and therefore I am very pleased with what we heard earlier about the ABI and their recent report directed to the voluntary sector and certainly we are engaging with them in the work that we are doing around the risk of volunteering. I agree with Derek about the limitations of some of the pooled approaches, but the sports field is a good example of   where pooled insurance is particularly well developed at the moment, they are engaged in similar types of activities and I think there are alternative mechanisms that we can look at.


 
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