The government has rejected a suggestion that the NCS Trust should become a “broker and quality assurance body for full-time social action opportunities”.
In the government response to the full-time social action review, published today, it said that this would be a “significant departure from the current scope of the NCS Trust”.
The government added: “The NCS Trust was set up to deliver the National Citizen Service programme and to achieve positive outcomes for participants across its threefold mission of improved social mobility, social cohesion and civic engagement. Additional responsibility as a quality assurance body would detract from these core functions.”
But it said body already encourages its graduates to continue volunteering and makes them aware of other opportunities through an online portal that enables them to search for opportunities.
Claiming benefits
In response to recommendations that the Office for Civil Society should work more closely with other departments to encourage full-time social action, the government said there were already opportunities for these discussions.
The review had specifically recommended that the Department for Work and Pensions do more to support people who are volunteering to claim appropriate benefits.
But the government response said that there was no restriction on claiming jobseekers allowance or universal credit as long as people met their requirements to spend enough time searching for work and “the ability to reduce job seeking hours to accommodate volunteering is not a ‘right’, rather a ‘discretionary flexibility’ that may not be appropriate for every claimant.”
It said advisers determine on a case-by-case basis whether more flexibility is appropriate and “act to promote volunteering accordingly”.
New guidance
The review urged the government to support NCVO and others to produce more guidance. The government said that a working group of sector experts had been convened to discover what is needed.
The government also said that the Careers & Enterprise Company and Step Up to Serve are planning to work on a toolkit of interactive resources which will support careers leaders, enterprise coordinators and enterprise advisers to embed social action in their whole school careers plans.
Elsewhere, Steve Halliday, who led the review, is working with Business in the Community to work with business leaders.
Civil society strategy
The review had been conducted following lobbying for a new legal status for full-time volunteers, but it concluded that no new legal status was necessary and made a number of recommendations about raising awareness.
In the foreword to the report, Tracey Crouch, minister for civil society, said that the government’s wider vision will be set out when it publishes its civil society strategy.
A government spokeswoman said the strategy would be published “in due course”.
'Lack of ambition'
City Year Uk, one of the charities that has been lobbying for a new legal status, said it was disappointed with the government's response.
Leo Watson, external and public affairs lead, said: "The lack of any obvious ambition to assess how the government can grow youth full-time social action in order to tackle some of the country's biggest challenges is hugely disappointing. Using evidence found at home and abroad, we know that this type of volunteering can play an enormous role in tackling some of our society's biggest challenges such as educational inequality, homelessness, lack of social care support, loneliness and climate change."
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