The expansion of contracted voluntary sector delivery of public services has reduced volunteer involvement in charitable provision and limited the tasks that volunteers carry out to the routine and mundane, a new report claims.

The latest discussion paper from the National Coalition for Independent Action examines the impact of the contracting and commissioning regime on volunteering, and concludes that charities have been forced to develop much more formalised systems of volunteer management over the last two decades to meet the demands of tightly prescribed funding arrangements.

The report, authored by Colin Rochester, identifies various concerns about how volunteering has been affected.
First, he says that access to volunteering roles in service-delivery organisations has shrunk: “At the very least the ratio of paid employees to volunteers has changed markedly.

“But it is not just a matter of numbers; with some exceptions the trend is for volunteers to be relegated to low-level and routine tasks while the more demanding – and satisfying – roles are reserved for paid staff.”

Rochester points to evidence of volunteer recruitment being increasingly based on the use of tools similar to job descriptions, person specifications and the taking up of references in order to find volunteers equipped with particular skills or aptitudes so that they can carry out specific tasks.

“Volunteer managers no longer welcome all comers or see it as a key part of their role to find ways in which those who come forward can be helped to find ways in which they can contribute to the work of the organisation," he wrote. "Instead they try to fit volunteers into pre-determined functions.”

Many volunteers are put off by these formal bureaucratic processes, the report said, or find that the formal managerial environment cramps any aspirations they may have had to exercise autonomy or explore creative approaches to the organisation’s work.

This formalisation has reduced volunteers to no more than additional sources of labour, there to support paid staff undertaking the key operational activities. This can inhibit their enjoyment of volunteering as a sociable and collective experience, Rochester wrote, and can also create barriers to the involvement of socially excluded groups such as disabled people or ex-offenders.

All this serves to undermine the distinctive nature of voluntary organisations, the report said.

It concluded: “The dominant paradigm threatens the untamed and often maverick expression of free will that defines the authentic spirit of the volunteering impulse, and can serve to separate and distance the work of voluntary sector groups from those volunteers and voluntary groups that occupy the world of activism."