It was the “biggest failure” of the year for the sector that none of the political parties had anything to say about voluntary action during the general election, NCVO’s chair Peter Kellner said yesterday.
Speaking at the Christmas reception of NCVO and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Charities and Volunteering yesterday, Kellner said that he is “determined that it will be the last election that none of the parties have anything substantial to say about voluntary action”.
But Kellner said that “in the worst possible circumstances” a few days after the general election came “one of the great demonstrations of why this sector matters so much”, referring to the fire at Grenfell Tower. He said that, on this, “civil society absolutely stepped up to the mark”.
He said: “I think we can be really proud of what our sector achieved and I hope that from those lessons, both those specifically from those terrible days and more generally, we can persuade all the parties that in the years ahead, whatever their ambitions are for the health service, for education, for social care, for libraries, for fighting crime, for whatever, that if they build in the work of civil society and the work of our sector and work of volunteers, they are much more likely to achieve their wider goals, to help create a better society.”
‘The government getting a lot wrong’
Also speaking at the reception held in the Houses of Parliament was Steve Reed, shadow minister for civil society.
He said that “the government I fear is getting a lot of this wrong,” adding that they “have sidelined and marginalised the sector for too long”.
Speaking of the 58 reports that had supposedly been written by Brexit secretary David Davies into the impact of Brexit on key sectors, of which the charity sector was not included, but in actual fact the reports never existed, Reed said that this meant “the situation was even worse”.
He said: “They hadn’t even pretended to have done a review on the impact of Brexit in the third sector. And that is wrong when the sector employs two million people, contributing £12bn to the economy. It cannot be an afterthought, it has got to be at the centre, and it has got to be treated with respect.”
Reed said that “the government needs the confidence to listen to criticism otherwise the government won’t be successful”, adding: “We have to listen and we have to adapt and we have to learn.”
‘Sector deserves more than half a minister’
He also said that the sector “has a bigger role to play than the government realises”.
He said: “Over the last few years we have gone from the having the office for the third sector represented in cabinet, to now having only half of a minister in DCMS. The minister [Tracey Crouch] is a very capable, this isn’t personally about her. But this sector deserves more than half a minister, however capable.
“I want to see the sector put right back where it belongs, and that is not on the side-lines. It is at the heart of government, it is at the heart of an agenda about national renewal.”
Reed said he had not yet had time to "really think through what the future policy offering for civil society needs to look like", but that they are starting to do that now.
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