The total economic impact of formal volunteering activity in England has been estimated at £24.7bn a year by government-commissioned research.
This represents an average economic impact of £2,012 per volunteer, according to the research undertaken by London Economics, Basis Social and NPC.
Reviewing activity in 2021-22, when approximately 12 million people formally volunteered at least once, researchers estimated the cost of replacing volunteers with paid staff would have been £16.4bn, equivalent to £1,339 per volunteer.
People who volunteer at least once a week accounted for 63% of the £16.4bn, which researchers said “highlights the importance of retaining the most frequent volunteers, and encouraging more frequent volunteering”.
Researchers estimated that the wellbeing benefits experienced by volunteers in England in 2021-22 were £8.26bn, equivalent to £673 per volunteer.
They found that volunteering at least once a year leads to a small increase in participants’ life satisfaction (0.033 on a one to-seven-point scale).
Volunteers were 10 percentage points more likely than non-volunteers to express a willingness to improve their neighbourhood, and 2.4 percentage points more likely to agree that they felt a sense of belonging to their local area.
Effect on paid work
The research, commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, combined desk research and stakeholder workshops with voluntary organisations, academics, local government officials and funders.
It discovered a positive effect on employment for volunteers aged 16 to 25, but a negative impact for people aged 46 to 65.
The research found volunteering increases the likelihood of participants securing paid employment two and three years after becoming a volunteer, but reported limited evidence of a positive impact after one year.
However, the research found that people who had volunteered received 1.2% lower pay on average than non-volunteers in the following year.
This effect was strongest for those who volunteered at least once a week, who received a 2.8% lower hourly pay in the next year compared with non-volunteers.
But the research added that this effect does not persist over time, except for the most frequent volunteers, and that external factors may also have an impact such as an increase in a partner’s wages.
Organisations encouraged by findings
Volunteering Matters chief executive Amanda Naylor welcomed the government’s efforts “to better recognise the social and economic value of volunteering”.
“But we must go further,” she said. “The true power of volunteering lies beyond statistics. It is found in the confidence it builds, the trust it restores and the cultural shift it creates towards fairness, compassion and belonging.
“To fully realise this potential, we need to keep banging the drum. And we need others to join us. That means bold, long-term investment in the infrastructure that makes volunteering possible. It means every organisation doing its part to make volunteering more accessible, inclusive and sustainable. It also means empowering young people early on to lead change, not just participate in it.
“We are especially encouraged to see growing recognition of the volunteer voice. Volunteers, especially those from underrepresented communities, must not only be heard. They must be trusted to shape the future of their communities and services.”
Reach Volunteering chief executive Janet Thorne said: “It is very encouraging to see a report which makes the benefits of volunteering more visible.
“It is inevitably a difficult area to quantify, let alone create a monetary value for, but it is really useful to have some measure that illustrates the contribution that volunteering makes.
“Volunteering creates multiple benefits at several levels, simultaneously, from the personal, to the organisational, community and wider society. It is great that this report aims to tackle more than one dimension.
Thorne suggested that the report underestimates the value of volunteering, particularly its measurement of wellbeing gains attributed to an increase in life satisfaction.
“The challenge with this is that it will fold many different things into one net score,” she said.
“In our recent survey into volunteer motivations, we asked people their thoughts on the state of the world and the responses were striking: people are used words like fear, selfishness, war and uncertainty. On the other hand they felt that volunteering gave them a strong sense of purpose and community, and a feeling that they were making a difference.
“How would all that show up in a single metric about life satisfaction? I suspect that the volunteering effect would be at least partially muted by feelings about the state of the world.”
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