Volunteering is not happening in the places where it is most needed, shadow minister for civil society Lisa Nandy said yesterday during Cabinet Office Questions in the House of Commons.

Nandy, the Labour MP for Wigan, asked whether the Big Society has been intended to mean that that “some would swim while others would sink”.

She said that “people are being thrown onto charity because the state has failed”, that there were now three times as many charities in affluent neighbourhoods as poor ones, and that “while volunteering is thriving, it is not in the places where it is needed most”.

Kerry McCarthy, MP for Bristol East, said that food banks are now “by far the most visible sign of the big society in action”, and asked whether the government considered “food banks feeding the starving because of the failures of the welfare system” to be a success of the Big Society.

However Nick Hurd, minister for civil society, said that government had made progress in transferring power to people, opening up public services, and encouraging social action.

He said that since 2010, when the Conservative government came to power, volunteering had risen following years of decline.