Jonathan Last asks whether the National Trust's innovative use of this year's leap day could set a trend.  

The National Trust is giving its staff the opportunity to take 29 February 2012 off work to volunteer for a local cause, a scheme it is calling ‘Local Leap’.
 
Examples of activities the 5,000-odd national participants will be taking part in include helping out in a children’s hospice in Bristol, clearing out the Wandle river, lending a hand at a children’s centre and cleaning up some catacombs.

Staff can choose to spend their quasi-free day doing whatever they like: some are giving an extra day to a cause they already support; others are trying something totally new. The day can be taken in lieu if doing their bit on that particular date is inconvenient, and the Trust will be manned for the day by a minimal skeleton crew.

What an excellent idea this is.

The quirk of our planet taking 365.25 days to complete a lap of the sun, rather than a round 365, makes this quad-annual extra day necessary. Falling as it does this time on a Wednesday, the cosmos are effectively gifting employers an extra day to wring out of their workforce for free – and no one seems to mind.

The 29th of February comes infrequently enough for it to be marginalised in the public consciousness. Every now and again campaigns to make St. George’s Day a national holiday circulate inboxes, with the idea always ignored by the powers that be (although, in fairness, us Brits have been pretty lucky this year and the last in getting an extra bank holiday – first for the royal wedding and soon for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee).

But people don’t tend to speculate about what should be done on those years when February stretches itself a little further. Well, maybe we should. I don’t for a moment expect it would ever be turned into a national holiday (what would we be celebrating, exactly? The universe’s refusal to fit neatly into our Gregorian calendar?), but why not follow the National Trust’s lead and make it National Volunteering Day?

The regular clichés revolving around the phrase ‘in the current climate’ would no doubt be bandied about by opponents, as if cutting the country’s economic output by the equivalent of a quarter of a working day per year would really make a difference to the recession, but who in their right mind could stand up and genuinely protest against such a concept?

This ‘Local Leap’ is, to my knowledge, the only example of a charity making such a laudable putting money-where-mouth-is-move. Why is that? The National Trust is both highlighting the importance of its own volunteers – without whom, its senior press officer Claire Graves told me, the organisation couldn’t exist – and setting a good example for others.

In fact, Graves thinks that this concept should spread not only throughout civil society, but that all businesses should consider how best to use what she calls “this gift of a day”.

So when you’re sitting at work on Wednesday and going through your usual routine, consider that in four years’ time you could be spending the day working for good – instead of working for free.