Volunteer rights and the scope of the Charity Commission

For this posting we are really happy to welcome visiting blogger and our former colleague at Volunteering England, Mike Locke, who shares with us his views on the ongoing issue of volunteer rights following a recent report from the Charity Commission (England & Wales).

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The Charity Commission has recently made clear its position on allegations of unfair treatment of volunteers.  Its Operational Case Report regarding St John Ambulance saw the issue as a matter of the charity’s administration, such that the Charity Commission would only get involved if governance procedures had not been followed or if the case threatened to bring the charity into disrepute.

This may not grab the headlines, but it’s helpful because during the long-running attempts to resolve volunteer rights there has been a question why complaints made by volunteers to the Charity Commission have been regarded as outside its scope.

The actual case here concerning, in its full name, The Priory of England and The Islands of the Order of St John was that the charity adopted a regional structure on grounds of finance, quality and impact, and consistency. However, according to a “senior volunteer” in the Telegraph newspaper in 2011: “If the structure is changed … what incentive is there for local people to volunteer and raise money?” In resisting restructuring, a small number of volunteers were “disciplined”.  The case sounds like the classic dilemma which other national charities have faced of tensions between national and local control – and I’m in no position to comment, only sympathise.

The Charity Commission looked into the case given “ongoing complaints” and found: “It is regrettable when disciplinary proceedings have to be brought against volunteers and we recognise that the events brought considerable distress to those involved. We did not see anything to suggest that the charity acted in a way that would bring the charity into disrepute such that the commission should become involved in these matters.”

The point about disrepute echoes the concern of Lord Hodgson in his review of charity law where he warned that treatment of volunteers could reduce public trust in charities. He thought responsibility should lie with charities’ self-regulation but raised the question whether there should be an independent body for external referral.

Following the Volunteer Rights Inquiry, I chaired the Call to Action Progress Group (2011-2014) when I worked for Volunteering England and NCVO. Our final report reviewed, without finding a consensus, the question of whether there was a need for an external regulatory system or whether that would be disproportionate and the problem tackled through good management practice. We recommended organisations sign-up to the 3R Promise (get it Right, offer Reconciliation and take Responsibility) which had been formulated by the Inquiry.

My perception is that volunteering organisations are more conscious of the problem and widely have instituted good practice – including, to my knowledge, St John Ambulance.

But the issue of volunteer rights won’t go away. A small number of volunteers are unfairly treated, heart-breakingly so, and – at least prima facie – in ways that offend public policy, let alone charity governance.

So, I believe, the question remains whether there is a need for a procedure or institution independent of volunteering organisations? Is the Charity Commission’s position, as clarified, sufficient? And if not it, who might take the role, and how?

Sports volunteering - fair game?

The other day the lovely people in the volunteering team at The London School of Economics (LSE) shared their latest blog post with me via Twitter. In it they argue against volunteering at the forthcoming Champions League final - it is well worth a read.

The argument against volunteers at the Champions League final seems to be that football is a wealthy sport and so it should pay people to do the roles being advertised. This implies that there is a degree of exploitation at work here, with volunteers engaged in order to keep costs down and profits up whilst players received £millions for what they do.

I can understand that position. We’d generally say that volunteers doing the same roles as paid staff in - say - Tesco would be exploitative. In fact, that’s been a common objection to some of the compulsory work elements of the government’s Work Programme. But are these roles at the cup final the same as those done by paid staff? It doesn’t seem so.

And why object to these when no football match in the country - Premier league included - can take place without the involvement of volunteers in safety critical roles in the form of  first aiders from St John Ambulance?

A further point that the team at LSE make is that in some circumstances volunteering at big events like this is OK because whilst the event may be organised by a profit making body the people taking part aren’t well paid professionals. Therefore it was OK for volunteers to work at the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, even though they were sometimes doing the same jobs paid staff were also doing. Whilst this may be true for the majority of athletes, what about the likes of Ennis, Bolt and Phelps (millionaires all) and the need for LOCOG to make as much money as possible to ensure the games didn’t lose money?

To me, it doesn’t make a difference if its the individual athletes making lots of money, the sport making lots of money or nobody making lots of money. There are two reasons for this:

1. Volunteering in the for-profit sector is recognised as not universally a bad thing. For example, volunteers work in private hospitals and care homes doing key roles that staff would never do, enhancing patient care and providing a service everyone should expect whether they are cared for in public, private or voluntary sectors.
2. Sport in this country lives on the support of volunteers. Coaches, officials, players, families, people who wash kit, transport kids, provide catering, run the club finances etc.. 

Big sporting events - be they Olympics, Commonwealth Games, football matches, Tour De France stages, the ICC Champions Trophy this summer or anything else - give an all too rare opportunity to showcase the importance of volunteering to sport, to society and to celebrate the efforts of our nation’s great volunteers.

Last summer’s Olympics saw the UK public getting an insight into how essential volunteers are to life in this country, how volunteers underpin the fabric of everything we take for granted. The visibility of volunteers and volunteering was massively enhanced. Shouldn’t we hope for that same effect at the Champion’s League final - and work towards supporting it to happen - rather than sitting on the sidelines crying foul?

What do you think?

Are legal rights the best way to improve the treatment of volunteers?

A month ago friend and colleague John Ramsey shared his thoughts on the pre-Christmas 2012 decision by the Supreme Court that volunteers were not entitled to the same legal rights under employment law as paid staff. You can read John’s excellent article on the IVO social network.

Volunteer rights is an emotive issue and one I last visited on this blog a year ago after writing a piece on the issue for Third Sector online in June 2011. Sadly it is an issue that won’t go away. I say sadly not because I wish this would all get brushed under the carpet but because clearly things are not getting better across the volunteering movement. 

Disappointingly the work around the 3R Promise that resulted from the hard work of the Volunteer Rights Inquiry seems to have been lost in the last couple of years. Sure plenty of organisations have signed up to the promise but the momentum of the Inquiry has been lost - not least because of the cuts at Volunteering England and their resulting merger with NCVO - and the issue seems to now be left to just a few vocal campaigners to keep on the sector’s radar.

The 3R Promise was an opportunity for volunteer involving organisations (VIOs) to get their houses in order. Note that I say VIOs not volunteer managers (VMs). The Inquiry was clear that it often was not VMs who were to blame for poor treatment of volunteers but paid staff (often in management positions) and sometimes trustees (volunteers themselves) who were at fault. This wasn’t an issue to simply be fixed by better volunteer management or increased take up of Investing In Volunteers (which at the end of the day just says an organisation has good processes, not that it treats volunteers well).

There were plenty of voices around the VRI table calling for an independent complaints body or ombudsman to take responsibility for the issue. That could have been a statutory body or a self-regulatory one like the FRSB in the fundraising world. In the end the Inquiry opted not to go down such a route, preferring an approach that gave VIOs (at least those whose practice wasn’t up to scratch) a chance to improve. Not only did this seem like the wise way to proceed but it was also clear that in an environment of voluntary and public sector belt tightening the Inquiry would have faced a high uphill struggle to secure the funding necessary to establish any new body for volunteer rights.

Perhaps the time to re-evaluate that decision is now upon us? But does that mean we go straight to legislation, establishing protection explicitly for volunteers within primary legislation? In John’s article he seems to suggest that this would be a sensible way forward. I’m not so sure.

First of all, legislation doesn't solve the problem. Legislation means that when problems occur there is a route to resolution that is available to volunteers. We’ve had anti-discrimination for employees in the UK for many years but that hasn’t stopped employers discriminating. Why then do we believe that legislation will solve this issue?

Second, legislation would require parliamentary time to introduce. There seems to be little interest within Westminster or any of the other UK parliaments to address this issue. In fact, the current direction is towards the Westminster government repealing aspects of employment legislation as it applies to paid staff and seeking to weaken the position of EU discrimination legislation (which often provides better protection for employees than UK law). Against such a prevailing wind, why would MPs decide to introduce changes to the law that would add protections to tens of millions of people?

Thirdly, I continue to maintain that legislation would be counter-productive. We’ve already seen many organisations cut resources for volunteer engagement as money has become more scare post global financial crisis. We also know that many organisations - at least in the middle to large organisation end of the sector - don’t see volunteers as a resource worth investing in, preferring instead to try and raise more and more money from an increasingly cash strapped and donor fatigued British public. If we suddenly make engaging volunteers much more bureaucratic than it is at the moment I fear we’ll see more organisations choosing not to engage volunteers at all as the costs and risks increase at a time of scare resources. And all that’s before I consider the impact on volunteer managers who would become even more process obsessed than they already are when what we need is for them to become for focused on individuals, on people, on volunteers.

So what then is the way forward?

Well there is no simple answer. The resource isn’t there for a new statutory body to stand up for volunteers when they are treated badly. The resource is also lacking for a self-regulatory body and considerable support would be needed from across the sector if this were to happen. Fundraising self-regulation only came about because statutory regulation was threatened and even now it is only those organisations that choose to submit to self-regulation that are subject to it.

The Charity Commission might seem a natural place to turn except they have seen considerable cuts to their budget in the last few years and anyway a significant number of volunteers don’t ‘work’ in organisations that come under the Commission’s regulatory remit.

How about Volunteering England? Now a part of NCVO there is an opportunity for the issue of volunteer rights to be brought to the table of a wider audience than just volunteer managers and volunteer centres. Yet NCVO stands up for bodies (again, only in the voluntary sector / civil society) so would it really have an appetite to side with volunteers, effectively ending up policing and potentially ‘punishing’ its own members for poor practice?

In reality the closest we have to any form of regulation explicitly around volunteering is the Institute of Fundraising who have a code of practice on  volunteer fundraising that is binding upon its individual and organisational members. Any complain against this code brings us back to the FRSB who would investigate any alleged breaches.

We also don’t need another Volunteer Rights Inquiry. The original Inquiry’s work still stands as valid, the issue is what we do about it given that the 3R Promise hasn’t worked. 

What we need is someone to step up and start a debate about how we can proceed. Someone who can ensure the discussions don’t become a talking shop but a forum for change and action, a platform from which we can try to eradicate poor treatment of volunteers rather than simply provide a legislative sticking plaster when things go wrong.

Ideally this ‘somebody’ would be a partnership between the key sector umbrella bodies. In England these seem to be more concerned with paid staff and fundraising than volunteers so perhaps we have to look elsewhere in the UK, to bodies like Volunteer Development Scotland or Volunteer Now (in Northern Ireland) or to organisations like The Association of Volunteer Managers (should they ever arise from what appears to be hibernation).

Whatever gets done and whoever does it something must happen. Allowing poor treatment of volunteers, however isolated, is something we must never be comfortable with. 

What do you think is the way forward?

Please share your thoughts on what should happen next and who should take the lead on this issue.

Team GB to be 'forced' to volunteer ahead of Rio 2016

A couple of weeks ago the always awesome CEO of the Directory of Social Change, Debra Allcock-Tyler wrote a great piece for Third Sector magazine.  In the article, Debra suggested a reality check was needed between the day-to-day reality of the volunteering that happens across the UK and the "street party" nature of volunteering during the London 2012 Games.  Debra concluded by challenging the government not to "...set up yet another blooming agency to foster the post-Olympic volunteering legacy. You don't understand volunteering and you don't know what you're talking about".

A few days later one of my daily Google alerts flagged a story from the Daily Mail, reporting that Maria Miller MP, the new Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Support had come up with a wizard wheeze.  Ms Miller announced to the Conservative Party conference that Team GB athletes aiming for Rio 2016 who are in receipt of lottery funding would have to do five days of volunteering in schools or sports clubs.

The announcement focused on the usual rhetoric of encouraging and inspiring the next generation and building on the legacy of the 70,000 Games Makers who did such great work this summer.

But hang on a minute.  This means Team GB athletes are being forced to volunteer if they want to stand a chance of going to Rio 2016.  Is this what we want the Olympic volunteering legacy to be about?  Is making people volunteer, whether they want to or not, really the headline we all would love to see about volunteering post-London 2012?

And how about practical implementation of this proposal.  Let's say Jess Ennis or Mo Farah don't 'volunteer', or don't complete five days of such 'volunteering'.  Will they not be selected for 2012's Team GB?  And are the schools and sports clubs geared up to make really effective use of the 5,000 days all these athletes are apparently going to give?

It seems Debra Allcock-Tyler's remarks to government were bang on (as usual) - they don't understand volunteering and don't know what they are talking about.

Volunteer rights – a long and winding road

As some of you may know I also write a monthly blog for Third Sector magazine online. Last June, in only my second blog post for them, I questioned whether the time was right for the sector to be addressing the issue of volunteer rights.  My posting was borne out of a frustration that the momentum built up by the Volunteer Rights Inquiry had seemed to stall somewhat.

Thankfully any drop in profile for the results of the Volunteer Rights Inquiry had only been a temporary blip and there are now more than 100 organisations who have pledged their support for the Inquiry’s 3R promise.


Yet still we read allegations of poor treatment of volunteers.  In November we had further reports into Jon Danzig’s dispute with the Pituitary Foundation and now we have the tale of Gillian Brocklehurst who, after being dismissed from Cylch ConwyDistrict Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) after four years, had to bring a claim under the Data Protection Act to be allowed access to a report into her dismissal.

As with many other cases, this one centres around a CAB.  I don’t for one second think CAB consistently treat their volunteers poorly.  I do, however, think that their volunteers are more aware of their ‘rights’ and so feel more confident in bringing claims of unfair dismissal which is why we see so many

Citizens Advice are to be congratulated for conducting an investigation into the circumstances of Gillian’s dismissal.  Yet the latest developments in the story show that this investigation was flawed; that processes hadn't been followed; that communication was poor; and that evidence existed to suggest bullying and harassment had taken place.  

As was often seen during the work of the Volunteer Rights Inquiry, it appears the person who originally dismissed Gillian was a trustee – in this case Phil Ward, the chair of the CAB.  Whilst these situations can be blamed on poor volunteer management, the Volunteer Rights Inquiry found that sadly they are all too often due to poor governance, behaviour and management by senior staff and board members. 

So what can we learn from this and other similar situations?  


I think there are three things:

• These are complex and emotive issues, made more so by a lack of clear legal status for volunteers and by the strong passions and emotions that often surround such cases.  To the volunteer, volunteering can be a deeply personal act and to be dismissed can be incredibly hurtful.  However justified an organisation may feel it is in taking the step to dismiss a volunteer, it must always be handled sensitively.
  
•  In this day and age volunteers, just like anyone else, have very easy access to a variety of means to share their experiences far and wide.  Couple that with a media who much prefer negative stories to positive ones and the chances of your organisation being cast in a bad light greatly increase.  So if you must dismiss a volunteer, be completely open, fair and honest about why and always use it as an act of last resort.
  
• We need to stop seeing such situations as problems for volunteer managers.  If senior managers and trustees are often a cause of these problems then they need to take their role in running a successful volunteer programme much more seriously.  We accept the need to develop their knowledge and skills around fundraising, why not volunteering too?

Whether these lessons are learnt or not, I fear quick solutions are not going to be forthcoming.  There is a long and winding road ahead of us with much distance still to be travelled, and many more to join the journey, before volunteers can be assured that they will not become the next Jon Danzig or Gillian Brocklehurst.