Parliament

There was an interesting (and fairly lengthy!) discussion about volunteering as part of the House of Lords debate on passing the new Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill. Clause 39 of the Bill would mean that anyone who volunteered could fast track their citizenship application. The Lords raised a lot of concerns about how immigrants would find appropriate roles, what the cost to volunteer involving organisations would be, whether CRB checks could be carried out on immigrants, who would decide what was and wasn't volunteering, and the ethics of incentivising volunteering and almost making it 'compulsory'.

Online Parliamentary Publications

Lord Brett claims that none of these are concerns for the 'design group' (who include apparently include Volunteering England and representatives from large charities), and that anyone who knows about Volunteer Management would not see these as potential problems - do we agree?