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Third Sector Review

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that point. Perhaps I should declare an interest: I am about to fill in the renewals for the subscriptions of two of my children for the junior football groups in which they are involved. He makes a good point. For people who already spend so much time volunteering to support local organisations, any extra bureaucracy is something that they could do without. Anything that makes it simpler for them to attract finance to support their activities is important. My hon. Friend has made a valuable suggestion and I hope that the Minister will nod enthusiastically about it, either now or in his departmental meetings at a later stage. We have been talking about co-operatives, and many of the Government's measures on co-operatives apply to Scotland as well as to England and Wales. The support for credit unions has also been important. I am fortunate to have in my constituency the headquarters of the Capital credit union, one of the most innovative in the UK. Credit unions have been supported by the UK Government. I also mentioned Citizens Advice Scotland, which is funded by the Government to do work related to money advice and citizens advice. I believe that the Government are still the major funder of that organisation. We have also seen some welcome changes to the rules set out by the Department for Work and Pensions, which will make it easier for people to do voluntary work while still claiming benefits, to a certain extent. All these issues are relevant to my constituents, just as they are to those of Members of Parliament from England and Wales. I want to suggest to the Minister a way of making it even easier to contribute voluntarily to community organisations in the third sector and thereby be a benefit to society. This suggestion, too, has UK-wide possibilities. We should encourage even more employers to facilitate arrangements for their employees to take time off to contribute voluntarily to local organisations. Many employers already do a wonderful job in that regard and there are many interesting schemes, of which I am sure the Minister is aware, to encourage such activity and make it possible. Some employers, however, are not as good as they ought to be at encouraging and enabling their employees to take part in voluntary activity in their local society. There are particular problems for small businesses, which find it difficult to allow their employees to have time off in this way, but there must be ways of developing the ability of employers to encourage their employees to take part in voluntary activity. I think that the statutory right still exists for local councillors, justices of the peace, magistrates and some others to take time off to engage in public duties. I am not sure that I would want to apply a parallel arrangement for employees taking part in voluntary activity, partly because the exercising of that statutory right has been problematic, and partly because I would not want to add a complicated regulatory regime to the burdens already affecting employers. However, there must be some way to give greater rights to people who want to take part in voluntary life in the community, and to encourage and facilitate that activity when people face an unhelpful attitude on the part of their employer. I hope that the Minister will think about that suggestion. I said earlier that it is essential that all sectors of government show respect for the work of the third sector and encourage its ability to provide for the needs of our communities. I mentioned the recent decisions of the Lib Dem-SNP council that now, thanks to the proportional representation system, runs the administration of Edinburgh city council. I must emphasise that I did not raise that matter in a partisan way. The hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker) knows that I am as non-partisan as he is. I would have made those points if the council were Labour, Tory, Unionist or anything else. I raised the matter because it provides an example of precisely what should not be happening. We know that after years of campaigning and arguing, we finally reached a situation in which the majority of local council funding for local organisations in my areas was being provided on a three-year rolling basis. Organisations had a degree of certainty with service level agreements that were designed to allow them to plan year by year. Then they suddenly found that their funds—what they had thought was their guaranteed three-year funding—were to be cut in the middle of the year. That will not encourage financial stability for local organisations. In opening today's debate, my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Cabinet Office emphasised how important long-term stability of funding really is, particularly for third sector organisations. I would not expect my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to get too involved in the internal politics of my city council—though he is welcome to do so if he wishes—but I hope that in his summing up, he will emphasise how important it is for all levels of government to try to work towards a regime in which funding for voluntary organisations is much more secure and much more long-term. We want to avoid anything that can be debilitating to the work of staff, volunteers, voluntary committees and so forth. They do not want to spend half their time every year running around trying to raise money to keep themselves going for next year. All too often, they have just completed one funding application only to be at it again in respect of the funding for next year. Security of funding is vital to community, non-governmental and voluntary organisations and charities. The more we can move towards such security, the more we will help those organisations to maximise the potential they can offer to their society and community.