17 Apr 2011

How Sheffield’s teens will pay 50 pounds for place on Cameron’s volunteer scheme

About a year ago, at the peak of the general election campaign I cycled along to the plush media suite in the Millbank Tower that housed the slick Conservative election machine.

As an ordinarily highly cynical hack, I found myself uncomfortably impressed by the glitzy launch by David Cameron of the National Citizen Service, a plan to get 16-year-olds to volunteer on community projects.

Actor Sir Michael Caine spoke movingly about how he wanted to speak on behalf of youngsters who’d been forgotten by the system.

Well the NCS is now taking recruits. And remarkably, many of these six to eight week volunteering schemes are charging £50 to £100 for the pleasure, according to a scarsely believable Sunday Times story. But then I found this advert for an NCS scheme run through Sheffield Wednesday, and Sheffield College on Facebook: click here to see it.

“The standard price of the NCS experience is only £50”.

It is quite extraordinary that many of the 16-year-olds targeted will have £50 or £100 to spare in order to pay for work experience. Paying for the experience of offering your labour for free doesn’t seem like a great deal. The NCS was featured twice in Nick Clegg’s Social Mobility Review earlier this month as a “flagship policy”.

The strategy claimed that “too often such opportunites [for work experience and volunteering] are restricted to the better off” but then failed to mention that its solution to that problem, the NCS would often require charges. The deputy prime minister might want to take the bus across Sheffield to the council estates around Hillsborough to see how many teenagers’ parents have the cash.

It’s not just the NCS. Funding cuts have directly affected organisations such as TimeBank, which helped my other half, for example, mentor a refugee couple, soon after their arrival in Britain from a despotic regime, who are now saving lives as top NHS doctors. One example of precisely what constituted the Big Society, directly undermined by government cuts.

Now obviously cuts or extra charges are required to bring down the deficit. And there is some case to support the idea that some third sector initiatives became too dependent on state money under Labour. But I don’t see a phalanx of wealthy Tory or Lib Dem donors diverting their millions into these sorts of projects, or even to pay the fee that would allow poor kids to benefit from the NCS.

Last April we saw an inspiring, well-edited Disney-esque video of sincere cut glass-accented young Tories volunteering on tough estates ramming home an important election message for Mr Cameron. The then leader of the opposition spoke of his time in the Eton Cadet Force as an inspiration for the NCS which he hoped would become one of the “proudest legacies” of a Conservative government. The controversy at the time was whether the NCS would be compulsory, an appeal to the “Bring Back National Service” brigade.

There is a clear economic case for this type of intervention, as evident from the depressing youth jobs numbers as from street corners in most UK towns and cities. But charging them?

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