At university we had hustings to help students decide which of their peers they should elect to represent them on their college’s governing body.
They were heated events. We crammed a hundred or so people into a small room, gave the candidates a good grilling and scrutinised every word they said, throwing back difficult questions at every opportunity.
Before I went to the volunteering hustings on Tuesday night – the event hosted by Volunteering England at which third sector minister Angela Smith, shadow charities minister Nick Hurd and Lib Dem charities spokeswoman Jenny Willott pitched their thoughts on volunteering to those in the sector – I had wondered how it would compare.
It was different, to say the least.
Any hopes of policy announcements (entirely reasonable in the build-up to a general election) were unfulfilled. Hurd pledged to “create an environment in which more seems possible for people” and reiterated his ambition to cut through a “thicket of regulation” around volunteering. He hinted at a national citizenship service for young people, but when I spoke to him afterwards he refused to comment further on what this might involve, or how it might differ from volunteering charity v.
Willott’s proposals – for Gift Aid reform (she didn’t specify in what way), “thinking imaginatively about capacity building” and creating a “culture of volunteering” – did little to distinguish her party from either Labour or the Tories.
And Smith’s speech was equally low on policy announcements, with the exception of a commitment to hosting a round table with businesses to discuss employee volunteering.
I thought things might heat up when it came to questions from the floor. But the MPs managed to dodge a difficult question about funding for volunteer centres and said they’d be in trouble with their Treasury teams if they made any firm commitments.
The only moment of friction was over the role of v. Hurd asked the audience whether they thought the Government’s £150m spending on the organisation was justified, and Smith accused him of “wriggling” when audience members said they thought it was.
But the MPs were let off too easily. Nobody expected financial commitments, but some sense of the criteria the different parties would apply when deciding where the axe would fall in future third sector budgets would have been welcomed.
We wouldn’t have given them such an easy ride in our student common room.
