Civil Society – Running a Voluntary or Community Organisation
This theme is now closed for comment. An announcement on Red Tape Challenge plans will be made in due course. You can read comments made during the theme spotlight (17 May 2012 – 13 September 2012) below.
Voluntary organisations, community groups and social enterprises are essential to building a stronger society. We know that setting up these groups is not always easy and that’s why we launched our Civil Society Red Tape Task Force. To see what you’ve told us so far and how we’ve acted on your feedback, click here.
But we don’t want to stop there. Through the Red Tape Challenge we continue to seek your views on unnecessary red tape that gets in the way of setting up or running a voluntary or community organisation.
- What unnecessary regulation have you faced when setting up, running or growing a voluntary or community organisation?
- Have you encountered difficulties when attempting to engage volunteers?
- Do rules and regulations prevent you from doing things you would like to do or just make it unnecessarily difficult?
- How could these barriers be reduced or removed?
If you want to share your experience privately, then you can comment through our private inbox here. Visit the Civil Society landing page here.
CRB checks – new rules: I am concerned that the new ID checking rules for England and Wales could unfairly affect asylum seekers and refugees. If they don’t have specific documents they could end up going through a fingerprinting process, delaying things further and scaring people away from volunteering. My point is not about making things unsafe, it is that the Home Office should already have lots of data about such individuals, so why repeat such an admin process for CRB checks? Surely we should either allow for a wider range of ID documents, or have a specific CRB link to the Home Office for volunteers from the asylum seeker or refugee community? It doesn’t make sense to me that we duplicate processes at the taxpayers’ expense. It is also frustrating that we have achieved so much with an ‘inclusive’ Olympics but then implement systems that hold things back. Please review this based on a test of what is sensible.Comment Tags: asylum seekers, CRB, refugees
I agree with this comment. New restricted list of ID documents is going to make it very difficult and time consuming for CRB checks for asylum seekers, new refugees, and other migrants many of whom see volunteering as an invaluable route to settling in their new communities, practising English etc. Why is a travel document not on the list? or an ARC card?
The charity I work for runs a community centre. We have 3 full time staff and a number of volunteers. We have recently been told that, in order to advertise public events that we put on for the local community (e.g monthly film club, performances by community drama groups) we have to have a premises licence. This has involved considerable time and expense: £150 to place a press ad informing the general public that we are applying for a licence; the completion of a lengthy form; 4 visits from our local council’s licensing team (1 x fire safety visit, 2 x noise visits, 1 x general licensing matters visit); significant neighbourhood liaison; and attendance at an evening Council meeting when our application will be heard. We don’t sell alcohol and don’t want to.. No event runs later than 10pm and our maximum capacity is probably about 60. Around 20-30 people attend our film club. We have no intention of turning our community centre into an entertainment venue. But we do want to be able to support the community to come together, to socialise and enjoy new experiences. The process we have had to go through seems out of proportion with what we want to do.