Today we launch the next two reports from our Inquiry into the Future of Voluntary Services.

The first “Outsourcing and the Voluntary Sector” by Laird Ryan explores the motivations, progress and impact of the Coalition government’s drive to privatise public services and how this has impacted on the voluntary sector in England. In surveying the main service areas involved, such as social care, employment and youth services, the report evidences the damage being wrought by competition and marketization and the growing subservience of Voluntary Services Groups as sub-contractors to profit-hungry transnational corporations like Serco and G4S.

In the second report “The Devil that has come amongst us“,  Andy Benson looks in detail at the procurement and commissioning regimes through which this progressive enslavement of voluntary groups has been achieved. The result has been “…huge damage to the autonomy, independence and, sometimes, integrity of VSGs and a diminution both of their interest and capacity to speak out against injustice and to take their mandate from the needs of their users and communities.”

Some of the issues within the two reports have been picked up in an article in The Independent, published today the 30th June.