National Citizen Service Bill [Lords] — House of Commons, 2017-03-15
Topic: Social Welfare
Felicia Jane Beatrix Drummond (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a pleasure to speak in support of the Bill. I should declare an interest, having taken part in a project organised by an NCS partner in Portsmouth: the Pompey in the Community team, led by Clare Martin and James Shannon at Portsmouth football club. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall), who is no longer in the Chamber, and like, I suspect, many other Members of Parliament, I was a "dragon" in the "Dragons’ Den" event organised for young people to pitch their ideas for social action projects to be run as part of the scheme. There were some brilliant ideas, and the service has led to the delivery by young people of some great projects in Portsmouth I have no doubt that the establishment of a royal charter body is the right way to develop the NCS. It will give the organisation a strong stature in the eyes of the public, and will help to define its independence. The intention is not to allow it to bully or dominate other organisations in the voluntary sector; it is to ensure that a public body, spending large amounts of public money, is properly incorporated. This is not a slight on community interest companies—I have the pleasure of working with several CICs, and I am a firm supporter of that business model—but a move to put the NCS on a firmer footing in view of its considerable public responsibilities. The change will improve our oversight of the organisation, and will allow us to measure it against some of the concerns expressed in the Public Accounts Committee report Portsmouth is a compact and diverse city, so we can draw on a real mix of people from a wide variety of backgrounds. It will be vital nationally for the NCS to be able to draw people together from across the spectrum. Getting hold of young people, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, is a challenge, but we are achieving it in Portsmouth. That is one of the reasons I think the service is so successful. Our target is 350 this year, and we already have 171 signed up. Ours is a compact city, and people have to work together wherever they come from While I recognise that some concerns have been expressed about clause 9 and the involvement of HMRC, I see no great difficulty with it. Being given their national insurance details by HMRC at the age of 16 feels like a rite of passage for many young people, and it makes sense to include information about the NCS at the same time. They should also be getting the message via their schools, and I am sure that every MP can help in that regard. No one would expect the main means of learning about the NCS to come in a buff envelope with the national insurance card, but that is an additional means of engaging young people with projects that can change their lives and open the door to the world of responsibility and adulthood I hope that the annual report from the trust will contain some commentary on how it ensures the integrity of its data processing. That should relate not just to its relationship with HMRC, but to all sources of personal data collected and held by the NCS and its partners The key issues in the Bill that still give rise to concern involve the measuring of performance and value for money. As we heard from the hon. Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed), that concern arose from the PAC report. We look forward to scrutinising the business plan annually, and to seeing how the performance measures up. There must be no repeat of the unfilled places problem identified in the PAC report. We already know that 90% of the young people who are engaging with the service currently see the value of it, but I would particularly like to see how many continue to volunteer, perhaps even until the age of 21 The challenge of the NCS will be to demonstrate the follow-on benefits of it as people get further into adulthood. We will therefore want to see in the annual reporting what the sustained impact is at age 21. This Bill reflects a desire shared in all parts of the House to help young people develop the skills they will need in adulthood, connecting them with parts of society with which they might not otherwise engage I have followed the debates about this Bill and its measures with interest, and I feel we have before us a Bill that should command the confidence of Members and the wider public, and I look forward to it becoming law in due course.