Dad's Army is going to be here to save you.

Volunteering in Britain is already screwed. Few do it any more. It has fallen by a quarter in the last decade. So how on earth does Brown expect to get people to do this? Those who would already do volunteering and are unlikely to drop their current commitments to take on this new pointless one, and those who don't almost certainly won't.

We already have people to fulfil this role - y'know, the police and the other emergency services? As well as associated volunteers? - so this proposal of a "Civil Protection Network" seems like little short of an attempt to take it all under on centralised authority - a good thing in some ways, and very very bad in others.

And the inevitable comparisons with Dad's Army are never going to be lived down, no matter what.

The number of volunteers in Britain has fallen by a quarter in the past decade. I'm not overly surprised by that, even if a quarter is a large number. But I don't think that it can possibly be claimed to be directly the government's fault for failing to support them.

Volunteers don't volunteer because the government does or doesn't support them - they volunteer to do some good in their community or elsewhere. They volunteer to help others in some way. What the State thinks matters little to them.

Instead, it is indirectly the government's fault. This is because they have fostered a society of reliance on the State rather than the individual. At the same time as this, they have made it progressively harder to volunteer - CRB forms being quite possibly the biggest offender. Not because they are in themselves a bad idea, but just because the Criminal Records Bureau are so damn slow! They have also extended it to cover too many situations.

I am both a Scout leader and a St John Ambulance first aider. I don't do them for purely altruistic reasons, because I do them because it makes me feel good to have done them. There are two ways that people decide to become Scout leaders or otherwise involved in the Movement: (a) Their children join Scouts and they get dragged in, or (b) they are Scouts and want to give others the chance to do it. That's my reason. I am a Scout leader because I want to pass on the fantastic knowledge and experience that I got as a Beaver, Cub, Scout and Venture Scout. I want todays children to be able experience it as well.

Some people forget - or simply don't realise - that Scout leaders and first aiders don't get paid. They get nothing from doing it but the experience and knowledge that they are doing something good. It was fantastic to see the Scout contingent in the Remembrance Sunday parade yesterday and the voice-over reminding people of this fact - it is all voluntary.

The reason the number of volunteers has declined is because the government has indirectly stifled independent charity in favour of State redistribution. But nobody works for the State for free, yet thounsands will work for charities for free. The amount of paperwork surrounding volunteer charities needs to shrink, and it needs to be simplified. Or else the volunteer won't be just an endangered species, but an extinct one.

Source: The Telegraph