For example, the NCS programme only covers holiday periods and participants pay a small fee to participate. By contrast, the AmeriCorps programme lasts for up to a year and participants are offered financial support towards educational costs. This has meant AmeriCorps has not only encouraged volunteering; it has also provided incentives for generations of Americans, especially from poorer backgrounds, to stay on in higher education. This small financial nudge has thus potentially delivered lifelong returns. More generally, the UK already encourages giving money by allowing charities to reclaim tax on donations through “Gift Aid”. Is there a case for providing tax-based incentives for people who instead volunteer time? The idea is not without precedent. In 2008, the Canadian Parliament debated a bill that proposed taxpayers who volunteer at least 250 hours be issued a tax credit up to $ 39 It was rejected. But since 2011, Canadian firefighters, most of whom are volunteers, have received a tax credit of $ if they complete over 200 hours of volunteering a year. Such a policy may sound ambitious, certainly administratively, as it would require auditable records of volunteer hours worked. But it is not impossible to conceive of a system of Individual Volunteering Accounts (IVAs) for people engaged in formal volunteering. Relative to the value created, the administrative costs would probably be modest. Once in place, those IVAs could serve a number of useful purposes.
There is some evidence of cyclicality in volunteering, with it falling at the start of the recession and rising during the recovery. A recent report suggested that volunteering numbers had reached a ten-year high. 10 It is possible this upward trend will continue. An ageing population will boost older cohorts where volunteer participation rates are high. And among younger cohorts there is evidence of a behaviour shift, with participation rates having doubled in the past decade. Taken together, these patterns suggest that volunteering is tightly-woven into the UK’s social fabric – a fabric which is large, diverse, international and potentially growing. Measuring the value of volunteering So far we have established that labour inputs into volunteering are considerable. But this does not tell us what value these volunteers create for the economy, much less for society. This is important when gauging the contribution volunteering makes to societal welfare. It is possible to build up an incremental, if somewhat piecemeal, picture of this contribution from its various sources. These are shown schematically in Figure 9 as layers of a “volunteering onion”. At the centre of the onion are the volunteer army, all 15 million of them. The outer three layers then measure respectively: •  The economic value of goods and services created by volunteers – if you like, the GDP-equivalent value of volunteering services;  7  Salamon et al (2011). 8  See for example http://enews.fergananews.com/news.php?id=2697, describing a recent subbotnik in Uzbekistan in August 2013. 9  Volunteering England (2009).