Editorial: Give volunteers a chance to contribute

Provision for children and young people has always depended on an enormous contribution from volunteers. It has also been a context in which young people themselves often learn the early steps to volunteering, something contemporary policy is seeking to cultivate further. Yet the systems, structures and mechanisms that regulate the involvement of volunteers have already become major obstacles to those aspirations. And, with the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act having gone through Parliament, they are about to become more stringent.

My concern is that we are about to lose another substantial tranche of existing and prospective volunteers, who are fed up with being treated as objects of suspicion rather than individuals willing to commit their valuable spare time. As the writer Marcel Berlins recently observed, these individuals are less and less "prepared to provide their generous services to run or contribute to children's activities, for fear that some totally innocent gesture or inadvertent contact will be misunderstood and result in appalling consequences". Berlins has a pedigree second to none; he has been writing on children and the law for 40 years.