The indispensable backbone of voluntary action:

measuring and valuing the contribution of older

volunteers

Report of a survey carried out by

VITA and Volunteering England

Colin Rochester and Brian Thomas

September 2006
SUMMARY OF KEY FINDINGS
1. Older volunteers make a substantial and irreplaceable contribution to the work of
volunteer-involving organisations in the voluntary and community sector and in
the public sector alike. Our survey of 477 organisations found that:

• between them the organisations involved a total of 1,300,000 volunteers in

their work

• people aged 50 or over formed two-thirds of this volunteer workforce

• people aged 65 and above formed 31 per cent of the volunteer workforce

• people aged 50 or over contributed 68 per cent of the total number of hours
provided by the volunteers in these organisations.

2. The contribution made by older volunteers varies by size of organisation and field
of activity but not by sector. We found that:

• there was no significant difference between the proportion of older volunteers

in the public and voluntary and community sectors

• organisations which involved large numbers of volunteers in their work

attracted higher percentages of older volunteers than those with relatively
small numbers

• the organisations taking part in our survey were active in a wide range of fields
but heavily concentrated in social services and health

• the proportion of older people in the volunteer ‘workforce’ was significantly

higher in organisations working in social services, health, and the
environment, and lower in culture and recreation and the activities of
intermediary bodies like volunteer centres.

3. Older volunteers played a wide range of different roles in the organisations

surveyed. These encompassed five kinds of role of function, listed here in order of
frequency of occurrence:

• providing front-line services to users or beneficiaries

• providing support services to users and beneficiaries

• administrative and organisational tasks

• leadership and specialist technical roles

• fundraising and external relations

2
4. Older volunteers are valued by volunteer-involving organisations. They are seen
as an indispensable backbone for voluntary action but also have some
comparative advantages over younger volunteers

• greater commitment to the organisation and its work

• longer term involvement

• greater contribution of time

• more experience, knowledge and skills

• greater flexibility and versatility.

5. The great majority of participants in the survey – 93 per cent - did not have an
upper age limit for volunteers but, for the others:

• some had limits because of insurance issues

• some imposed limits on particularly demanding roles

• some justified their age limits in terms of a ‘duty to care’ owed to users,
passengers or drivers

• a number of organisations had more discretion and individual judgment built

into their decision-making

• there was some evidence of limits being removed or eased.

6. Eighty-five per cent of respondents reported that they had not experienced any
difficulty with insurance but this may be a matter of interpretation:

• some organisations had ‘solved’ the problem of upper age limits for insurance
by getting older volunteers to sign a disclaimer and volunteer uninsured

• there are continuing problems with insurance for older drivers

• another area of concern is the refusal of insurers to provide cover for older
people who are handling money

• on a more positive note, some organisations had ‘shopped around’ and found
a more helpful insurer.

7. An overwhelming 99 per cent of respondents had indicated their support for the
campaign: the few exceptions were constrained by the specific circumstances of
their own organisation.

3
CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

1. The findings demonstrate the importance of the contribution made by older

volunteers to the work of a large number of voluntary organisations and statutory
agencies across the country. This is a matter of scale – numbers and
percentages of older volunteers involved; of the number and diversity of roles
filled; and of the value attached to them by volunteer managers.

2. These positive messages need to be treated with some caution. The involvement
of older volunteers is uneven across organisations of different size and area of
interest and the data about roles provides evidence about the number of roles but
not about how many volunteers are engaged in what activities.

3. There are also some very positive messages about the key issues of the
Campaign against Age Discriminations in Volunteering and the extent to which
respondents have ‘signed-up’ to its principles.

4. On the other hand, it is likely that the organisations surveyed were more inclined
than most to ‘buy in to’ the Campaign and the negative feedback from a minority
suggests that there are still real issues about upper age limits and insurance. We
therefore recommend that:

• the evidence base is extended to provide more information about attitudes and
practice in smaller volunteer-involving organisations and in areas not
adequately covered by our sample

• further research would also improve the quality of the data concerning the
roles that older volunteers undertake – it was impossible to determine how
many volunteers undertake each type of role from the data

• the Campaign continues to call for approaches to volunteer management that

decide on volunteer’s abilities to undertake various tasks, however onerous,
by a case by case approach rather than a blanket age limit for any roles

• more specifically, the Campaign should engage with the concept of ‘a duty of
care’ and take legal advice as to how this can be followed without imposing an
age limit on all volunteers

• the Campaign also needs to collect intelligence about the practices of the
providers of insurance and identify those with whom organisations have dealt
successfully and to ‘name and shame’ the worst offenders

• as well as some very convincing statistics about the importance of older

volunteers, there is also a wealth of anecdotal evidence and potential case
studies available which should be used to promote the value and
indispensability of this group.

4
INTRODUCTION
As part of their joint campaign against age discrimination in volunteering, VITA
(Volunteering in the Third Age) and Volunteering England conducted a telephone
survey of 477 organisations which were members of Volunteering England including
the 20 which involved the largest numbers of volunteers in their work. More details of
the survey are provided later in this report.

The Campaign Against Age Discrimination in Volunteering aims to establish ‘a

climate across England that is volunteer-friendly’. In a joint statement, VITA and
Volunteering England identify the issues they intend to address:

“In a country with an ageing time-rich and able population it is remarkable that many
volunteer-involving organisations discriminate against older volunteers. Older
volunteers can find themselves unable to volunteer because of their age or asked to
leave volunteering at a certain age. Whilst increased insurance premiums is often
given as a reason by volunteer-involving organisations it is known that the real
reason is often ingrained prejudice or the perceived difficulty of finding appropriate
opportunities for older volunteers.”

And they invite volunteer-involving organisations to support the campaign by signing

up to three commitments intended to ensure that:

• everyone wishing to volunteer should be able to do so, regardless of age

• whilst disability and frailty may limit opportunities for some older people as well
as other age groups, selection should be based on objective criteria relating
directly to the tasks to be performed and on volunteers' performance

• where insurance cover for volunteers can not be obtained beyond a specified
age, organisations should search for other insurers.

Organisations supporting the campaign:

• “will not have arbitrary age limits and will not impose a 'retirement age' on
volunteers as this is unfair and discriminatory”

• believe that “volunteer opportunities should complement an individual’s

motivation to volunteer. Age should not be the deciding factor in selecting an
individual for a role”

• “will actively seek insurers that do not charge an unreasonable premium for
older volunteers and we will not use insurers who remove cover for older
volunteers”.

5
MEASURING THE CONTRIBUTION OF OLDER VOLUNTEERS
The first aim of the survey was to establish the scale of the contribution made by
older volunteers to the work of voluntary organisations and statutory agencies. The
figures demonstrate very clearly the degree to which volunteer-involving
organisations depend on volunteering by older people.

• Between them the organisations involved a total of 1,300,000 volunteers in

their work.

• People aged 50 or over formed two-thirds of this volunteer workforce.

• People aged 65 and above formed 31 per cent of the volunteer workforce.

• People aged 50 or over contributed 68 per cent of the total number of hours
provided by the volunteers in these organisations.

More detailed information provided by some of the organisations surveyed also

suggested that these figures include significant numbers of people aged 75 or over.
20 per cent of WRVS’ and 13 per cent of Age Concern England’s volunteers were in
this age group while RSVP reported that they had “many volunteers in their 80s”.
Brighton and Sussex Universities Hospital NHS Trust had 187 volunteers over the
age of 70 and 21 over the age of 80 (out of a total of 506). A number of other
respondents had volunteers who were still extremely active in their late 80s and 90s.

“The average age of our volunteers is 62 and our oldest volunteer is 95 who after a
double bypass operation returned to volunteer for us stating that he felt he needed to
reduce his hours from three days per week to two days! We have one volunteer who
is 90 and has been awarded the MBE for his volunteering services here, he has been
volunteering for us since 1969.” Stoke Mandeville Hospital NHS Trust

Breakdown by type of organisation

This section of the analysis breaks down the sample of organisation by sector; by
number of volunteers involved; and by field of activity and looks at variations in the
scale of the contribution made to the different types of organisation by older
volunteers.

Breakdown by sector

The great majority of those surveyed were voluntary and community sector (VCS)
organisations (88 per cent); a significant minority (11 per cent) were statutory
agencies - NHS trusts and local authority departments; and a handful (one per cent)
were based in the for-profit sector.

There were no significant differences in the proportions of older people involved as

volunteers in the VCS and statutory sectors.

6
Table 1: Older volunteers’ involvement by sector1

Sector Percentage of Percentage of Percentage of

volunteers aged volunteers aged total volunteer
50 and over 65 and over hours provided
by those aged 50
and over
Voluntary and 66% 31% 68%
community

Public 66% 36% 68%

All 66% 31% 68%

N=450

Breakdown by numbers of volunteers involved

The size of the organisations in the sample – measured by the number of volunteers
involved in their work – varied enormously. At one end of the scale a single
organisation – Christian Aid – involved 300,000 volunteers, largely in its door-to-door
collections and other fund-raising activities. Because of the scale of this involvement
we have excluded data from this organisation from some of the analysis to avoid
distortion. Only one other respondent reported figures of more than 100,000
volunteers and this was Help the Aged whose 132,000 volunteers play similar roles
to those of Christian Aid. At the other end of the scale, there were 143 organisations
with fewer than 50 volunteers; they formed 35 per cent of the total number of
organisations in the sample but accounted for just one per cent of the total number of
volunteers. A full breakdown is provided in table 2:

Table 2: Breakdown of sample organisations by number of volunteers

Number of Number of Percentage Number of Percentage

volunteers organisations of total Volunteers of total
Fewer than 50 143 35 3476 1
50-99 60 15 3998 1
100-999 166 40 49108 9
1,000-9,999 26 6 77024 14
10,000 and over 16 4 413000 75
All 411 100 546606 100
N=411

1
The number of organisations based in the for-profit sector was too small to make useful comparisons

7
Table 3: Older volunteers involvement by size of organisation

Number of Percentage of Percentage of Percentage of

volunteers volunteers aged volunteers aged total volunteer
50 and over 65 and over hours provided
by those aged 50
and over
Fewer than 50 47 13 49
50 – 99 41 15 44
100 – 999 62 28 63
1000 – 9999 71 33 72
10,000 and over 66 31 69
All 65 30 67
N=411

Clearly, size does matter. The proportions of older volunteers – whether defined as
those aged 50 and over or those aged 65 or over – and the percentage of total hours
they provide generally increase as the total number of volunteers rises until they
peak at the 1,000 to 9,999 band and drop back a little for those with more than
10,000 volunteers.

Breakdown by field of activity

Organisations were classified according to the International Classification of Non-

Profit Organisations developed at Johns Hopkins University to identify the field of
activity in which the sample organisations were active. While a full range of fields was
covered, there was a considerable degree of concentration in a few areas. Activities
were listed in descending order of the number of organisations involved (Table 4) or
by the estimated numbers of volunteers involved in each field (Table 5).

Table 4: Breakdown of fields of activity by number of organisations involved

Field Number of organisations Percentage

Social services 204 49%
Health 100 24%
Culture and recreation 33 8%
Philanthropic 25 6%
intermediaries and
voluntarism promotion
Environment 24 6%
Other2 29 7%
N=412

2
Education and research (1); development and housing (6); law, advocacy and politics (13);
international activities (3); professional associations and trades unions (1), religion (5).

8
Table 5: Breakdown of fields of activity by estimated number of volunteers involved

Field Number of volunteers3 Percentage

Social services 209,032 39%
Culture and recreation 92,428 17%
Health 91,448 17%
Environment 72,648 13%
Philanthropic 62,360 12%
intermediaries and
voluntarism promotion
Other4 12,049 2%
N=412

By either measure, social services is the largest category with almost half of the
organisations and 39 per cent of the volunteers. Nearly a quarter of the organisations
are involved in the field of health but this accounts for only 17 per cent of the
volunteers. Culture and recreation and the environment are represented by
comparatively few organisations but more substantial numbers of volunteers.
Similarly, volunteer centres and other intermediaries form only six per cent of the
organisational population but involve 12 per cent of the volunteers.

The range of areas of concern is largely provided by organisations in the VCS.

Statutory agencies were mainly found in the fields of health (34 organisations and 74
per cent of the public sector responses) and social services (ten or 22 per cent).

The proportion of the volunteer workforce made up of older people varied between
the different areas of activity.

Table 6: Older volunteers involvement by field of activity

Field Percentage of Percentage of Percentage of

volunteers aged 50 volunteers aged 65 hours contributed
and over or over by older volunteers
Social services 75% 40% 80%
Health 73% 32% 74%
Environment 71% 42% 69%
Philanthropic 44% 4% 43%
intermediaries and
voluntarism
promotion
Culture and 43% 14% 48%
recreation
All 65% 30% 67%
N=412

A clear pattern emerges; older volunteers have a greater involvement in social services,
health and the environment and less in culture and recreation and engagement with
intermediaries.

3
Excluding Christian Aid’s 300,000
4
Education and research (3); development and housing (261); law, advocacy and politics (730);
international activities (1,640); professional associations and trades unions (50); religion (9,365).

9
ROLES PLAYED BY OLDER VOLUNTEERS
The roles played by older volunteers in the sample organisations were many and
varied; we counted nearly 1,100 different role descriptions in the 411 responses
which provided data on this question! They were too varied for us to fit them into the
categories used for the Home office Citizenship Surveys so we have developed our
own classification on the basis of an analysis of the 1,100 role descriptions provided
by the sample. This is based on a total of 22 roles which have been brought together
under five headings. The results need to be treated with caution: the statistical
breakdown is limited to the number of times the role was listed by respondents and
does not allow us to count the number of volunteers involved in each role.

The broad categories are:

1. Providing front-line services to users or beneficiaries

2. Providing support services to users and beneficiaries

3. Administrative and organisational tasks

4. Leadership and specialist technical roles

5. Fundraising and external relations

The detailed breakdown is provided in tables 7-11

Table 7: Providing front-line services to users or beneficiaries

Role Proportion of organisations

Befriending and mentoring 25%

Providing information, advice and counselling 19%

(and case work for CAB)
Support and care 15%

Domestic help such as gardening, shopping, 13%

cleaning and knitting
Teaching and coaching 7%

Visiting 7%

Conservation and environmental 5%

10
Table 8: Providing support services to users and beneficiaries

Role Proportion of organisations

General support such as ward helpers in 18%

hospitals
Catering services 17%

Driving and transport 16%

Stewarding, officiating, meeting and greeting 5%

Table 9: Administrative and organisational tasks

Role Proportion of organisations

Reception, administration and clerical 36%

Organising events and activities 15%

Library services 2%

Table 10: Leadership and specialist technical roles

Role Proportion of organisations

Providing specialist expertise 24%

Governance, finance and leadership 15%

Research and policy work 6%

IT services and support 2%

Table 11: Fundraising and external relations

Role Proportion of organisations

Charity shop work 15%

Fund raising 10%

Raising awareness and publicity 9%

Campaigning 1%

11
WHY OLDER VOLUNTEERS ARE VALUED
A number of respondents made observations about the value of older volunteers to
their organisations. Two of them described their older volunteers as the ‘backbone’ of
the organisation while another used the term ‘indispensable’. For yet another it was
“absolutely fundamental to what we do to have older volunteers”. While one of the
reasons given by more than one respondent for valuing older volunteers generally
was the need to have a full range of people with different perspectives, many of the
responses highlighted specific ways in which older people brought more to the
organisation than younger volunteers. They were seen as:

• More committed to the organisation and its work – older volunteers were
“extremely capable and dedicated” – like the “lady in her 80s who has never
missed a day through illness and is so reliable”.

• Likely to stay longer – A number of organisations were targeting their

recruitment on older people as experience had taught them that older
volunteers “tended to stay longer” or were “less transient” than younger
people. Among a number of examples of long-term involvement was the “lady
in her eighties who used to be employed by” Surrey Community Action and
who “retired on a Friday and came back to us as a volunteer the following
Monday. She has now been volunteering for us for 20 years. Her husband has
also been volunteering with us for 30 years”.

• Putting in more hours – respondents felt that people over 50 either had more
time at their disposal or were prepared to give more of it to volunteering.
Citizens Advice found it was easier for older people to find the eight hours per
week it needed from them; Sure Start Portsmouth had older volunteers who
were prepared to take on a second family whereas the younger volunteers
only wish to work with one; and the British Heart Foundation suggested that
“the older they are the more hours they do”. There were some outstanding
examples of the time older people were prepared to give including the 92 year
old man who worked on a variety of tasks at Nightingale House who “comes in
at least two or three times a week” and the “lady who has volunteered 35
hours per week for the past 15 years” for Darlington MIND.

• Bringing more experience and skills – older volunteers “bring many varied
skills with them” (Huddersfield MENCAP); “have more life experience to give”
(Samaritans) or “have many skills and experience and knowledge” (Haig
Colliery Mining Museum). These may embrace some very specialist fields
such as ship-building and furniture making (National Museums, Liverpool).

• Being prepared to be more flexible or versatile – “older volunteers are so

prepared to get involved in a broader range of activities whereas younger
volunteers are more specific about the activities that they are prepared to do”
(Acorns Children’s Hospice).

• Having a rapport with older users or beneficiaries – several respondents

echoed the Samaritans’ view that it was “good to have older volunteers to
speak to older callers – more rapport”.

12
THE CAMPAIGN ISSUES
Respondents were asked three questions specifically about the Campaign against
Age Discrimination in Volunteering. These were:

• Whether they had an upper age limit for volunteers

• Whether they had experience difficulty in insuring older volunteers’

• Whether they would be prepared to support the Campaign by ‘signing-up’ on

its website.

Upper age limit

The great majority – 93 per cent - of respondents did not have an upper age limit for
their volunteers.

Of the minority who did have upper age limits, a significant number of respondents
reported that these were the result of problems over insurance; either insurers were
not prepared to insure volunteers above a certain age or the costs became
prohibitive. This was commonplace in the insurance of drivers (where the cut-off
points ranged from 65 to 75) but also affected personal accident and public liability
cover. We suspect that few organisations are in the position of one Primary Care
Trust that insures volunteers up until the age of 70 and assumes responsibility for
any liability after than age. They might be reassured by the experience of the
organisation which has been able to extend cover to its post 80 year old volunteers
but has yet to make a claim.

Others imposed an upper age limit for specific roles which were seen as particularly
onerous. An organisations providing emergency medical care retired its “active life
support members” at 70 because they needed “to be very fit and able to carry the
equipment bag which weighs 14 kgs”. Other volunteer roles were, however, still open
to them. Other specific roles which were used to justify age limits were ‘using
dangerous tools such as chain saws’ (limit 75); driving a minibus (70); driving a large
van for a furniture recycling organisation (80); driving a van which involves heavy
lifting (70); and leading groups of people with disabilities on foreign travel (70). One
organisation addressed similar issues by channelling older volunteers “to the more
sedentary tasks”.

Several respondents justified their upper age limits in terms of a duty of care: ‘we
have imposed an upper age limit on our drivers. This is not an insurance issue but as
a duty to care to our service users and to keep us in line with other local caring
organisations’. A Social Services Department reported that ‘beyond 75 they have to
retire. Our legal department will not extent this and state that it is their duty of care to
the passengers’. And a more specialised legal requirement from the Health and
Safety Executive prevents the deployment of first aiders at events unless they are
aged between 16 and 65.

13
Other organisations have a greater or lesser amount of discretion and individual
judgement built into their decision-making. One hospital has “an upper age limit of 85
beyond which it is at management discretion”. A youth offending scheme with
volunteers in their 80s is “considering an upper age limit but only as a duty of care to
our volunteers and each case will be looked at on an individual basis rather than
having an arbitrary age limit”, Other organisations check the health of older
volunteers, especially drivers, when they reach a pre-determined age but another
has a more equitable approach: “all our volunteers undergo a health check, the
results of which may preclude them from volunteering. This is a health limit though
and not an age limit”.

On the other hand, at least one organisation is using an age limit as a means of
avoiding tackling an individual case: “We have imposed an upper age limit of 80 on
volunteer drivers. This was not because of an insurance issue as the drivers use their
own cars under their own insurance. We had one driver in her 80s who was
becoming a risk to herself and the service users and, rather than single her out, we
imposed an upper age limit of 80 on all drivers in order to spare her feelings.”

Finally, there is evidence from the responses that practices are changing. Several
organisations reported that age limits have been removed or raised while others are
looking at the possibility of making changes.

Difficulty with insurance for older volunteers

Eighty-five per cent of respondents reported that they had not experienced any
difficulty with insuring older volunteers. We suspect that there may be a problem of
interpretation here. One organisation reported that they had “no issues with
insurance” they only had “personal accident cover up to 70 but this doesn't prevent
older people volunteering”. In other cases volunteers who are too old to be covered
by the insurance but wish to continue “sign a disclaimer and they volunteer on an
uninsured basis”. As one of the organisations which operates on this basis reported
with, we think, some degree of understatement: “we have to get them to sign an
insurance disclaimer but this is far from ideal”. Other clearly find the arrangement
unacceptable and retire volunteers when they can no longer be insured. And some
have yet to reach the point at which it is an issue: “we only have insurance up to the
age of 75. So far none of our volunteers have reached that age but we know we will
have to face this problem at some point”.

There are specific issues relating to the insurance of volunteer drivers. Insurance
companies are reluctant to extend cover to people over 65 or 70 without the
safeguard of a medical certificate provided at some cost to the volunteer. Similarly,
volunteer drivers using their own cars have been charged additional premiums.

A second area of specific concern is the refusal of some insurers to extend cover to
older volunteers (usually over 80) who are handling money. This is clearly a matter of
concern to a number of organisations.

On the more positive side, some organisations had ‘shopped around’ and found
insurance companies which were prepared to provide cover on reasonable terms: “it
took a very long time to try to get insurance cover. Finally only one company would

14
offer us insurance at a reasonable premium” and “we use (name provided) insurance
company and have no issue with cover”.

Signing-up for the Campaign

An overwhelming 99 per cent of respondents were prepared to support the

Campaign. There were a number of reasons why the small minority were not able to
do so. These included:

• the need to remove the organisation’s current upper age limit before signing-
up

• lack of authority within the organisation to make the commitment

• unwillingness to sign until the respondent was sure that his/her organisation
would be an active supporter of the Campaign

• refusal to sign until a pre-existing and unrelated dispute with Volunteering

England had been resolved.

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The first strong message to emerge from the survey is the importance of the
contribution made by older volunteers to the work of a large number of voluntary
organisations and statutory agencies across the country and working in many
different fields of activity. This is partly a matter of the sheer scale of their
involvement; two thirds of the 1.3 million volunteers involved with the organisations
surveyed were older people and they contributed 68 per cent of the total hours
provided by the volunteer ‘workforce’. But what is also impressive is the range of
roles played by older volunteers: there is no contribution to the work of these
organisations which older volunteers are failing to address from the provision and
support of front-line services to beneficiaries to the management and administration
of the organisations and raising the funds to support its work. And, thirdly, we have
the testimony of those who manage volunteers in these organisations about the
additional qualities or comparative advantages brought with them by older
volunteers.

We need, however, to sound a note of caution at this point. The involvement of older
people in volunteering is uneven. They make up a much larger proportion of the total
number of volunteers in larger organisations – those with more than a thousand
volunteers – than in smaller organisations where the total number of volunteers is
less than a hundred. And they appear to be concentrated in a similar fashion in a
comparatively small number of fields of activity, important though these may be.
Older people have a much greater involvement in the field of social services, heath
and the environment and much less in culture and recreation and the activities of
volunteer centres and intermediaries. Our evidence on the roles played by older
volunteers is also limited: we have counted 1100 different roles but we do not have
the means of calculating how many volunteers are involved in each of them. We also
have to point to the problems with the sample: while it has been extremely valuable

15
to have returns from the 20 organisations with the largest numbers of volunteers,
their inclusion has skewed the sample and requires us to be careful in the
conclusions we draw.

There is more apparent ‘good news’ when we look at the responses to the issues
highlighted by the Campaign against Age Discrimination in Volunteering: 93 per cent
of respondents do not have an upper age limit for volunteers while 85 per cent have
not experienced difficulty with insuring their volunteers. And practically everyone who
was contacted is ready to sign-up to the Campaign.

Again, we need to temper this optimistic scenario with a cautionary note or two. The
first of these is that our sample is likely to consist of organisations which, because of
their size and their membership of Volunteering England, are, perhaps, atypical of
the whole population of volunteer-involving organisations in their awareness of the
issues of age discrimination and their understanding of good practice in volunteer
management.

And there are some causes for continuing concern about some of the observations
made by the minorities whose organisations still imposed age limits and had
experienced problems with insurance.

While practices were changing, there were examples of organisations which were
imposing age limits because of the refusal of insurers to provide cover either at a
reasonable rate or at all or imposing an age limit for some volunteer roles rather than
judging each case on the fitness of the individual to meet the demands of the role.
Others – who may have been prompted by the legal departments of local authorities -
were arguing that a ‘duty to care’ was a complete rationale for a blanket age limit.

Similarly, some organisations felt that their problems with age limits set by insurance
companies could be addressed by an agreement with volunteers that they would
continue to be involved without insurance cover. And there were continuing issues
about insurance for drivers – where disclaimers were not an option – and for older
volunteers who handled money.

The findings thus not only provide evidence that older people can and do make a
huge contribution in scale and diversity to volunteer-involving organisations, there is
still work for the Campaign to carry it to make sure that an understanding of the
issues involved and an acknowledgement of what constitutes good practice is
applied across the sector.

We therefore recommend that:

• the evidence base is extended to provide more information about attitudes and
practice in smaller volunteer-involving organisations and in those which are
involved in the fields of culture and recreation and the other areas not
adequately covered by our sample

• further research would also improve the quality of the data concerning the
roles that older volunteers undertake – it was impossible to determine how
many volunteers undertake each type of role from the data

16
• the Campaign continues to call for approaches to volunteer management that
decide on volunteer’s abilities to undertake various tasks, however onerous,
by a case by case approach rather than a blanket age limit for any roles

• more specifically, the Campaign should engage with the concept of ‘a duty of
care’ and take legal advice as to how this can be followed without imposing an
age limit on all volunteers

• the Campaign also needs to collect intelligence about the practices of the
providers of insurance and produce a kind of ‘Which report’ to identify those
with whom organisations have dealt successfully and to ‘name and shame’ the
worst offenders

• as well as some very convincing statistics about the importance of older

volunteers, there is also a wealth of anecdotal evidence and potential case
studies available which should be used to promote the value and
indispensability of this group.

VITA is a project funded by the

Cabinet Office and co-ordinated by
WRVS.

17