The Commission on the Future of Voluntary Action, Meeting the Challenge of Change: Voluntary Action Into the 21st Century, NCVO, London, 1996, 130 pp., £20.00 paper.

Abstract

Traditionally, when government wants to stall on a difficult but politically pressing issue, it establishes a Royal Commission (a technique little used by the bulldozer governments of the Thatcher era). However, despite the widely acknowledged (albeit with differing emphases) political significance of the voluntary sector, there has been no recent government incursion of this kind into the world of the voluntary sector. The only recent public government commentary has been The Individual and the Community which, in 1992, appeared both as part of the Majorite broad push on the Citizen's Charter and a flagging up of his government's desire (during the review of charity law, and the introduction of the community care reforms) to pull the voluntary sector further into the welfare market dominated by the three Es; as Barry Knight has put it, to encompass the ‘delivery of state objectives through voluntary means’.