The Queen has announced that the National Citizen Service, the volunteering programme for young people, will be placed on a “permanent statutory footing” in her speech at the state opening of parliament.
The bill will make permanent the government's commitment to make the NCS, its flagship youth volunteering and development scheme, available to all 16 and 17-year-olds who want to attend.
The likely annual cost of doing this has been estimated at around £470m a year.
This will involve the creation of a National Citizen Service Bill, according to the background notes released alongside the Queen’s speech. The bill will support the 2015 Conservative Party’s manifesto commitment to expand the NCS by encouraging thousands more young people to take advantage of the programme. This formed part of its commitment to “build the big society”.
The bill is also to be created to “strengthen links between young people and schools, local governments and central governments to promote participation in the programme.”
It will create a new statutory framework to deliver the NCS, and put a duty on all secondary schools, including academies, sixth-form colleges and independent schools, to promote the NCS to young people and their parents.
The bill will also put a duty on local authorities to promote the NCS, and on the relevant secretaries of state to report annually on how they have promoted it.
The government said that it is currently in discussions with the devolved administrations about extending the Bill to their jurisdictions by a legislative consent motion.
The Cabinet Office committed to a further expansion of the NCS earlier this year, setting a target of 360,000 places by 2021.
Michael Lynas, chief executive of the National Citizen Service Trust, which manages the NCS programme, tweeted that it was a "big moment for NCS and young people".
Generation Change, a coalition of 18 charities and social enterprises that support over 600,000 young people to take part in volunteering projects, said it welcomed the announcement, but called on the government to go further by using the legislation to “create a new legal status for young people undertaking full-time volunteering, and to support schools to further embed the role of volunteering”.
It called for the introduction of a new legal status for “service years” in the bill. It said that service years give young people the “opportunity to volunteer intensively for a year in communities across Britain”.
It added that young people taking part in full-time volunteering are “currently not recognised for their positive contribution, are classed as “NEET” (not in education, employment, or training) and do not have their national insurance contribution counted”.
It also said called for active citizenship programmes such as, Giving Nation, Go Givers, Free the Children or Envision, to be given consideration in the legislation.
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