The government will expand the National Citizen Service, its flagship youth volunteering scheme, to serve 300,000 participants a year in 2020, at an estimated cost of £1.1bn over the course of the Parliament.
Chancellor George Osborne announced the expansion during his autumn statement and spending review speech in Parliament today.
“To help all our children make the transition to adulthood – and learn about their responsibilities to society and not just their rights – we will expand the National Citizen Service,” he said.
“Today, 80,000 students go on National Citizen Service. By the end of the decade we will fund places for 300,000 students on this life-changing programme pioneered by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister.”
Spending review documents reveal the NCS is expected to cost £200m in each of the next two years, £300m in the year to March 2019, and £400m in the year to March 2020.
The unit cost of each place on the NCS has previously been estimated at around £1,300. However in practice a quarter of places have usually gone unfilled, raising the cost per attendee to around £1,800.
The NCS budget comes against cuts to other parts of the Office for Civil Society, the government department responsible for charities. The government said that OCS headcount will be cut as part of wider departmental spending cuts of 26 per cent, although it also promised more than £100m of new money for social impact bonds, a payment-by-results mechanism involving private investment.
Karl Wilding, director of public policy at NCVO, said that it was “an unalloyed good thing” that NCS was being expanded, although he said it was clear that while government was keen to fund volunteering and social investment, it appeared more agnostic about general charities.
OCS ‘missed previous NCS targets’
Last year the Office for Civil Society failed to hit its minimum recruitment targets for the most recent round of the National Citizen Service, despite spending £130m on it in the year ending March 2015.
In 2014 the OCS recruited fewer than 58,000 participants for the NCS. The initial target for the scheme was 80,000 participants and the minimum target was 60,000.
Fewer than 53,000 people completed the course, which included a two or three-week full-time programme plus 30 hours of community volunteering, and ran in two tranches in summer and autumn 2014.
The programme's cost of £130m in the year to March 2015 was just under half the total OCS budget of £270m.
