The sector needs communicate with each other better to improve standards overall, a charity chief executive said at a fringe event at the Labour Party Conference.

Samantha Hyde, chief executive of the Youth United Foundation, was speaking at a fringe event on volunteering yesterday, and  said: “There is a tendency for the voluntary sector to reinvent the wheel rather than sharing best practice.”

Hyde said this issue was raised in a piece of work her organisation had been doing around her members’ health and wellbeing services.

She said: “We found much of it was digital and some of it was extremely powerful so how do we share that with other organisations? How do we encourage them to work in the same way?”

Hyde also said that charities should do more to include people with disabilities and mental health issues as volunteers.

Politicians should support existing schemes 

Also speaking at the same event was Luke Pollard, Labour MP, who said politicians are too focused on supporting innovative projects instead supporting tried and tested schemes, a Labour MP has said.

He said: “We need to make sure that we are funding the organisations that are already doing amazing work. I think sometimes there is an attitude in politics of new initiatives. ‘Let’s support a new initiative and solve this’.

“Actually, let’s just fund the people who are doing a really, really good job of it already to make sure they can continue their good work.”

Pollard also said, at the event held in the “Youth Zone” of the conference centre, that government should “fund our youth services better”.

He said: “Since 2010, we have seen not only the funding for youth services eroded but the facilities that they rely on eroded.

“If you get rid of the community centre, you get rid of the base for all these different types of activities. We need to support the grassroots facilities.”

Pollard encouraged delegates to lobby their local MPs to provide more support for local volunteering schemes.

He said: “The thing about politicians is whichever political party they are a member of, they all start off as a volunteer, so volunteering should be something that politicians understand better.”