01/04/2010

Robin Walker today welcomed David Cameron's announcement of his vision of a Big Society and moves to encourage volunteering and community service.

Robin has worked as a volunteer for many years, helping with Riding for the Disabled in his student days and more recently volunteering alongside fellow conservatives to help with reading and literacy at a Worcester Primary School.

Last year he intervened to help voluntary orgasisation Worcester Wheels to get funding from the City Council and this week he visited the Myriad Centre where volunteers help to look after people with complex needs in central Worcester.

David Cameron yesterday suggested we need to build a Big Society - a society with much higher levels of personal, professional, civic and corporate responsibility; a society where people come together to solve problems and improve life for themselves and their communities; a society where the leading force for progress is social responsibility, not state control.

He announced a series of proposals to make this a reality:

•·         A new ‘neighbourhood army' of 5,000 full-time community organisers with the skills to identify local community leaders, bring communities together, help people start their own neighbourhood groups, and give communities the help they need to take control and tackle their problems.

•·         A Big Society Bank, funded from unclaimed bank assets, which will bring in private sector investment to provide hundreds of millions of pounds of new finance for neighbourhood groups, charities, social enterprises and other non-governmental bodies.

•·         Transforming the civil service into a ‘civic service' by making regular community service a key element in civil servant staff appraisals.

Robin welcomed the announcements and called for more civic action in Worcester, saying:

"Thousands of people in Worcester are already involved in volunteering and supporting local good causes. The work that they do is irreplaceable and provides endless benefits to our community. I want to see the government becoming an engine of growth for voluntary activity and doing everything it can to support independent community-based volunteering."

"One of the big problems with Labour is that they don't see beyond the state and tend to look to the state to solve all the big problems out there. Conservatives know that the best people to deal with problems are often the communities that face them and that huge amounts of good can be done by forces beyond the state - families, communities and volunteers."

"If I am elected, I will work with voluntary groups to support a new age of civic responsibility.  I will fight to make sure voluntary organisations are not tied up in red tape and encourage communities to come together in a common cause. I will bring this neighbourhood army to Worcester to make this city a better place."