The UK should establish a permanent register of volunteers. Throughout the COVID crisis there has been a constant demand for volunteers to help in many different ways; delivering supplies to the vulnerable, stewarding at testing and vaccination centres, administering vaccinations and helping lorry drivers held up at Dover are some examples. All these demands for volunteers have had to start from scratch. A permanently established database of those prepared to volunteer should save much time and effort.
Many millions of our adult population volunteer each year but this is not organised currently on a national basis. The government should fund the establishment of the database. People would be able to provide their personal information, contact details, qualifications, skills and experience, the sorts of roles they would be prepared to accept, their vehicle details and if they are willing to use their vehicle in the offered volunteering work.
A set of basic checks could be completed after registration and before deployment. There was nothing more embarrassing nationally than the news that retired medical staff had to complete 21 different checks to be able to volunteer to inoculate in the vaccine programme. With a permanently established database many of these checks could be completed before volunteers might be deployed. At regular intervals volunteers would be invited to update their database entry.
In the future when there was a demand locally or nationally for volunteers, the database would provide the data to approach the right people with the minimum of delay.
The government should fund the establishment and maintenance of the database. I suggest that the dead hand of government and the civil service should not be involved in that establishment and maintenance. It seems that the big supermarkets manage to maintain databases of their customers through loyalty cards without too many embarrassments and perhaps a supermarket firm might be a safe guardian of the database.
943-11