UK’s chief scout calls for annual leave allowance for volunteering

Employees should be given a fixed amount of annual leave by their companies to use for volunteering, the UK’s chief scout has said.

Dwayne Fields, who was appointed in September, said allowing people 35 hours a year for voluntary purposes would make “a huge difference” in happiness and productivity at organisations.

The Scouts, formed by Sir Robert Baden-Powell in 1907, has a membership of around 500,000 young people and adult leaders across the country.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Mr Fields said: “One of the most amazing things about volunteering is it has so many far-reaching benefits.

“It benefits the volunteer – you learn skills, you build your confidence, you help other people – it’s great for the community, the person who’s receiving the volunteer, and whether it’s the young people within the Scout movement, they learn to be stronger, more confident, they build friendships, they develop their skills, so it benefits everyone.

“People who volunteer tend to be happier. People who are happier tend to work more productively. So it’s good for the person, it’s good for the community and it’s good for the organisation.”

Mr Fields, who was the first black Briton to reach the North Pole, said being a volunteer with the Scouts had “saved” him from taking a much darker path earlier in life.

The 41-year-old previously slept on trains while being homeless and had a gun aimed at him from close range when trying to recover his stolen moped aged 21, but it fortunately misfired.

He said: “Scouting is for everyone, and if you’re coming there with a mindset to learn, to make friends and to build yours and the confidence of those around you, then there’s a place in scouting for you. Scouting reflects society.”

Andrew Haldane, the former chief economist at the Bank of England, said volunteering was an “afterthought” in public policy despite having a significant economic impact in real terms.

Mr Haldane told the programme: “In our measures of GDP, volunteering scores a big zero when it comes to the value it creates. That just feels completely wrong.

“It’s tens of millions of people in the UK who volunteer every year, and that translates in monetary terms into tens, if not hundreds, of billions of pounds of activity, if we would have put monetary numbers onto it, and that is transformational – a largely invisible economy out there, that is neither measured nor therefore managed or valued as much as it ought to be.”