§ Mr. SpringTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what is his estimate of the total number of hours worked by volunteers in the charities sector in each year from 1992 to the present. [90254]
§ Mr. BoatengThe information requested is not available.
The 1997 National Survey of Volunteering from the Institute for Volunteering Research found that, across the United Kingdom, an estimated 21.8 million volunteers were contributing an average of 88 million hours per week—an annual total of nearly 4,600 million hours. This compared with the 1991 figure, the date of the previous survey, of 23.2 million volunteers contributing 62 million hours per week—an annual total of around 3,200 million hours. These figures refer to all types of formal volunteering and include sports, arts and politics. Much of this volunteering will have taken place in public sector organisations, for example, schools and hospitals, but the 1997 survey found that 84 per cent. of volunteers were active in the voluntary sector.