Can the private sector halt the decline in youth volunteering?

As I stood in Wembley Arena the other week, listening to the screams of thousands of young people cheering for P Diddy, I was blown away. Not because of Mr Diddy, who I'm sure is a very nice man, but because all of the young people there were united by the fact that they had all volunteered through Orange RockCorps. Each of the 11,000 teens and young adults had completed at least 4 hours of voluntary work that had helped hundreds of charities and community projects - that's a helluva lot of volunteering!

Watching those kids having fun and hearing many of them talking about their volunteering experiences with excited voices, you'd be hard pushed to believe that volunteering amongst young people was actually in decline. Yet according to a survey from NFP Synergy out today youth volunteering is starting to show a marked dip, the first in fact after nearly three years of consistent growth.

There are a number of possible causes for the decline, rising youth unemployment - at its highest in over a decade - and the introduction of higher student fees are no doubt part of the equation, but I suspect the main cause is the sudden and somewhat brutal cuts to local volunteering and youth infrastructure. A combination of wiping away all of the national youth volunteering charity v's grant making capacity plus huge reductions in local authority youth spending, have seen literally hundreds of local youth projects go to the wall and with them much of the capacity to engage and sustain youth social action.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that removing a national framework that was proven to be increasing youth volunteering would do the exact opposite once it was gone. Of course the government blames the economy and the need for spending cuts to justify cutting v's funding but if that really was the case then why have they committed over £60m to a totally new youth programme?

The National Citizen Service has been hailed as the flag ship programme for the big society. In declaring this the Coalition Government must assume that the NCS will prove to be far more successful at engaging young volunteers than v was. Perhaps this will turn out to be the case but I very much doubt it. For a start the sums simply don't add up - £60m will buy around 30,000 six week placements for young people, of which just two weeks are spent on a voluntary project. That may seem like good value to some, but compared to the hundreds of thousands of volunteers generated by v and other projects for a similar sum, it's peanuts and will hardly create a step change in youth attitudes to social action.

The other issue for me is that the model for NCS does not appear to be based on any substantive evidence or need. When the Russell Commission was researching volunteer options back in 2005 there was no evidence to suggest that full time residential programmes would be more likely to encourage a habit of life long volunteering - in fact the opposite seemed more likely, for example gap year students were more likely to put off volunteering again until their late thirties or forties.

I'm sure that the few thousand young people that take part in the NCS will have an amazing experience, thanks to the quality of placement providers like Catch22, but I suspect that in the wider scheme of things their participation will do little to change the overall level of youth volunteering in this country.

The tragedy of all of this is that it seemed as if v was starting to bear fruit - the NFP Youth Engagement Monitor had shown a steady increase in youth volunteering since 2008. Whereas v may struggle to take all of the credit for this it has no doubt played a significant role and since its demise we are now seeing a decline.

Perhaps we now need to look to the private sector to motivate young volunteers, free from government dependency and the whims of policy makers. Initiatives like RockCorps that can harness the power of music and youth media have proven to engage the attention of teens otherwise distracted by an increasing array of commercial brands - I'd put money on their still being here long after the National Citizen Service has been consigned to the great policy bin in the sky.