This is the third volume to appear in the Third Sector Research Series. Previous contributions have focused primarily on the organisational base of the sector, and this will continue in planned books on the third sector in the devolved administrations of the UK, on the geography of the sector, and on attempts to build the infrastructure of the third sector to support organisational development.

In this book the emphasis shifts to action by individuals – in many ways a defining feature of the third/voluntary sector. The extent, distribution, measurement and meanings of volunteering formed an important strand in the research of the Third Sector Research Centre (TSRC). These have also been issues of direct public concern, with great weight being attached, in particular during the UK Coalition government (2010–15), to trends in voluntary activity. Understanding volunteering is thus of central political, and academic, interest. The innovative approach embodied in this book mean that it will make a significant addition to the current body of literature on volunteering.

First, the authors have drawn on more than three decades of survey data. Despite variation in the approaches taken by these surveys, they demonstrate the long-term stability of volunteering rates. Second, recognising that there is considerable disagreement about how to define and measure voluntary action, the authors also examine contemporaneous qualitative evidence from individuals about the nature and meaning of their voluntary activities. This has been achieved through a long-term collaboration with the Mass Observation Archive, using qualitative material submitted by individuals in which they describe the nature and meaning of their voluntary activities, and discuss their attitudes to volunteering.

The result of this research is a rich mixed-methods study which offers important lessons, both positive and negative, about the nature of voluntary action. The quantitative research reveals that those seeking to raise levels of voluntary action should be more cautious in their claims regarding the extent to which it is possible to do so. The overall message here is that there has been stability in voluntary engagement, albeit with short-term fluctuations largely related to economic circumstances. The good news is that volunteering rates have not declined; the bad news is that despite generally rising prosperity, and increased levels of participation in higher education, neither have they risen.

This chapter provides a short overview of the history of the developing role of third sector organisations in the delivery of public services in the UK. This is a long and complex history, made more so by some confusion over some of the key terms, which is explained and clarified below. The nature of third sector involvement in public services can be traced back over three centuries, and has been structured by broader changes in relations between the state and the third sector, which are discussed here as a series of phases of relationship change. The most recent ‘partnership’ phase has been associated in particular with the political and policy initiatives introduced by the recent Labour governments to both broaden and deepen government engagement with the sector. This has created opportunities, but also challenges, for third sector organisations involved in public service delivery, which are outlined here and taken up in more detail in some of the later chapters of the book.

Public services

What a review of the history of the role of third sector organisations in the delivery of public services reveals, therefore, is that this is a long history. It is a history in which this role has changed to adapt to the differing influences of economic pressures, policy shifts, user needs and new forms of practice. But the engagement of the sector, or rather elements of it, with the needs for and provision of public services is a deep-seated feature of the development of these services, extending over three centuries or more. Those who suggest that it has all come about in the last few decades of policy reform are therefore failing to appreciate this longer history, or choosing to ignore it. However, this is also a complex history; and at the root of this complexity is some confusion, or at least debate, over the meaning, or the application, of some of the key terms involved.

First, there are different understandings of what is included within the notion of public services, and in practice these need to be appreciated within this longer-term historical context. The most obvious, and the most extensive, understanding of public services is those services that are provided to the public, either collectively or (on an open access basis) to individuals.

The detachment of large numbers of men from paid employment is one of the most significant social changes of the last twenty years or so. The once near universal expectation that men's working lives would extend from the time of their leaving school through to their state pension age has been shattered, probably for good. In Britain – the focus of the new research reported here – more than one in five of all 16–64-year-old men, or nearly 4 million men in total, are no longer in employment.

There has always been unemployment, of course, and during the 1980s and 1990s redundancies hit men very hard. But only a minority of the men who are now detached from employment are conventionally unemployed. Early retirement, ill-health and domestic responsibilities – and sometimes a combination of these with an important element of unemployment thrown in – are all key factors, too.

There is scant evidence that this increase in labour market detachment among men was ever anticipated by policy-makers or academic analysts. It has grown quietly, year on year, and even now the true scale of this phenomenon is not widely recognised. What is more, the trend among men stands in marked contrast to what is happening among women, who are becoming engaged in paid employment in ever larger numbers. Women's rising ‘labour force participation’ is well known and has been the subject of much research and vast discussion in the media.

THE SURVEY

The survey covered men aged 25–64 who were economically inactive or at the time of the survey had been unemployed for most or all of the preceding six months. It also covered part-time workers on the basis that this type of work is non-traditional for men. Taken as a whole, this is the group which we refer to as the ‘detached male workforce’.

The survey was carried out in seven localities:

1. Barnsley, in the heart of the former Yorkshire coalfield, an area badly affected by industrial job losses in the 1980s and 1990s. This metropolitan borough has a population of 230,000, comprising Barnsley town and surrounding mining villages;

2. Chesterfeild, in Derbyshire, which shares some of the industrial job losses found in Barnsley but has a more diverse and resilient economic base. Chesterfield borough has a population of 100,000, mostly in the town itself;

3. Northampton, a county town in the Midlands just seventy miles from London, which enjoyed expansion as a result of new town status and which has a relatively buoyant local economy. Northampton has a population of 190,000;

4. west Cumbria, as an example of a rural area with a declining industrial base;

5. north Yorkshire, as an example of an upland rural area (the survey area was within the north Yorks moors);

6. north Norfolk, as an example of a rural economy with an important seaside/tourist component;

7. south Shropshire, as an example of a lowland rural area.

The locations of the survey areas are shown in fig. A.1.

Social security and unemployment

Most commentators on social security provision agree that the protection provided by state benefits serves a number of different purposes. These include the relief or prevention of poverty, the maintenance of income in periods of labour market absence, life course investment to support retirement and the provision of extra resources to support child care or disability costs (see McKay and Rowlingson 1999, Ditch 1999). Within the UK these different purposes have also resulted in the development of different forms of protection, subject to different rules and administrative procedures. Taken as a whole, social security is complex, confusing and contradictory, as the experience of many of the respondents in this research testifies, and we cannot hope to explore all of this complexity here. However, the study was concerned primarily with men's experiences of unemployment or labour market detachment; and the way in which the social security system responds to these issues has a particular history and incorporates a number of key elements of current policy, which are explored in more detail in this chapter.

Current benefit policies on unemployment can be traced back to the nineteenth century and to the Poor Law, the legacy of which remains to some extent still with us over a century and a half later. The concern of the nineteenth-century Poor Law was with pauperism rather than poverty, with the individuals and families who could not provide for themselves.