Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie (Con)

My Lords, I do not propose to repeat what we said in an earlier debate in Committee, but I thank my noble friend Lord De Mauley for these amendments. I want to focus on Amendment 48 and the importance of volunteering. The Sullivan report identified that a key strength of the RFCAs was their extensive volunteer membership. In every other part of our communities, we are doing everything we can to support volunteers and volunteering, and in times of tight financial straits especially, we seek to appreciate the knowledge of volunteers. I am afraid my heart sinks when I think of replacing the volunteers who represent the voice of our local regions, nations and communities. They bring experience and institutional memory, and they do it because they want to—and we are going to replace that with board appointments made on ministerial advice. I am sure many colleagues in this House have experience of public appointments. I currently sit on two public bodies as a board member, to which I am appointed by one Scottish Minister and one Westminster Minister. We are subject to the whims of that department. In one case, DCMS has apparently decided that public appointments should serve for only one term. I leave it to you as to how that supports institutional memory and succession planning in our public bodies. At Creative Scotland, on whose board I sit, we are currently four or five board members short, and the public appointment process is so slow that we are not able to get to the front of the queue to fill those vacancies. So the idea that the wonderful volunteers we currently have supporting our reserve forces and cadets associations are going to be replaced by some sort of NDPB board appointments fills me with horror: we will end up with the usual suspects, rather than experienced and committed volunteers who are allowed to speak impartially, freely and frankly.