A volunteer offers to help. You say yes. In that moment, your charity has taken on a set of duties, and the board may not have noticed any of them.
Articles about volunteers are usually about finding more of them. This one is about what happens after someone says yes: what you have created, what could go wrong, and where the board’s responsibility sits when it does.
If volunteers are carrying a large share of your delivery and nobody has looked at the arrangements in a while, that is a governance question before it is anything else.
What a volunteer is, and how one stops being one
A genuine volunteer works without a contract and without reward. There is no obligation on them to turn up, no obligation on you to provide work, and nothing changing hands beyond the cost of getting there and back.
Take away any of those and the picture shifts. Where a contractual relationship exists, and the person receives payment beyond their actual expenses, they can meet the definition of a worker – and a worker is entitled to the minimum wage. HMRC’s position is settled on this: reimbursing costs a volunteer has genuinely incurred creates no tax liability, and payments beyond that can be treated as reward.
The most common route into trouble is not deliberate. It is the round-sum allowance. Handing someone a flat £10 for travel when their fare was £4 means £6 of profit, and once a payment stops matching a real cost, the volunteer’s status is open to challenge. The same risk sits in vouchers given as thanks, and in extending staff benefits to volunteers.
The fix is dull and effective. Reimburse actual costs, ask for the receipt or the ticket, keep the record, and put it in a written expenses policy that the board has seen. Where a volunteer would rather not take the money, HMRC’s route is to pay it and let them give it back as a donation, not to skip the payment.
The volunteer agreement, and how to write one that doesn’t backfire
An agreement is worth having for most volunteers, and NCVO recommends one particularly where the role carries higher safeguarding risk. It sets out what your charity commits to and what it hopes for in return.
The word to watch is “hopes”. An agreement written in the language of obligation – must attend, required to complete, expected to work these hours – starts to look like a contract, which is the thing you have been trying to avoid. Keep it in the language of mutual expectation and make its non-contractual nature explicit.
On the safeguarding side, NCVO’s guidance is that the agreement should carry a commitment to follow your safeguarding policies including the duty to report a concern, a commitment to your code of conduct, a description of the support the volunteer can expect, an honest account of the risks in the role and the volunteer’s acceptance of them, and an explanation of what happens if something needs resolving.
That last one gets skipped, and it should not. A charity with no stated route for handling a problem with a volunteer ends up handling it badly, usually in the middle of the problem.
Volunteers doing more than the arrangements can carry?
The pattern is familiar: volunteers took on more as capacity got tighter, and the agreements, checks and policies stayed where they were three years ago. A free Charity Consultation is a quick way to find out how far apart the two have drifted.
Checks that fit the role
Criminal record checks are the area where small charities most often act on a half-remembered rule, and the half-remembered rule is wrong in both directions.
There are four levels of DBS check: basic, standard, enhanced, and enhanced with barred list. Which one a role qualifies for depends on what the role involves, and eligibility is identical for paid and unpaid positions. Enhanced checks with a barred list check are available only for regulated activity, which is defined in law and was drawn deliberately to exclude supervised volunteer roles where possible.
The part that surprises people: it is unlawful to request a standard or enhanced check for a role that is not eligible for one. Checking every volunteer as a precaution is not the cautious option. It is a breach, and it turns away good applicants who resent being treated as suspects. DBS publishes an eligibility tool for exactly this decision.
Where a role does involve regulated activity, a further duty follows that rarely reaches the board. Regulated activity providers have a legal duty to refer someone to DBS where the statutory conditions are met – if you remove a volunteer because they harmed or might have harmed a vulnerable person, referring is not a choice. Trustees should know this duty exists before they need it.
Around the checks sit the ordinary things: two references, a risk assessment for the role’s health and safety exposure, and a conversation about any adjustments the person needs. Ask about health conditions only to support and adjust, never to screen, and never make someone feel obliged to disclose.
Overseas volunteers need care, and the distinction is not the one people assume. There is no right-to-work check duty for genuine volunteers. What matters is that immigration rules separate volunteering from voluntary work: volunteering involves no contract, no obligation, no payment in kind and no substitution for an employee, and people whose visas prohibit work can often still volunteer. Voluntary work carries obligations and is treated differently. If your arrangements have drifted towards obligation, the immigration position drifts with them.
Starting people properly
NCVO recommends an introductory period, taster session or shadowing for longer-term roles, particularly higher-risk ones. It gives the volunteer a look at the reality before committing, and gives you a view of how they approach the work and whether they will follow your procedures.
For it to be fair rather than a way of filling gaps, the opportunity has to be genuine and available to everyone who applies, one named person needs to support the new volunteer and take their feedback, and higher-risk roles should not be left unsupervised during the period.
Induction should match the role rather than the calendar. A twenty-minute briefing for people volunteering at one festival and a full day for someone starting six months of weekly work are both inductions, and the same approach applies to each: decide what has to be covered, protect the time of whoever is delivering it, and have a fallback if that person is unavailable.
What it needs to include: the organisation and how it works, the people and the space, the policies – especially safeguarding and how to report a concern – the standards of conduct expected, the responsibilities of the role, who to turn to for support including your designated safeguarding lead, and how concerns about behaviour get resolved. Cover accessibility and language, because an induction people cannot follow is not an induction.
Build in a point where both sides review how it is going. Any doubt about someone’s suitability should surface early and be dealt with immediately rather than allowed to settle.
Training comes after. NCVO’s position is that safeguarding training must be pitched at the level the role requires, and that the Charity Commission expects charities to review their safeguarding training annually to check it still matches the risks in their activities. That is a board-level review, not an operational one.
Where the liability actually sits
Volunteers are not employees, which is often taken to mean the charity carries no exposure. It does.
Under the Equality Act 2010, your charity can be responsible for discriminatory acts by a volunteer acting on its behalf, and may be liable where a volunteer harasses a member of staff. Ignoring training does not automatically put the charity in the clear – what matters is noticing the problem and acting on it.
Health and safety duties extend to people affected by your activities, volunteers included. That means risk assessment for the role, not just for employees.
Insurance is where the old advice circulating in the sector is least reliable, so treat it as a set of questions for your broker rather than something to settle from an article. Does our public liability policy cover acts by volunteers? Are volunteers covered for injury to themselves, and if not, do we want personal accident cover? Does anything in our cover depend on checks, training or supervision we are not currently doing? Get the answers in writing.
What the board should be able to see
Trustees do not need to run the volunteer programme. They do need to be able to answer a small number of questions without going to look.
How many volunteers do we have, and in which roles? Which of those roles involve regulated activity, and are the checks for those roles current? When did we last review safeguarding training? Is our expenses policy being followed as written, or has a habit developed? What happens if a concern is raised about a volunteer, and who handles it?
Two record-keeping points follow. The policies underneath all this – safeguarding, expenses, health and safety, code of conduct – need to exist and be current, and charity policies that were written once and never revisited tend to fail at the moment they are needed.
And volunteers have to appear in your reporting. Their time cannot be counted as income in your accounts, which is covered in more detail alongside the other rules on in-kind support, so the only place a reader learns what volunteers contribute is the trustees’ annual report. A charity that runs on volunteers and never describes them has published accounts that misrepresent how it works.
A charity that treats volunteers well and manages them properly gets more of them. That is a real effect, and it is worth more than any recruitment campaign. The arrangements underneath are what make it possible to keep the ones you have.
This article is general information for UK charities and not legal or employment advice. Questions about employment status, minimum wage, immigration or insurance should go to a solicitor, ACAS, or your broker before you act on them. NCVO’s guidance on volunteers and the law is a good starting point, and its small charity helpdesk is free.
If volunteers are now carrying work your governance was never set up for, that is a specific problem with a specific fix – and a one-off governance project is usually enough to sort it.
