THE voluntary community sector is insecure and fragmented. Local organisations are forced to clamour and compete with each other for funding to survive.

This may not come as a surprise to many but if, like me, you are precariously employed in the sector, you will have probably had to explain this to the sorts of people who suggest in blissful ignorance that the answer to life’s problems is a “community project” or a “volunteer.”

Yet it is exactly this sort of ignorance that has enabled successive governments to peddle the falsehood that the way to reduce spending on public services and simultaneously localise (ie “improve”) them is to gradually let the voluntary community sector take the reins in some vital areas of health and social care.

When you are at your most vulnerable — a health crisis befalls you or your housing and income go off the rails — what you need above all is consistency and reliability in how you are dealt with.

You want adequately trained and well-informed professionals to navigate you through the system, to support you as and when you require it. You want to be clear on your rights and entitlements. You want to have someone, or at least some team or department, to be responsible and accountable for what happens to you. That’s what our statutory public services are there for.

But when the scarcely resourced voluntary community sector is brought in to subsidise statutory services, what you actually get at your most vulnerable is a postcode lottery of chaotic services and waiting lists, arbitrary conditions and criteria you may or may not be fortunate enough to meet and a time limit on the support available.

This is because local councils and commissioners, under pressure to come up with “innovative” (and cheaper) ways to address their population’s needs, can only offer short-term and one-off pockets of funding for specific services, which local voluntary community sector organisations then bid for.

So while an organisation may continue to exist as a name or brand, what services it provides can chop and change — there one minute and gone the next.

Those who work in the voluntary community sector are lucky if their role is funded for a year — usually we are hopping from one expiring project to the latest pilot every few months.

It is impossible for professionals and the vulnerable people trying to access our services to keep up.

They might be referred into a service which then expires before they get to the top of the waiting list.

But as our public services are being rolled back, providing only the bare minimum of support for people, our chaotic and insecure voluntary community sector is all that is left to fill the void — and despite our best efforts, we cannot fill that void effectively.

A social worker from a hospital discharge team recently called our organisation in a panic. She is about to discharge a vulnerable anxious patient who cannot go home alone.

The patient is a typical “revolving door” case — frequent unplanned admissions into A&E, safeguarding issues with family members who appear to obstruct discharge, inadequate support at home but doesn’t qualify for “reablement care” and who cannot afford to pay for any services.

The social worker asks: “Can you arrange for a volunteer to take Mrs Kelly home and settle her back in? And can they also provide some household support for six weeks — shopping, cooking, that sort of thing?”

As if it were that easy.

I wonder whether she thinks, perhaps in desperation, that there is a magic hat somewhere from which we can pull unlimited competent, highly trained volunteers who have lots of flexible free time and are available at short notice.

I tell her that our six volunteers, who also work full-time already, have actually registered on a particular project to do a particular role that has been commissioned, and as such they are only trained and able to carry out that role, which incidentally also involves just one hour per week on a fixed day. So, no, I cannot arrange this. And it would be inappropriate to put a volunteer into such a complex-sounding situation anyway, although this doesn’t occur to the social worker, who just needs a quick solution to the situation because she is under pressure to close the case.

Closing a case these days quite often means “hand over to the voluntary community sector to haphazardly manage the client’s ongoing well-being in the community.”

There is a volunteer service based actually at the hospital she is calling from, which provides “going-home” support for vulnerable discharged patients. I tell the social worker to refer Mrs Kelly to them.

“They don’t cover this ward,” she says. She has already asked them to make an exception for her but they can’t because their funding is attached to particular wards only.

Taking on exceptions would skew the outcomes and figures they need to report to the funders.

So even within one hospital, there is no blanket volunteer service in place that can support patients post-discharge. Entitlement to the “going-home” service entirely depends on whether you manage to have a stroke or a heart attack and land yourself in the right ward. Mrs Kelly didn’t land in the right ward.

The social worker pleads with me to work out if I can somehow take this case on.

This is not how we are supposed to accept referrals into our service and I have a waiting list four weeks long of vulnerable people to see.

While the name of my organisation and my job title might indicate that I am there to help vulnerable people live independently in the community, the reality is I am not funded to help this vulnerable person.

Mrs Kelly is not the right age, she doesn’t live in the right postcode area and she doesn’t need the sorts of services I am supposed to be providing. Helping her will mean I spend less time spent on the people that I am funded to support.

Fortunately my organisation recognises the arbitrariness of such remits and so as much as possible we try to unbind ourselves from the red tape.

I compromise with the social worker. I will meet Mrs Kelly at home on the day she is discharged and settle her back in. I will then take on the burden of trying to find free ongoing domestic support for her, so the social worker can close her case.

But then the voluntary community sector rollercoaster begins, as I will inevitably end up signposting on to other organisations, which will need to follow their own protocols and assessments to decide if Mrs Kelly fits their criteria.

They are not obliged to tell me if she does and I am not obliged to chase it up. She will get dropped in transition somewhere along the way and ultimately end up back in hospital. And maybe by that point she will have deteriorated to such an extent that she qualifies for social care package, and then it’s a whole other journey.

There are many people like Mrs Kelly — those juggled around in the voluntary community sector because either they do not quite reach the ever-higher threshold for ongoing statutory support, or the statutory support in place has failed them.

If our voluntary community sector was just an “added bonus” on top of a well-functioning, well-resourced health and social care sector, I might not be so concerned. But we are being fully integrated into the delivery of health and social care now.

Our sector, known for having no money, no authority or accountability, is being commissioned to replace and provide vital services. Well, it will be an inconsistent gappy service — and we will all suffer for it.