Over the last decade or so, the British government developed policy initiatives to promote volunteering as the essential act of citizenship; a means for generating social capital, combating social exclusion and delivery of high quality public services. Governments choose to prioritise specific volunteering activities or commit support to targeting particular groups of people into volunteering. The paper investigates whether the net amount of public money committed to particular volunteering programmes is correlated to stated government priorities. The research is particularly timely, given the current political consensus on the value of volunteering in Britain and the desire to increase voluntary sector provision of public services. This study offers the first comprehensive overview and detailed analysis of the development of the UK’s New Labour government involvement in this area (1997-2010). The research is multi-method. Firstly, discourse analysis has been utilised to analyse the rhetoric of two central government policy documents. Two further methods are then employed to overcome the significant methodological challenges posed by the absence of a central source of government funding information. Structured interviews with sector elites provided new information on lesser known government-funded volunteering programmes. Further, systematic searches through government spending data have been relied on in order to map volunteer-funding streams. This paper concludes that New Labour targeted its funding to specific volunteering activities (e.g. international development) and specific groups of people (e.g. young people) in conjunction with a holistic approach which encourages volunteering per se. This will aid our understanding of what value New Labour placed on volunteering.
