The National Citizen Service was a scheme that was the championed by our former Prime Minister David Cameron. I was there when he launched the idea at an event which was held at Amir Khan’s Gym in Bolton before the 2010 general election. Basically, National Citizen’s Service involves a young person attending a three week structured scheme where they attend a residential course and also get involved in community and charity week. For many young people it is the first time they have ever been apart from their parents.
The National Citizen’s Service Bill establishes a statutory basis for the scheme. It was announced in the Autumns Statement in 2015 that the scheme is being expanded from 80,000 places a year to 300,000 places a year by 2020. The present NCS Trust which is the overarching body controlling the scheme will be established a Charter body by a Royal Charter to guarantee its future independence from government and party politics. The Bill which has already been through the House of Lords was given an unopposed second reading after the debate yesterday.
Today is an opposition day with the debates in the main chamber being decided on by the Scottish National Party. In Westminster Hall there is a debate on the future of the Pennine Acute NHS Trust and so I will be attending that debate.
David Nuttall 
Before it expands to 300,000/£400m a year should they not demonstrate
a) The ability to reduce costs from the current £1800 per head and
b) That there is a net return from the money being spent.
From the NAO report “1.18 The OCS set up NCS without considering different ways it could meet its long-term aims of social responsibility, cohesion and engagement cost-effectively. The earliest business case available (November 2012) did not assess different ways of meeting the NCS aims and the OCS could not show that it had considered options before introducing NCS in 2011. The 2011 and 2012 pilots assessed how NCS was provided.
Since 2013, the OCS has not undertaken a structured analysis to understand how NCS outcomes could be better met. In 2016, OCS and the Trust commissioned an external review of how NCS activities supported individual outcomes.
1.19 ….It is currently considering how to identify and assess these longer-term outcomes, including the extent to which it can use data-matching across government datasets to identify, for example, employment outcomes. Identifying these long-term outcomes will be difficult as we have found elsewhere across government.”
I know my son enjoyed his 3 weeks with NCS, but I strongly doubt there was any benefit to society from him having done it. I’m frankly surprised that May has not quietly dropped NCS, it is afterall the only concrete legacy of Dave’s Big Society nonsense.