Volunteering England has warned that the sector will be unable to modernise if it does not put volunteering at its heart.

In a new campaign, supported by NAVCA, it is calling on CapacityBuilders to reinstate a strategic lead for volunteering at a national level.

Christopher Spence, chief executive of Volunteering England, said CapacityBuilders’ current proposal “threatens the entire sector by removing the voice, knowledge and skills base of volunteering from the strategic level of the entire ChangeUp agenda”.

“The proposal appears to take no account of the praise of the Durning report of existing strategic initiatives on volunteering, nor of the Treasury Third Sector Review interim report,” Spence added.

Kevin Curley, chief executive of NAVCA, said: “It is essential that local groups are given the support they need from a well-developed infrastructure. It is only by keeping volunteering as a national strategic lead that local volunteer centres can be given the necessary tools and resources to flourish and evolve.”

The campaign was launched as CapacityBuilders announced that a team of experts drawn from across academic centres is to establish new ways of evaluating the ChangeUp programme. The team, which includes representatives of Sheffield Hallam University and the COGS Consultancy, among others, won the job in a competitive tender exercise.