I believe the benefits system should keep volunteers on full benefits plus pay you extra when you do these volunteering jobs. This would help to build up your confidence, taking the pressure away from being unemployed and being on the breadline. You get that little bit of extra money.

You quickly say ‘Yeah, i like this, i want this, I’m going to get a job so that I can have this type of money.’ But what they are doing at the moment with the universal credit system is you lose 55p in every pound or 45 p in every pound.

I forget what the system is at the moment. It’s one of the two. And so it makes it so that you are actually losing money by trying to get back in to work.  So if they actually invested money into these people by keeping them on full benefits so they don’t lose anything, so they’re still getting the housing benefit, they’re still getting free prescriptions and they’re still getting their eyes tested and checked and all that kind of thing is all still there. It takes the pressure off these people and they get a little extra money because they’re doing some work and then they get used to this extra money and they want to keep it going.

So that’s another incentive for them to make it work for themselves. But it’s about confidence building. But the other thing is that you got to work with the people who want to do it. Everybody, will get to that point where they want to do it, but you’ve got to work with the people who want it, not force people into it.