Unnecessary child protection checks and other bureaucratic barriers are wasting the potential of volunteers in public services, Gordon Brown's volunteering tsar, Lady Neuberger, will say today.
The Liberal Democrat peer, brought in by the prime minister when he took office to be the government's volunteering champion, will urge hospitals and other providers to break down their resistance to using volunteers.
In the first of a series of reports, on health and social care services, Neuberger says that too often organisations are demanding Criminal Records Bureau checks on all potential helpers.
"This is clearly unnecessary. Checks should only be undertaken where a volunteer might spend time alone with young people or vulnerable adults. Managers need to show some common sense and stop, for example, requiring CRB checks for people working on hospital radio stations," the report says.
"Insurance and other legal considerations do seem to have created a level of risk-aversion throughout all management levels in health and social care services."
Neuberger was one of two senior Lib Dem peers brought in as so-called goats (as in Government of All the Talents) by Brown, along with Lord Lester, the lawyer who advises on constitutional reform.
While some changes can be made quickly to make health and other services more attractive to volunteers, Neuberger says there needs to be a long-term change in attitudes to volunteers.
"While the aversion to the use of volunteers in statutory health and social care services is understandable, it reflects a hugely wasteful attitude," she says.
Neuberger acknowledges that trade unions are often suspicious of volunteers because they see them as a way of cutting jobs and costs. But she says this should not happen. "It is about helping to create services that are people-centred ... this is not a cost-cutting measure."
She calls for a pilot project, based on a US model, where people with health conditions who have largely recovered help those with the same conditions.
"We need to move away from seeing care users as passive beneficiaries of services, and think instead about how we can use their experiences, and the knowledge they have gained, to improve the future experience of others, and ultimately the design of services."
Among the other recommendations are: an expansion of volunteering schemes in health and social care services so that it becomes commonplace for staff to volunteer; a new board, probably in the Department of Health, to get more volunteers into the service and ensure they are properly managed; and the creation of "volunteering hubs" inside health and social care services to make volunteering more mainstream.
Alan Johnson, the health secretary, welcomed the report. "It ... provides a welcome boost to the profile of volunteering."
· This article was amended on Wednesday March 12 2008. Lady Neuberger no longer speaks for the Liberal Democrats on health in the Lords as we said in the article above. She resigned from the health team when she became a government adviser. This has been corrected.