Coordinating spontaneous volunteers in a disaster

The Cabinet Office’s 2019 guidance defines spontaneous volunteers as people unaffiliated with official response organisations who, without extensive planning, are motivated to give unpaid support. It expects every Local Resilience Forum to consider them, and warns that uncoordinated help can make an incident worse. The right response varies. Sometimes you open a large reception operation, sometimes you politely decline, and sometimes it is enough to point people to community leaders who can organise them locally.

The Voluntary and Community Sector Emergencies Partnership connects voluntary organisations before, during and after emergencies, and your local council for voluntary service may already run the relationships you need.

In the preparedness cycle this is the RESOURCE stage: who is available, what can they do, and is it safe to use them. Write the policy in PREPARE, because working out insurance on the day is too late.

The guidance calls this a Volunteer Reception Centre. It can be a leisure centre or a gazebo near the incident. Identify several buildings in advance and choose on the day. Good ones have these features:

• A safe distance from the hazard, outside the emergency area.
• Parking and transport to the task sites.
• Heating, toilets, first aid, food and drink.
• Separate space for private assessment, briefing and welfare.
• A notice board with the current situation and the types of work available.

Keep the form to one side of paper: name, contact, emergency contact, skills, medical conditions relevant to the work, availability. Online pre-registration can speed things up, but people still need an assessment on arrival. Delay is your main risk, as frustrated people will leave and go to the site on their own, or complain online. If the queue builds, add staff and explain why the process exists.

Sort into four rough groups: skilled and checked (nurses, electricians, plant operators, each confirmed by evidence), physical labour, support (kitchen, logistics, phone calls, translation) and not today. Thank the last group, take their details and explain that they may be needed in recovery, which usually lasts far longer. Unsuitable decisions need an audit trail, and a person turned away may come back to another centre. A group, such as a company or a church, can register through one contact, but keep individual names.

If your organisation accepts help and directs someone’s work, it may be treated as a temporary employer and held liable. Whether your public liability and employers’ liability policies respond depends on their terms, so tell your insurer about your approach now, and involve finance and legal colleagues when you write the plan. The guidance is clear that anyone who self-deploys without the responders’ knowledge is outside the policy. Keep names, location and task for everyone deployed.

Where an organisation has employees, the Health and Safety Executive expects volunteers to be included in risk assessments. The Social Action, Responsibility and Heroism Act 2015 requires a court to consider the context when deciding negligence in cases like these, though it gives no immunity. The guidance recommends that volunteers in the response phase are over 18. DBS checks are not suited to an emergency, so design tasks that need none.

Waiting is what drives people to self-deploy. Ask the command structure for tasks at every shift change, and give each task a site, a supervisor, a risk check, a start and an end. Teams of five to eight are easy to supervise. Limit shifts, plan breaks and rotate people away from distressing work; four hours is a sensible first shift for people unused to this labour. Those limits are our suggestion, so adjust them to the task.

Typical safe work: filling sandbags, moving furniture, clearing silt from homes with the owner’s consent, sorting donations, making tea, checking on neighbours in pairs. Leave boats, chainsaws, entering structures and anything in moving water to trained teams.

Volunteer forms hold personal data and often health data, which UK data protection law treats as special category. Use the data only for this volunteer’s involvement in this emergency, keep it secure, and delete it when it is no longer needed. Tell people this on the form. Consent is not always required to share data, and the ICO’s code says that in an emergency you should share what is necessary and proportionate, and record what you did afterwards. If volunteers visit homes, give them only the addresses they need.

Write a shut-down plan from the start. Announce the date in advance, sign everyone out and account for every name. Hold a short debrief, ask what they saw that the response missed, and pass on any risk or concern. Thank people in writing, signpost support, and point them towards organised groups so that their goodwill is not lost. Then feed what you learned into the next plan; see how to run a debrief.

Sinkaos gives people from outside your organisation time-limited, scope-limited guest access that ends on its own, and your own forms can capture registration details. Tasks are assigned, placed on the map and acknowledged, so a coordinator can see who is where. Forms, retention settings and exports support your GDPR work. A person still decides who does what. See Sinkaos for NGO field teams.