Given the slump in the economy over the past year, it would be reasonable to assume that volunteering — a cornerstone of corporate social responsibility — might now be regarded as something of a luxury by City firms and their employees.

With jobs being cut and the outlook being so gloomy, employees might be forgiven for being too frightened to leave their desks to serve the wider community lest their desk not be there when they return. And when times are tough, firms might be entitled to expect employees to focus on the bottom line.

However, according to City Action — the City of London Corporation body that brokers volunteering arrangements between City firms, local charities and community groups — the reality is rather different.

It has just released figures for the first quarter of this financial year that show the number of individual acts of volunteering by City employees is up 40% on a year ago. April was a particularly impressive month with levels of volunteering up 128% on the same time last year.

City Action also claims that in the past six months it has attracted more than double the number of new clients compared with the previous six months — up from 7 to 15.

Corinne Phillips, its community involvement officer, said: “Last October when the credit crunch hit, we were apprehensive. We even did a risk analysis to decide what we would do if we lost a significant number of clients. But in fact our client numbers are up and so are the instances of volunteering.”

So what accounts for volunteering’s robustness in such dismal times? Advocates claim it improves employee engagement, raises group morale and increases the sense of corporate belonging, ultimately helping a company’s bottom line.

Phillips thinks companies may realise that the “cohesive” effect of volunteering on a workforce is even more valuable when times are tough. She points out that corporate social responsibility in general has been steadily expanding for more than a decade, and there is now a “trickle down” effect with the City’s big guns putting pressure on small and medium-sized client firms to follow their example. “Of the new companies that have come to us in the past six months, 50% have been SMEs,” said Phillips.

The demand for volunteers from charities and community groups in the deprived boroughs surrounding the City is also at a record high.

And earlier this year Giles Keating, head of global research at Credit Suisse, was named Volunteer of the Year at the London Lord Mayor’s Dragon Awards in recognition of a free voicemail scheme — VoiceMail4All — that he set up for London’s homeless.

It has been 10 years since Keating, an economist, first realised that phone contact was essential if society’s most marginalised citizens were ever to come in from the cold. Without it, the homeless could not keep in touch with support workers, family and friends and potential landlords and employers.

“Not having a phone aggravates exclusion,” said Keating. “And having a mobile isn’t the solution. Homeless people lose mobiles or have them stolen in hostels. Homeless people also often have trouble organising themselves and forget to charge their phones.”

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