the conviction of police officers, often attract enhanced publicity. Scandals and criminality are just as common, if not more so, in the private and public sectors, but charities are, in many ways, judged by higher standards than other parts of society.
The other side of the story
The harsh public narrative in recent years, compounded by a hesitant response from many charities, has caused a blurring and fading of the bigger picture. It has become easier for people to forget the size of the sector, its importance to the economy, the role that charities play in society and the contributions they have made and continue to make to a better quality of life in the UK. These aspects of the story have been receiving less airtime.
Despite media attention to large salaries there is also evidence that pay in charities is well below other sectors. In 2017, according to one authoritative survey, average pay in charities was 32% below other business sectors, and director and senior executive pay in London, where many big charities are based, was 50% below other sectors; in the country as a whole, the figure for charity chief executives was 31% below other sectors.37
The figures on the economy in the previous chapter also indicate that charities and the voluntary sector are not an optional extra or a luxury that is nice to have. One lawyer with extensive experience of working with not-for-profit organisations puts it like this in an interview with the authors:
“Charities are not just a safety net for what other sectors can’t deliver – they are a sector in their own right, employing large numbers, engaging volunteers and managing a lot of money. They deliver a huge amount of public good without which it is hard to see how society and the economy could manage.”
A 2018 report by Civil Society Futures (of which more in Chapter 19), made a similar point:38
Neither the public sector nor the market would be able to cope without the civil society action taking place across the country. It is the people informally helping their neighbours, getting involved with schools, food banks, sports clubs and tenants associations, who power communities and make public services viable, from health to education, housing, policing and much more. It is the consumer organisations giving feedback to business, the workers and tenants associations asserting rights. It is the organisations of people with disabilities that have made the inadequacy of some services so clear.
Kate Mavor, chief executive of the charity English Heritage, who is interviewed in Chapter 15, has also become impatient with the negativity:
“Charity is a massively important part of society and people should feel positive about it. These polls that say people don’t trust charities make you feel like saying, for God’s sake, someone get out there and tell the right story. We all know of the cases where they’ve done the wrong thing – they’re accountable, they shouldn’t have done it, and it’s been a good alarm call to charities that you shouldn’t get too eager about earning money and blurring the lines.
“But we’re held to a so much higher account than, say, Tesco. I can’t write to someone with a Wikipedia entry that says they’re interested in history because we’re not allowed to cold-call people now, but Tesco can send you a leaflet or an e-mail promoting their products whenever they like. The standards are different and the story of all the real good that’s done by charity needs to be heard, and policy makers need to understand it better.”
Although surveys have shown a decline in trust in charities, they also indicate more positive aspects. For example, the Charity Commission’s biennial trust survey, referred to above, showed in 2018 that 58% of respondents felt that charities played an ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ role in society and were more trusted than social services departments, companies, banks, MPs and newspapers.39 A survey in 2017 by nfpSynergy found that 65% of respondents trusted information from charities ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’; only a friend or family member was trusted more at 72%, while the figure for the BBC was 57%, the government 30% and politicians 15%.40
Despite the hardening of political attitudes, the government also still sees and encourages a role for charities in the delivery of overseas aid, the provision of some public services and action on social problems. The media and politicians also continue to rely on charities for analysis and information that underpins national debate on vital subjects. During the general elections of 2017 and 2019, for example, the Institute of Fiscal Studies, a charity, acted as a reliable and impartial information bank on the national economy. Wide publicity is given to charities’ research and campaigning on subjects ranging from wildlife preservation to the shrinkage of services for vulnerable young people. The World Wide Fund for Nature’s (WWF) Living Planet Report 2018, for example, which found that wildlife populations had fallen by 60% in the previous 40 years, was widely covered in the media; so was research by the children’s charity Barnardo’s, working with the all-party parliamentary group on school exclusion, which found that a third of local authorities had no more space in pupil-referral units for children excluded from school, putting them at risk of involvement in drugs and crime.41, 42
By 2020, charities had been under the cosh in one way or another for the best part of a decade. The level of salaries, the Cup Trust, high-pressure fundraising, Kids Company, Oxfam and the RNIB have been directly in the spotlight. Campaigning by charities has been a notable focus of criticism, particularly by some Conservative MPs. For more than a century, charity campaigns have played a part in important changes in the law and improvements in social conditions that few people would now argue against. These range from the abolition of the slave trade to universal franchise and the proper protection of children or animals, some of which will be examined later in this book. But campaigning and change, by their very nature, involve controversy and dispute, and the next chapter takes a closer look at the arguments.
‘Stick to your knitting’: the curbs on campaigning
In 2013 Gwythian Prins, a member of the board of the Charity Commission for England and Wales, made a remark during an interview that became a catchphrase and a talking point in the voluntary sector.1 Sitting in the impressive drawing room of the Athenaeum Club in London’s Pall Mall, he argued that some charities were getting too deeply involved in campaigning. “The weather has changed on this front,” said Prins, a historian and specialist in defence affairs. “The public expects charities to stick to their knitting, to use an old-fashioned phrase.”
The remark signalled a renewed focus by the regulator, supported by some politicians, on the vexed question of whether charities should be allowed to campaign or get involved in politics – a question that has been controversial since Victorian times. Prins’s clear implication was that charities should stay out of politics and confine themselves to the relief of distress. The contrasting view is that charities have always tried to eliminate the causes of distress – that William Wilberforce, for example, didn’t achieve the abolition of slavery by providing soup kitchens for slaves. The late Stephen Lloyd, an influential charity lawyer, argued in 2014 that charities are ‘necessarily and inevitably’ caught up in politics:2
If politics are not concerned with poverty, injustice, climate change, the distribution of wealth, human rights and education, what are they for? And since these, and many other issues, are the essence of charitable purposes, it is inevitable that charities will engage with contentious political issues. It goes with the patch.
This chapter examines how the boundary between charities and politics has moved back and forth in modern
