that began a millennium ago in Britain of doing good, serving others, defending the poor and weak, opposing injustice and pressing for change and progress in society. In today’s world nearly everyone will be served or helped by a charity at some point in their lives: they might use a foodbank, benefit from advances in medical treatment from charity-funded research, be saved from drowning by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), enjoy subsidised tickets at the Royal Opera House – yes, it’s a charity – or die in a hospice. Charities are a force for good, the conscience of the nation, part of its identity, part of its soul, even. What went wrong?
The answer lies in a combination of factors, of which one is the behaviour of charities themselves: the intensive fundraising methods of some big organisations, the level of salaries paid to some senior staff, some well-publicised cases of financial and managerial incompetence and the occasional failure of effective oversight by trustees. A new low was reached early in 2018 when the scandal broke about some Oxfam staff using the services of sex workers during the relief operation after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti – this is examined later in this book.
Another component was the shift in political attitudes to charities since the change of government in 2010, prompted in part by a different view of the role and purpose of charities that prevails among many Conservative politicians and some opinion formers in the media and think-tanks, and in part by recession and austerity after the global financial crisis of 2008. The politicians who took power were more likely than their Labour predecessors to argue that charities were getting above themselves and that their representative bodies should receive less subsidy in a time of financial austerity. A new regime at the Charity Commission for England and Wales reflected that change in political attitudes. Taken together, these various factors pitched charities into a more critical world.
High-pressure fundraising
Looking first at the conduct of charities, it is clear that some of the larger ones, in the drive for expansion and increased income, were seduced by the modern, database-driven methods of the marketing world. They fell into the habit of buying, selling and swapping lists of donors and potential donors, some of whom found themselves deluged by phone calls or mailshots that sometimes contained notelets or even coins – gifts intended to make people feel they had to give something back. Growing unease about fundraising was for years dismissed by some fundraisers as unworthy antagonism to good causes, but the suicide in May 2015 of Olive Cooke, 92 years old and a lifelong poppy seller for the Royal British Legion in Bristol, brought matters to a head. Although the inquest found that illness and depression lay behind her decision to end her life, the press focused on the pressure she had been under from charities. She had told her local paper that she had received nearly 270 mail appeals in a single month.
The Daily Mail went into overdrive. ‘Shame of the charities that prey on the kind-hearted and drove Olive to her death’, read a headline on 20 May. Chris Grayling MP, then leader of the House of Commons, spoke of “wholly inappropriate behaviour” and promised legislation. In July, under the headline ‘Shamed: charity cold call sharks’, the Mail’s reporters brought to light the callous attitudes to be found in some telephone fundraising agencies that worked for big charities, and gave details of the industrial-scale use of direct mail. The prevailing sense of anger prompted the government to set up a review, and it was perhaps fortunate for charities that this was led by an insider – Sir Stuart Etherington, then chief executive of the NCVO.
The review concluded that ‘the balance between giving and asking has sometimes gone awry’ and recommended replacing the Fundraising Standards Board with a new, self-regulatory body with enhanced powers, particularly on the use of personal data.1 Despite political pressure for a statutory system, the government agreed to set up the Fundraising Regulator, financed by a levy on charities. Parliament also passed the Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Act 2016, which required charities to set tighter controls on the fundraising companies they employed and to explain their fundraising policies in their annual reports. This new fundraising environment was buttressed by closer scrutiny by the Information Commissioner and prefigured in many respects the European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation of 2018, which gives citizens greater control of their personal data.
The whole episode forced a fundamental reassessment by charities of their fundraising practices and left many professional fundraisers, who had enjoyed considerable freedom for years, in a state of shock and confusion. It also caused tensions between big and small charities. The small mental health charity Sane was sure in 2016 that its income was suffering because of the unpopular fundraising methods of larger charities: “We’re getting fewer and fewer donations because of the way they’ve behaved,” its chief executive, Marjorie Wallace, said.2 The small environmental charity Friends of the Lake District was not experiencing a fall in income, but its chief executive, Douglas Chalmers, was so concerned that he wrote to all its members in the same year to dissociate it from the ‘inappropriate fundraising methods’ of some big charities. ‘The stories in the press represent a huge betrayal of trust by a minority of charities towards their donors,’ he wrote. ‘If I was a donor, I would be wondering if any charity I supported was behaving properly.’
The long-term effects of tighter regulation on the collective income of charities remain to be seen, but the outlook in 2019 was not encouraging. That year’s UK Giving survey by the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), based on 12,000 interviews with members of the public, found that ‘the key measures of giving are on a downward path’.3 Similarly, the data company Charity Financials found in its 2019 Income Spotlight Report, based on income figures in charity accounts rather than on interviews, that growth in fundraised income at the top 100 fundraising charities in the UK had fallen to 0.5% in 2017/18, compared to 2.8% the year before and between 4.5% and 6% between 2013 and 2016.4 ‘The challenge looming over the future,’ it concluded, ‘is to break through the apparent plateau in income growth, to regenerate public trust and the belief that giving to charities is a special, ethical and effective way of helping to address the social challenges which private and government sectors are not.’ Any effect of tighter regulation on fundraising was, of course, compounded significantly by the income shortfall resulting from the coronavirus pandemic.
Large senior salaries
Before the Olive Cooke case and the resulting reforms of fundraising, the media was already focusing on the pay of charity chief executives. More than 90% of registered charities have no paid staff and fewer than 1% of them employ anyone earning £60,000 or more; many of the 909,000 people employed in the sector in June 2019 (about 3% of the UK workforce) work in low-paid jobs such as assistants in care homes; and, generally speaking, charities pay their staff less than the commercial sector.5 But in 2013 The Daily Telegraph, which had been consistently sceptical about the government’s commitment at the time to devoting 0.7% of the country’s national income to overseas aid, published the fact that 30 executives in the 14 major charities that participate in the Disasters Emergency Committee – and dispense significant public funds when earthquakes, famines and other disasters happen around the world – were being paid more than £100,000 a year.6 The story included a comment from the then chair of the Charity Commission, William Shawcross, about ‘disproportionate salaries’. Senior charity pay began to be a matter for comment and dispute. The NCVO initiated its own inquiry which urged charities to publish their chief executives’ pay within two clicks of the home page of their websites and explain how it is benchmarked against comparable jobs in other sectors. Some charities have followed this approach, but by 2020 it was not yet standard practice.
The payment of such salaries out of funds raised partly from the public on the grounds that they will be used for good causes in the UK or abroad clearly causes an unease that is not necessarily mitigated by the fact that the charities in question pay their senior staff significantly less than private or public sector organisations of similar size: Oxfam, for example, paid its chief executive £140,000 in 2018, well below the going rate for a private sector company with a similar turnover
