Shawcross was succeeded as chair of the Commission in March 2018 by Baroness (Tina) Stowell, a Conservative peer who had been leader of the House of Lords from 2014 to 2016 and a member of the Cabinet for the second of those two years. On her appointment she resigned the Conservative whip to become an independent, or ‘crossbench’, peer; and after seven months she delivered a ‘statement of strategic intent’ which emphasised that charity was ‘a vital force for good in society’ and that the Commission shared responsibility to maximise its positive impact.26
But she was critical of the recent record of charities generally in an article in The Times after the Commission published its report on the Oxfam affair:27
We’ve seen charities losing sight of what they stand for in pursuit of organisational advantage. We’ve seen charities engage in pressure-tactic fundraising, supposedly justified by the money that raises for the cause. We’ve seen charities that should be working together instead competing for scarce resources. And we’ve seen charities putting their reputations before their purposes in responding to failings.
This prompted Sir Stuart Etherington, then chief executive of the NCVO, to complain in a letter to the Commission about a lack of balance:28
Charities have been far from complacent. I am concerned that the message coming from the commission is only a partial one. While claiming that it wants charity to thrive and inspire, it is only talking about how ‘charity’ has failed. Of course we want charities to learn from the mistakes of others, but these broad generalisations are far from helpful. Indeed, there is a real risk that they will achieve the opposite effect: they entrench public misconceptions and erode the public’s trust.
Public opinion
All the factors outlined above – scandals in charities, harsher political and media attitudes and a tougher approach by the regulator – were significant in themselves. But collectively they also influenced and chimed to some extent with the mood of the public, which was perhaps the most significant effect of all. There was a measureable change in the public’s attitudes to charities. One survey showed that people did not much like being cold-called by charities, being stopped in the street by ‘chuggers’, being talked at by fundraisers on their doorstep in the evening or receiving mailshots out of the blue from charities they had no interest in.29 Research on trust in charities, conducted every two years for the Charity Commission, scored it in 2018 at 5.5 out of 10, compared to 5.7 in 2016 and 6.7 in 2012 and 2014.30 Of the 45% of respondents who said in 2018 that their trust in charities had decreased in the previous two years, 62% cited negative news stories as a reason and 41% said they were donating less because of their loss of trust. Regular surveys by the research consultancy nfpSynergy showed that the proportion of respondents who trust charities ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ dropped from 70% in 2010 to 54% in September 2018, with a low point of 47% in October 2015, soon after the fundraising scandal, and a relative recovery to 64% in February 2017.31
The historical perspective
The sobering and occasionally shocking stories that emerged in the 2010s are not entirely a new phenomenon. Ever since charities were first established in mediaeval times there has been a risk of abuse, often to do with trustees misapplying or appropriating charitable funds.
Criticism of charities by politicians is not new either. William Gladstone called charities “institutions of questionable value” when he was chancellor of the exchequer in 1863.32 The government led by Margaret Thatcher was at loggerheads with the Church of England in 1985 over its report Faith in the City, which led to the Church – a charitable body – being labelled the unofficial opposition to the government: one cabinet minister was reported as dismissing the document as “pure Marxist theology” and another Conservative MP said it proved that the Church was governed by a “load of Communist clerics”.33 When Douglas, now Lord, Hurd was home secretary in 1986, he referred to organisations, including charities, that took issue with government policies as “strangling serpents”.34
But anti-charity sentiment after 2010 was unusually intense, leaving charities collectively feeling bruised, demoralised and less sure of themselves. Occasional transgression by individuals made matters worse: charity staff or volunteers are convicted in the courts, from time to time, of helping themselves to charity funds. In 2018, for example, the former chief executive of Birmingham Dogs Home, Simon Price, was jailed for five years after defrauding the charity of around £900,000.35 Five years earlier, five people were jailed in Southampton after they used fake identity documents and collecting tins with home-printed logos to collect money in pubs: they pocketed £26,000, while the cancer charity Marie Curie received £263.36 Such cases, rather like 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