Читать книгу What Have Charities Ever Done for Us? - Cook Stephen - Страница 12

2

What has gone wrong?

Charities frequently act as the canary in the mine, drawing early attention to social problems such as the extent of homelessness or poverty, and leading the way in providing relief. This was particularly evident at the start of the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020. Foodbanks were in the front line as unemployment and poverty increased; women’s charities reported and responded to a growth in domestic violence during the lockdown periods, as detailed in Chapter 6; Shelter campaigned to prevent eviction of tenants falling into arrears with private-sector landlords; the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) publicised an increase in the abandonment of pets; and the Alzheimer’s Society spelled out how restrictions on visiting care homes were increasing the confusion and suffering of people with dementia. Charities were also engaged in the policy debate on plans for national recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, particularly in relation to the environment. Wildlife and Countryside Link, for example, proposed the establishment of a Nature Service to take on rural projects and provide employment, and CPRE, the Countryside Charity (formerly the Campaign to Protect Rural England) launched a manifesto for a ‘green recovery’ that took issue with the government’s plan to ‘build, build, build’.

Generally, however, charities were in a gloomy place at the end of the second decade of the 21st century. For the best part of 20 years, until 2010, they had a reasonable relationship with government and were well protected by their general reputation and the positive associations of the word ‘charity’. It was comparatively rare during that period for them to be criticised in the media or by politicians. Lately it seems as if they are under scrutiny all the time, and there have been periods when national newspapers and television current affairs programmes seemed to be competing with each other to come up with the next charity-knocking story.

Why has this remarkable change taken place? Charities, after all, are part of a tradition 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 of more than £400 million. There tends to be less criticism of charities that do not rely on public fundraising but either earn their income from selling services or benefit from big endowments. Surveys show that the largest salaries are concentrated in the big healthcare foundations or providers such as Wellcome Trust, which paid the top member of its investment team £4.6 million in 2019, and the London Clinic (where the top salary was £1.27 million in 2018).⁷ These two have not been the subject of hostile national media attention.

But some other charities that do not rely on public fundraising have attracted criticism over senior pay. The Consumers’ Association, the charity that runs the Which? publications that earn the bulk of its income, came under fire from its own members in 2016 for a bonus scheme that meant its chief executive at the time received £462,000 in 2017; and in 2019 the birth control charity Marie Stopes International, which had received only £4 million of its £296 million income in 2018 from donations, was asked by the Charity Commission, following press attention from The Daily Mail and The Sun on Sunday, to explain why its chief executive was paid a package in 2018 of £434,500, half of it as a bonus.⁸ (The charity was renamed MSI Reproductive Choices in 2020.)

Other scandals

As well as outcries about fundraising and high pay, there were also high-profile instances of financial or managerial incompetence, inadequate supervision by trustees or the abuse of charitable status. One of the most disturbing stories broke in 2012 about the Cup Trust, a cynical, sophisticated tax avoidance scheme set up as a charity to take advantage of Gift Aid, under which donations to charity are augmented by the amount of basic rate tax the donor has paid on the sum donated. Three years later, there was extensive media coverage of the collapse of Kids Company, a charity with a ground-breaking approach to helping marginalised children and teenagers, set up and led by the persuasive Camila Batmanghelidjh; she charmed David Cameron when he was prime minister and successfully solicited money from government departments. The running of the charity was strongly criticised by a committee of MPs in 2016,⁹ but early in 2021 Mrs Justice Falk in the High Court refused an application by the Official Receiver to disqualify the trustees as company directors, calling them ‘a group of highly impressive and dedicated individuals’. She added that it was ‘more likely than not’ that a planned restructuring of the charity would have succeeded were it not for a police investigation into allegations of sexual assault at the charity, which proved unfounded but prompted the collapse.¹⁰ Media coverage of the case in 2015 and 2016 only reinforced the impression that some charities were profligate and incompetent, and the Oxfam scandal of 2018, mentioned at the start of this chapter, introduced the fear that some failed to protect vulnerable beneficiaries from exploitation. The spotlight swung onto the question of safeguarding by all charities, not just those involved in overseas aid and development. The Charity Commission updated its guidance on safeguarding soon after the Oxfam affair, and in 2020 published a report on a special school run by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) which said there had been ‘comprehensive failures in governance that placed the safety of young people in its care at risk and allowed harm or distress to be suffered by some’.¹¹

The change in political attitudes

So much for the behaviour of charities: what about the other main element in the cloud that hangs over them – the shift in the attitude of government? In the first decade of the 21st century, under the Labour administrations led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the sun shone on charities and the voluntary sector. Charity law was modernised, the Office of the Third Sector (later renamed the Office for Civil Society [OCS]) was set up in the Cabinet Office to smooth the path for charities and the sector was seen by the government as an important component in the drive to reform public services. Gift Aid was relaxed so that donations of any size – not just those above £250 – could bring a tax refund to charities. Many Labour MPs and ministers had worked in the sector when the party was in opposition and were sympathetic to it. In an ambitious document in July 2007, Brown pledged to invest an unprecedented half a billion pounds in the sector.¹² ‘We set out … a vision of how the state and the third sector, working together at all levels and as equal partners, can bring about real change in our country,’ wrote the Prime Minister in the introduction.

All that was severely modified, however, after the global financial crisis and the formation of the Conservative-led Coalition government following the general election in 2010. Charities were not spared in the new era of austerity: the funding of capacity-building organisations set up by Labour came briskly to an end, and subsidies to umbrella bodies like the NCVO and the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (Acevo) were soon phased out. Responsibility for charities and voluntary organisations also slipped down the Whitehall hierarchy. The budget of the OCS fell from £227 million in 2009/10 to £56 million in 2014/15, a drop of about 70%.¹³ When Theresa May became prime minister in July 2016, the OCS was moved from the Cabinet Office, seen as the policy centre of government, to the more peripheral Department for Culture, Media and Sport (later the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, DCMS); and after the general election of 2017, when the Conservatives lost their overall majority in Parliament, the sector lost a minister of its own and responsibility for it was added to the portfolio of the minister for sport. This prompted the shadow civil society minister at the time, Steve Reed MP, to remark that the government didn’t quite know what to do with the OCS. “It should be at the centre of government rather than parked in a lay-by somewhere,” he said.¹⁴

After 2010 there was also more overt criticism of charities from some parliamentarians, mainly on the right of the Conservative Party. Charlie Elphicke, MP for Dover and Deal until 2019 and a member of the public administration select committee, complained during a hearing of the committee that “Shelter doesn’t provide any shelter” and that political lobbying by charities “subverts democracy and debases the concept of charity”.¹⁵ Elphicke, who was jailed for two years in 2020 for sexual assaults, went on: “If a member of the public puts a pound in a rattling tin, and that money is spent on press officers and Bell Pottinger to lobby a bunch of politicians, wouldn’t that person feel a bit disgusted and a bit cheated?” His fellow committee member, Robert Halfon, Conservative MP for Harlow, said there were too many very large “Tesco-type charities” that spent millions of pounds lobbying in Whitehall and questioned whether such organisations should have charitable status. The fundraising scandal discussed above also prompted outspoken criticism from some MPs.

Trevor Morris, then visiting professor of public relations at the University of Westminster, told a Charity Finance Group conference in 2013 that charities were not seen as innocent any more, faced the prospect of more attacks and should prepare for a moral crisis. He said in a subsequent interview:¹⁶

“The Today programme on BBC Radio 4 is a parade of heads of charities and NGOs making their case, often in a highly politicised way. The government is wrong, money must be spent, business must do something. It sounds like politics to me. It’s not about helping poor old ladies or hedgehogs – there’s a different feeling coming through. Some right-wing politicians have jumped on it because it’s not risky any more – it’s become acceptable to say not all charities are good … The public has a sense that some charities are rather pleased with themselves – they pay themselves a lot of money, they hassle us in the street, they’re not apologising. There’s a sense that people are less deferential towards charities and more questioning of them.”

The Charity Commission gets tough

The alteration in the political mood after the change of government in 2010 was mirrored by the general approach to the regulation of charities by the Charity Commission for England and Wales, a non-ministerial government department headed by a chair appointed by a government minister. The regime at the Commission had been relatively indulgent and charity friendly during the previous decade under two chairs appointed by Labour, Geraldine Peacock and Dame Suzi Leather. Things changed after the appointment as chair in 2012 of William Shawcross, a hawkish journalist, author on geopolitical subjects and biographer of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.

The new regime began in earnest after a report by the NAO in 2013 prompted by the Cup Trust scandal, mentioned above, stated that the Commission was failing to regulate charities effectively and ‘does not do enough to identify and tackle abuse of charitable status’.¹⁷ A drive began to improve internal efficiency, take a harder line with errant charities and generally toughen the rhetoric. Shawcross talked of the Commission as a ‘policeman’, albeit a friendly one. By 2015 he was able to report that the Commission had used its various statutory powers to tackle abuse and mismanagement in charities 1,200 times in 2014/15, compared to 216 times two years previously, and had opened 103 new statutory inquiries – the strongest intervention at its disposal – compared with 15 two years before.¹⁸

The new board that Shawcross appointed included one person with 25 years of experience working in social enterprise, but its composition was otherwise seen by some in the charity sector as indicating an emphasis on enforcement, with a particular focus on preventing charity funds being diverted to support terrorism.¹⁹ One of the new board members was Peter Clarke, a former head of the Anti-Terrorist Branch at Scotland Yard, who said in an interview in 2013 that his role included helping to improve partnerships with the security services and other agencies.²⁰ In 2014, Shawcross told The Sunday Times: “The problem of Islamist extremism is not the most widespread problem we face in terms of abuse of charities, but is potentially the most deadly. And it is, alas, growing.”²¹ He said the Commission was currently running five inquiries and 43 ‘monitoring cases’ into charities where there were suspicions related to terrorism, particularly in Syria.

In 2015 the Conservative Party cancelled a fringe event at its annual conference by the Muslim Charities Forum after an allegation in The Daily Telegraph that it had links with the Union of Good, which had funded Hamas, considered to be a terrorist organisation.²² Two years later Baroness (Sayeeda) Warsi, co‑chair of the Conservative Party from 2010 to 2012 and a former minister in the Coalition government, said in a lecture that the Commission had a “disproportionate” focus on Muslim charities that made them feel under scrutiny all the time.²³ This was unjustified, she said, referring to a reported statement by Tom Keatinge, director of the Royal United Services Institute’s Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies, that “the abuse of UK charities in support of terrorism is negligible. The standards are very high and awareness amongst the big charities of this issue is intense.”²⁴

The Commission’s own annual reports, Tackling Abuse and Mismanagement – later renamed Dealing with Wrongdoing and Harm – show that in the five years from 2012/13 the number of statutory inquiries relating to terrorism that were opened or under way in each year ranged from 6 to 14, with an upward blip to 20 in 2014/15.²⁵ The number of terrorism-related ‘serious incidents’ reported to the Commission grew steadily from 1 to 27 over the same five years. The Commission’s examples of terrorism-related incidents that charities should report include a member of staff being arrested under suspicion of terrorism offences, a charity’s warehouse in a war zone being raided at gunpoint or a visiting speaker promoting extremist messages. The Commission maintained throughout that it was not targeting Muslim charities, but the subject was highly sensitive and some of the rhetoric soured its relations with Muslim charities.

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 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.