Charitable Sector

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

Tuesday 5th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick]

My Lords, I am delighted to speak in the twilight moments of this debate. I hope in these few minutes to add a different perspective, if possible. Like everyone who has spoken during the afternoon, I have had a generation of engagement with the not-for-profit sector. I spent 21 years as a trustee and 15 years as chairman of Crime Concern, which two years ago merged with the Rainer Foundation to make Catch22, to which I shall return later. I have just become chairman of Millennium Promise UK, which is focused on the millennium development goals in communities and villages in African countries. I have a long history of enjoying passions which the charitable sector allows you to enjoy. Probably the most dynamic aspect of it is the sense of purpose, sensible engagement and mind release that comes from any charitable activity that we do. This comes not just to the receiver; it also gives joy to the giver. I think of my good friend Tom Benyon, who received his OBE earlier this year. He is now walking the entire 480 miles from Edinburgh to London to raise £250,000 for the people of Zimbabwe, for the charity ZANE which he founded nine years ago. He rang me last night and told me that he has walked 220 miles so far, pretty much non-stop but with the odd sleep on the way. He talks energetically about what it feels like to do that journey at 71 years of age and to feel refreshed by it. The joy experienced by those involved in the charitable sector comes from the release of endorphins such as you experience on the sports field.

I am glad, too, that in the nature of our debate the charitable sector, which we all relish, appreciate and want to see flourish, is not the sum total of civil society. Civil society is way beyond the capacity even of the 200,000 plus registered charities, let alone the multitude of groupings across every town, village and community in the United Kingdom. It is a bigger concept than that. Whether it is Ed Miliband’s great society or good society or it is David Cameron’s big society, there is a necessity somewhere in the middle of all of it to capture a spirit of us all having a role as contributors or through being part of an organisation.

The thing that has troubled my mind most over the many years of my involvement in charities as a trustee, chairman, instigator and observer is exactly the point to which the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, alluded in the latter part of her remarks; that is, the efficiency and effectiveness of the not-for-profit sector. Every one of us knows the battles that we have been through year in and year out to get the money, whether it is on a one-year, three-year or five-year cycle, and the stress of the waiting and the wondering. Whether it is government, a foundation or just the public and all the people who rely on us for their livelihoods, if we do not succeed, it brings devastation.

That is what led me as chairman of Crime Concern, and Elizabeth Filkin as chairman of the Rainer Foundation, to merge our two mega-charities. Each organisation was worth around £20 million, which put us in the top league of the not-for-profit sector—not right at the top, but in the top league. Putting the two together did not just make a bigger, but a more effective, streamlined, capable, focused and active crime prevention network. In the business in which I am involved, KPMG, we have spent a lot of time thinking about how to empower charity mergers. We worked collectively with the Charity Commission and alongside Social Finance.

I look at the approximately 200,000 charities in the UK—some would say that there are more, but on the website page dated 21 September this year, the number of registered charities was in fact 190,000. But there we are—who knows what the exact figure is? Whatever it is, only 29,000 charities have incomes of more than £100,000. That means that huge numbers are battling year in and year out for critical causes but small amounts, with teams of people, often in competition with other charities and not-for-profit agencies, looking to the same foundations or pockets of cash to stand still.

I am not suggesting that government should treat this as a means of efficiency for budgets, but they should enable and encourage a culture of merging which allows innovation and investment to flourish in order for the sector to keep its vibrancy and not its panic. The charitable sector should be a place where really big people can release their passions. In every sense I can think of no one more delightful and overwhelming than Camilla Batmanghelidjh and the work that she does with the 14,000 or 15,000 kids who she looks after—week in and week out—in tough south London neighbourhoods, and how she has sacrificially given herself and her organisation to their tender care. She should receive not just the applause of the nation and the funds of government but the appreciation of communities in London on whom, frankly, civility relies because of her engagement.

However, she should not be fighting every two or three years to prove the case that she does well alongside the 14,000 children she looks after or the 2,500 who attended Christmas Day lunch at Kid’s Company in 2009. Why has she got continuously to make the argument? It is partly because there is too much competition in the field. I suggest that as we move forward in our thinking about the future of the not-for-profit sector and the charity sector we bear in mind that an effective civil society is a place in which everyone is genuinely a giver. I know that that sounds like wild ambition, but it ought to feel that it is possible to have a society of givers and we should really focus our resources—taxpayers’ money, private donations, the release of foundation resources, all the money in unspent accounts—on the organisations that deliver the sharpest and most efficient deliverable outcomes. If we can empower mergers and working together, as would be commonplace in business, it may be that we can deliver a better front-line service.