Charitable and Voluntary Sector Debate
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Lord Turnberg
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Charitable and Voluntary Sector
Lord Turnberg Excerpts(4 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Turnberg (Lab)
My Lords, the Government’s award of £750 million to the charitable sector is of course a welcome response to what is becoming a dire situation for so many charitable activities—from care homes to research, and from museums to the performing arts—all of which are suffering as their sources of funds dry up. Of course, this grant is never enough. It never can be compared with the enormous gap in funding that charities face. But it is a step in the right direction. Much more immediately worrying is the difficulty in making the funds available and delivering them to where they are needed with the speed that is necessary. The need is being felt now, not in a month or so’s time.
I have a suggestion about how we might reduce the inevitable bureaucracy that government funding involves. It is to make use of the expertise available in the philanthropic sector, which is flexible and agile, so can respond rapidly to where the funds are needed most. I have several recent examples. The noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury of Turville, has funded the food bank to the tune of £1 million; the Wellcome Trust rapidly funded £40 million for vaccine research; and the Wolfson Foundation, of which I have the good fortune to be a trustee, gave out its biggest single month’s award of £7 million this month in response to bids from mental health charities, hospices, care homes, museums and the performing arts. The Government might find this capacity to respond rapidly in a focused manner valuable in distributing their funds to where they are needed most in a rapid and timely way. Will the Minister consider ways in which the Government can work closely with the philanthropic sector to get their funds out rapidly now?
There is one further point about the contribution that charities make to the country’s economy. Will the Minister ask the Treasury to provide an estimate of the financial benefits to the Exchequer that the charity sector brings?