Small Charity Sector

Alex Easton Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the small charity sector.

It is a great privilege to serve under your stewardship, Sir Roger. I am astonished and happy to see that so many Members take the small charity sector seriously, because it is a serious issue. As you will specifically know, Sir Roger, the sector is critical to everything that we do. The Government can do only a certain amount; the two other groups that aid the people and support the natural fabric of society are families and small community groups and charities. Small charities do much more than even the large charities that we hear all the headlines about. The charities that do the most are the ones about which we probably know the least. The purpose of this debate is to find out about them and discuss what we can do to help them.

I want to start with a few facts and figures that may astound colleagues from all parties. First, the “UK Charity Insights Report” found that 30%—fewer than a third—of charity leaders think that the sector is in a healthy position. Some 44% of charity leaders cite cost rises as one of their main challenges, up from 14% four years ago. We know that that is the case for many charities. Demand for charities’ services is growing, with 83% of charities recording an increase in demand over the last 12 months. Only one in 10 charity leaders said that they have been able to smoothly meet the rise in demand.

The “UK Giving Report 2025” said that although donations from the public to charity increased to £15.4 billion in 2024, which is quite remarkable, really, only half of people say that they donated to charity in the previous 12 months. That, obviously, is to do with levels of income. I am not making a party political point; this is just a statement about the situation for these small community groups.

The downward trend is evident across all age groups, but it is especially pronounced among young people. A little more than a third of 16 to 24-year-olds say they donated or sponsored in the past 12 months, compared with 52% in 2019. The small charity sector has been doing fantastic work, but it has been healthier. I hope that it can become a focus for us and the Government. It is a delicate flower and we need to nurture it in everything that we do.

[Alex Easton (North Down) (Ind)]

Will the right hon. Member give way?

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I will indeed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Easton]

Does the right hon. Member agree that the small charity sector, including community and faith-based groups, plays a vital role in reaching the hardest-to-reach communities—not only in my constituency of North Down, but across our United Kingdom? Does he agree that the sector should be commended on its local leadership, which so often fills the gaps in statutory provision?

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I do indeed. I am going to be careful about taking an intervention unless the Member nods their head to suggest that they are prepared to stay for the rest of the debate. I am like a spider at the centre of the web, but I promise I will not trap anyone if I do not have to; I have great confidence in Sir Roger’s stewardship.

Some 20 years ago, I visited the Easterhouse estate in Glasgow, which was one of the most deprived communities in the United Kingdom. At that time, the people there no longer looked to Government as their safety net from poverty; instead, it was local charities that stepped forward. People at the grassroots were present every day, patiently helping people into work and out of debt and addiction. The lifespan of individuals there was incredibly low, much lower than the UK average. That visit stayed with me throughout the latter part of my time as party leader. I saw deprivation and problems, but I also saw innovation at a local level to solve key problems. Innovation is critical, and that is what the small charity sector is about.

For that reason, I founded the Centre for Social Justice in 2004 to create a bridge between local poverty fighters and policymakers here in Westminster; we described it as connecting the back streets of Britain to the corridors of power. The work that the organisation does now is informed by an alliance of more than 1,000 grassroots charities. Today it is led by former charity leader and CSJ award-winner Andy Cook. This is all about real people doing things away from Westminster and achieving things that are never exalted enough; nor is experience of them ever transferred to central Government.

The CSJ harnessed the experiences of those charities to identify five distinct pathways to poverty, which it could then change; that idea still holds as true today as it did when I set the organisation up. Those pathways are worklessness and welfare dependency; addiction; educational failure; debt; and of course family dysfunction and breakdown. What I learned about the impact of worklessness and the other pathways helped to shape some of my thinking later on.

Every year since 2004, we have had an awards programme that recognises outstanding small community groups and charities that work quietly but effectively across the country. To see what they have achieved is one of the most moving things. They will not be known to many people, but what they do is remarkable and the lessons from their work ring out to policymakers. Instead of inventing new ways of doing things, we should look at what these groups do, see whether we can bring it to Westminster and, if necessary, make legislation that shapes lives along the same lines.

I want to refer to some community groups and charities that I know about—I hope other Members will do the same, to give a cross-party sense of what is going on in our communities. The first I want to talk about is Ripple, a suicide prevention charity based in Portsmouth. After the tragic suicide of her brother Josh, Alice Hendy dedicated herself to preventing harmful online internet searches from leading others to the same fate. We face a growing nightmare out there, with many people committing suicide as a result of what they see online. It is a real problem.

From her bedroom in Portsmouth, Alice created a browser extension that intercepts crisis searches, offering a calming breathing exercise before signposting people to accessible local services. I have seen it myself, and it is quite brilliant—the members of the Government who saw it were also taken aback by how remarkable it is. What began as a response to personal tragedy has become a lifesaving tool that has now been downloaded—believe it or not—more than 2 million times. This is a small idea, from a small set-up in a bedroom, that is now being used more and more widely.

That is why we need to learn from what these groups are doing, pick it up and see what we can do centrally. Many individuals will not have committed suicide as a direct result of that particular initiative, but there are many other examples. With the right Government engagement, tools like Ripple’s could be made available in schools, hospitals and jobcentres across the country, for example, yet Alice and her team still have to approach institutions one by one.

I say again to the Minister: these are the kind of huge, life-changing things we can take from this debate—I am sure colleagues will give similar examples—and we do not have to invent them from scratch, because they already exist.

Another shining beacon in our charity network is the BAC—the BAC O’Connor centre in Staffordshire; I first encountered it some years ago during my visits to grassroots charities. For 30 years, BAC O’Connor has been helping people to recover from addiction. We have long argued that, for obvious reasons, addiction is a reinforcer of poverty. BAC’s founder, Noreen Oliver, who sadly is no longer with us, was a much-loved member of this family. I was lucky enough to visit the centre again last year with the hon. Members for Neath and Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) and for Burton and Uttoxeter (Jacob Collier).

Some still new to political leadership in various other parties think that simply legalising drugs is a single-stroke way of ending the drugs problem and saving lives. BAC O’Connor believes in changing and transforming lives; its rehabilitation programmes remind us that recovery, not normalisation, remains the desired outcome. BAC O’Connor does groundbreaking work, as I am sure the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) will want to explain further. It created its own restaurant for those coming out of addiction and is a very good example of what I am talking about.

In my constituency of Chingford and Woodford Green there are some remarkable small charities, from which the Government could learn important lessons. They include the Dream Factory, founded in 2008 by Avril Mills BEM. It supports children with life-limiting or life-threatening conditions or with severe disabilities by making their dreams—the things that they hoped or wished to do but have not been able to—a reality. It is a simple device: no matter what their situation is, Avril wants to hold them and say that they are worthy of achieving some of their dreams, although they may not be around long enough to see all of them.

Wanstead and Woodford Migrant Support, a Christian charity based in Woodford Green, offers free immigration advice, housing support, advocacy and social spaces for refugees, asylum seekers and vulnerable migrants. By providing community-based advice early, it helps prevent homelessness. Immigration and housing policy should recognise and learn from its preventive work and the savings created by local and interactive support.

There are others. Read Easy Waltham Forest offers free, confidential one-to-one coaching for adults who want to learn to read. One of the main reasons why people—mostly young men—end up in prison is that they simply cannot read and write. We discovered that they are too embarrassed to go into jobcentres, where they will be confronted by things that they need to read and write. They will probably be sitting in front of an efficient woman who is trying to help them, and they are embarrassed about admitting that they simply cannot read what she is putting in front of them. They will leave the jobcentre and fall into a life of crime because, without reading and writing, there is nothing out there that people can do for regular work. Many people who cannot read and write struggle; that is an often overlooked barrier to employment and to a straightforward, well-lived life.

The central issue that I hope this debate will address is this: the Government take grassroots charity too much for granted—they did before and still do now, to a greater or lesser degree; this is not party political, as I said. The Government fail to listen when charities are delivering what works, and I urge the Minister to raise that point with her colleagues. They ought to be looking with MPs at what is going on in their constituencies and seeing what we can bring forward. The Government should rise up to serious, lifesaving policy work that does not need degrees or involve people writing new policies on the backs of envelopes and everybody getting excited about them. The programmes of these charities have been tried and tested, and they work—in life, it is always a good start to look at what works and copy it. That is what most of us would want to do.

We need to foster a stronger culture of philanthropy in the UK that is closer to the American model. In its “Supercharging Philanthropy” report, the CSJ proposed practical steps to get us there. It suggested unlocking matched funding schemes to drive philanthropy and creating an evidence fund, so that smaller organisations can prove their impact and compete on a higher-level playing field. I want this debate to focus on how the Government can better learn from charities. There is a clear policy pipeline through which Ministers and Departments can systematically learn from grassroots charities working on the ground.

The problem is that larger charities have public affairs teams and a lot of money, so they can fill up the inboxes of the Government on a daily basis, which they do—I have experience of that. I am not attacking them; I am simply saying that the real innovation is in smaller charities. It is the same in the economy—job creation in the business sector is all about small businesses. They are the ones that take the risks, are dynamic and produce the most employment in the United Kingdom.

Small charities and community groups are exactly the same: they are innovators that see a problem, want to solve it and innovate to do that. When it works they really grow, but it is difficult because there is a glass ceiling that they must get through to reach the Government. That is what the Centre for Social Justice is trying to enable, but the issue needs to be recognised on a wider scale. That innovation must be harnessed to produce solutions.

I remain proud of what the CSJ has done to bring these voices to the national debate. The CSJ Foundation has now given more than £25 million to grassroots charities and hopefully will raise more. I hope that, as this debate continues, the Government will listen and recognise that, through discussions with groups such as the Centre for Social Justice and others, we can harness and recognise the issues. There are a significant number of colleagues here for a debate such as this on a normal day, and they all work with local community groups and charities. Let us find a way to show what is really good about what those do and get the Government to act, once and for all, on things that we know work, rather than doing experiments in public policy.

I rest on the basis that those charities are the lifeblood of what keeps society going, and we do not recognise them fully enough. I know that colleagues do, but the Government never do.