Small Charity Sector

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Danny Kruger (East Wiltshire) (Reform)]

I have two quick declarations of interest. I am the founder and still chairman of a charity working in prisons. It is 21 years old this year. My second declaration of interest is the fealty I owe to the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith)—my original, and still my feudal lord. He is the leader that I first worked for. I pay tribute to all the work he has done over many years. I remember very well the Easterhouse visit and setting up the Centre for Social Justice, and all the work that he has done over the last two decades to advance the cause of social justice, particularly through the work of small charities.

We all love our small charities, and I, too, could run through a list of brilliant ones that work in East Wiltshire—I do want to quickly mention the LINK service, which drives people around the county, particularly to medical appointments. That is such an important service, provided totally free and voluntarily to the community.

However, I want to use the time I have to make a more strategic point. The role of small charities is not just for us as MPs to champion in a sort of neutral sense—“Oh, aren’t they good?” There is something profoundly important about this network for public policy. I was involved, as the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green was, in those early years of thinking about social responsibility in the era of David Cameron. I think the big society was the best thing that David Cameron did—except perhaps for calling a referendum on the European Union—yet it did not quite work.

It did not quite work for two main reasons. One is that the Treasury did not really believe in it— George Osborne never got the point of the charity sector and its role in public life and in policy. Secondly, the difficulty is that if the state starts to support charities, it ends up basically enabling big charities to occupy the space that state agencies did previously. They effectively game the provisions that are made with the purpose of supporting the small charity sector, to exclude the small charities and create barriers to entry for those small organisations that it is so difficult for national Government to see and to work with.

Fundamentally, we need a big, new settlement with the charity sector; in fact, with society itself. This is not just about registered charities. It is about social organisations in all their forms. We need to trust communities much more fully, with all the mess, the disparity and what is called the postcode lottery that that can sometimes induce. We need to support philanthropy and direct public support—I think the United Kingdom could become the absolute global centre of philanthropy. The City of London should regard that as one of its key investment markets.

But this is not actually just about money, private or public. It is about the state enabling and authorising its agency throughout the public sector to rely meaningfully on the charity sector, so that it can do that in all the areas we have been discussing, including addiction, re-offending, homelessness, children in care—these knotty, wicked problems that cause so much distress and pain in our society and which the state is so inadequate at dealing with.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephanie Peacock]

My hon. Friend makes an incredibly important point; the young volunteers were also talking to me about that data point yesterday.

One example is that the DCMS launched the voluntary, community, and social enterprise business hub last year, alongside the VCSE Crown representative. The hub contains a host of resources intended to support civil society organisations in finding and bidding for public funding. That is especially important for smaller charities with fewer resources to dedicate to seeking out such funding, and it is a vital source of information in our mission to encourage more civil society organisations into public sector contracts. Obviously, however, data is helpful across the board.

[Danny Kruger]

This is such an important debate. I want to pick up on the suggestion of the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell). Although it is obviously very helpful if small charities, which do not have financial resources or indeed necessarily the right data, can demonstrate their value to the public sector, let us not build systems that force charities into a model that really works only for public sector agencies or large charities. The whole value of these small projects is that they do not have those clear processes, outputs and data, with everything being reduced to unit costs. We have to have a system that actually honours the way that charities work, rather than trying to force them into some kind of proxy of that quantitative model for demonstrating value. Why do we not just localise public sector funding so that small charities can be properly trusted?

[Sir Roger Gale (in the Chair)]

Order. Colleagues will have noticed that I have deliberately allowed the Minister to overrun her time because, given the time, it seemed important that she was able to respond fully to the debate. I now have to remind the Minister that I want the right hon. Gentleman who introduced the debate to have time to wind up properly.