Charitable Sector

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Tuesday 5th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

My Lords, even at this late hour, I rise to add, I hope, a grain or two of wisdom to what has already been shared. I thank the Minister for giving us this opportunity, and I thank those who have spoken before me who have made their first speeches for enlivening us. I wish that I could have a fraction of the joy that the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, brought to the Chamber as I share my thoughts with your Lordships today.

I have spent all my working life—indeed, I am spending what is left of it—in the charitable sector. It is my life; it is what I do; it is where I am. While I am patron of a number of charities that serve the needs of homeless people and have organisational and institutional responsibilities to do with management, the work that I have relished for 40 years has been much more to do with hands-on charitable work with people in need of one kind or another. In order to come to this debate I have just left a situation where my colleagues are engaged in interfaith work in the borough of Islington. They have done remarkable work with the Muslim community particularly but with other faiths as well. The work that we have been doing to try to get inner-city regeneration projects up and running is also yielding some fruit. We are deeply involved in school governance and community development, and we offer safe space for busy people to spend quiet time—all without prejudice. It is called, and this is our strapline, “loving your neighbour”. The idea is as old as the hills, and the debate today does not really add any more to the essence of what loving your neighbour is all about, however grand the schemes and projects, and however widespread they may be in their reach and influence.

I shall cast my mind back to a previous part of my life in order to make a couple of points and then detain your Lordships no longer. In the 1980s, 25 years ago, I inherited the redoubtable Lord Soper’s work and his network of social work programmes spread throughout London. It was an extraordinary piece of work, I must say. There was a treatment centre for people suffering from various forms of addiction that took people off the streets, self-referred, and took them right through to sheltered housing before eventually returning them to the community, with lots of rehabilitative work surrounding them. We also had a day-care centre in the City of Westminster, which was open seven days a week, 365 days a year, and catered specifically for over-25s, old lags—in fact, the hard end of homelessness. Street homeless people spent most of their time with us, and we had a range of services for them, from housing advice to referral to helping agencies and, especially in those days for people with mental health problems, accessing health services, because local doctors’ practices did not on the whole want our kind of client under their wing. In the end we got some specialist care brought in to the project.

We also had a magnificent bail hostel that was an alternative to prison for quite a number of people who would otherwise have been on remand. It was serviced by a rehabilitative programme offered by a professor of criminology from the University of Cambridge—again, providing qualitative added value to what would otherwise have been a basic service. All that was Donald Soper’s gift to me, as I took over the management of it.

I should like to make two very simple points. First, the staff who ran these services were all qualified, professional people, who had dozens of volunteers supporting them, thereby providing collaboration between the statutory and the voluntary. That is what we are really talking about—how to make the best of such collaboration. I insisted that however great the need facing these staff might be, they reserved some of their time for keeping observational notes and reflections and statistical information. As it says in the Good Book, the poor are always with us and the voluntary sector, I can assure anybody in this House, will never solve the needs of all the poor. However, the voluntary sector can do qualitative pieces of work which it reflects upon and draws evidence from, and then proposes to statutory and providing bodies models of good practice that can perhaps challenge existing ways of doing things. That is how we approached our social work.

We provided the funding; we had a wealthy endowment of several million pounds, but we needed partnerships with local authorities and government to get the best out of our money. If you are going to campaign, to educate and to bring your wisdom to bear upon the situation, you must use some of your time to reflect on practice rather than simply attending to the next patient.

Secondly, I happened to be in charge of this work during a recession. A lot of our work was done in the City of Westminster and the authorities immediately saw us as an easy target for cutting funding. Almost at once, we found ourselves deprived of a funding base. I take issue with one thing that the noble Lord, Lord Wei, who is not in his place, said in an otherwise splendid speech. He said that the previous Administration had led a lot of charities up the garden path, leaving them stranded and totally dependent on money from the state. There are lots of charities which are up the garden path but have not been led there by anything except circumstance. We are in a recession; people are cutting funds. Expectations of the voluntary sector are increasing, yet the funding collaborative patterns are being impoverished by the day. It really is an impossible conundrum. I am not talking about one-strand income charities but those prepared to share resources gained from other sources.

It is difficult, and it was very difficult in a case that I remember from my past. On one occasion, I insisted that the work should be done—that was what our endowment was for—but there was no matching funding and so our endowment decreased. I was prepared to see that happen, because the poor have their demands too. It is not just good bookkeeping—it is the cries of the poor that we must listen to. In the end, of course, the managers of the money that I was spending in this way thought that I was incompatible with their objectives, and I lost my job.

We are in a recession now. We are facing similar tensions now, trying to balance impossible forces. But in looking to increase the participation of the voluntary sector, I hope that Her Majesty’s Government will not increase those expectations without understanding that in a recession people are cutting available funding. Less work can be done for the money unless we get resources from somewhere else.

These are difficult times and we will see an increase in social problems that, over the past 20 years, we thought we had begun to solve. It needs an effort from across the forces of our parliamentary system to try to get that one right.