The government talks local but acts national. How do charities make sense of this?

By John Plummer, Monday, 23 August 2010, 5 Comments

Two stories I have worked on this year have generated considerable feeling.
 
One is the merger of Age Concern and Help the Aged into Age UK and its subsequent attempts to persuade local Age Concerns to become ‘brand partners’.
 
The other is the decision by the Alzheimer’s Society to merge local branches into a new regional structure.
 
In both cases the changes have been perceived by opponents as attempts by big, bureaucratic London-based charities to impose their will on local charities.
 
Whether or not this is true, certainly there has been increasing pressure on large charities to bend to the government’s way of working if they want to retain their influence and funding. For many, this has meant becoming more business-like and centralising their structures.
 
But now the coalition government is talking about a smaller state and a big society.
 
Small community groups may have displaced large, heavily state-funded charities in ministers’ affections but the large scale radical reforms the government is introducing, such as the Work Programme, are only fuelling the pressure on charities to get bigger and more professional.

What the government wants and what it needs seem to be two different things. It’s difficult for charities to know how to respond to this.
 

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  • James Renton

    There is a contradiction only because no Minister actually wants to articulate what their real desires are but instead prefer to give us incomplete and sometime incoherent media soundbites! My reading is: a) the government ideologically prefers small charities and ideally they would like all of these to be volunteer led and operated with the bare minimum of employed staff and for the most part rely on donations, fees from service charges or have some connection with the Pony Club; b) However, they realise that to deliver large scale government funded activities (DWP Work Programme) and/or pet projects (National Citizens Service) they need to issue a small number of large contracts and transfer more risk towards the contractors – so large charities offer a good vehicle (or stooge) for this; c) They also have an aversion to grant funding in the same way as my kids avoid housework; d) Being high on the list of Ministers affections means nothing and will not pay the gas bill; e) Many in the government would welcome an extensive cull of the sector as they think it still houses too many ageing hippies, closet socialists and people focusing too much of their time on helping minorities who don’t vote for the coalition. Get these things straight and you will start to understand the world you will live in over the over the next few years.

  • Dave Punshon

    Logically The way to react to this dilemma would be to have a National framework working with and for local charities e.g a Franchise or truly Federal system .The trouble is the London Centric approach to life whereby no one in the provinces could possibly understand the intricacies of Govt

  • John Plummer

    James – I think the coalition has moved quickly in its first three months and clearly come out on the side of small charities. The Communities First fund is an example of this.

    But I wonder whether this ideological commitment will wither in the face in the welter of big, national initiatives that are being set up to tackle the deficit.

  • James Renton

    John the one thing I would add would be there are ideological commitments and real ideological commitments. Free schools are a real ideological commitment that involves the government putting its money where its mouth is! Communities First (while welcome) does not rank in the same ball park – it could be a sixth the size of the existing Grassroots Grant scheme. In other words support for the VCS is being cut far more than the 25%-40% that many other areas of government spending are being cut. This is also applies to the engagement with charities generally – it falls into the nice-to-have ideological commitment have rather than must-have ideological commitment category.

  • Teddy Bear

    Only time will tell if James Renton’s reading of the situation is correct but, if the Big Society simply leads to statutory bureaucracies being replaced by ‘big bureaucratic London based charities’, how will that deliver local accountability and the control that we are led to believe the Big Society is all about? Statutory services do have at least some accountability to local communities. Some of these ‘mega charities’ would appear to have none.

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