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Many people in the voluntary sector will feel a small glow of satisfaction at the election of Ed Miliband as Labour leader, no matter what they think of his politics, the mode of his election or the fraternal ‘psychodrama’.
Tag Archives: Labour Party
It’s hard to see through the fog surrounding the future of the National Lottery
One of the most vexing issues on the voluntary sector landscape right now is the future of the National Lottery.
The government wants to reduce the amount of good causes money awarded by the Big Lottery Fund from 50 per cent to 40 per cent.
Considering that the BLF has given £3.6bn to mainly charitable projects since 2004, you might have expected this to be greeted with howls of protest.
But the sector’s response so far has been fairly muted because nobody knows quite what the impact will be.
Ministers claim charities will actually benefit. While the BLF’s slice of the cake will diminish, they say, the overall size of the cake will increase when Olympics-diverted funds return after 2012.
They are also proposing that all BLF funding goes to not-for-profit organisations. Currently, a minimum of 80 per cent must go to voluntary groups although the BLF says the actual figure is 92 per cent. The remainder goes to statutory projects, which under the last government led to allegations of ministers using the lottery to fund pet projects.
Ministers also point out that, although the proportion of lottery money going to the BLF will decrease, the proportion going to arts, heritage and sports distributors will increase and a good deal of this will go to charities.
It’s a persuasive argument, yet a sense of uneasiness remains. Last week Navca and the Directory of Social Change called on the overall amount of money going to local voluntary and community groups to be preserved.
When Nick Hurd, Minister for Civil Society, was in opposition he was fond of using the phrase ‘smoke and mirrors’ to describe Labour’s policies and statements.
It’s hard to see through the fog of this one.
Was the Charity Commission right not to publicise the findings of its investigation into the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative?
The long-awaited verdicts from the Charity Commission on the last two of the charities it investigated over political activity during the pre-election period are out.
Both the employment charity Tomorrow’s People, which was probed over the appearance of its chief executive in the Conservative Party’s election manifesto, and the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative, which was investigated over claims it emailed supporters asking them to vote for the Labour Party, received “advice and guidance” from the commission about political campaigning, but neither received any further sanctions.
On the face of it, the cases seem quite similar. So why did the commission write a full report and press release on the Tomorrow’s People case, but nothing about the Tony Blair one?
We would never have known about the latter had the complainant, Conservative MP Greg Hands, not leaked the commission’s letter about the case to the Sunday Times.
The commission says it chose to publicise the Tomorrow’s People case because many other charities might find themselves in a similar position and it would be useful for them to understand the rules.
The Tony Blair case, it claims, is so unlikely to be replicated elsewhere that it was not worth publicising.
Granted, very few charities have been set up by former Prime Ministers. But the Blair case was, at its heart, about the sharing of data between affiliated organisations: something that seems likely to affect far more charities than requests to appear in political party election manifestos.
It would be interesting to hear charities’ views on which of the cases they found more relevant.
