Street fundraising has been having a bit of a moment in the mainstream media.

A Sunday Telegraph journalist went undercover and exposed evidence of potential breaches of chugging rules by a fundraising agency.

More recently, Lord Hodgson’s review of the Charity Act and recommendations on fundraising led to more headlines screaming for a ‘crackdown on chuggers’.

Lord Hodgson’s proposal that it should be easier for charities to pay trustees has drawn the most ire from the sector, but his proposal that Gift Aid be withdrawn from charities that file their accounts late is perhaps the one that seems to make the least practical sense.

First of all, Gift Aid is of vastly different importance for different charities, so the penalty for late filing is not a uniform one. Many do not claim Gift Aid at all. What happens to them?

Stephen Twigg, the shadow education secretary, has dared to raise the issue of removing the charitable status of independent schools.

Like many a Labour MP before him, it rankles with him that fee-paying schools benefit from the many perks of charitable status yet many appear to be failing to fulfil their charitable objectives.

There’s a story, much-used among producers of Freakonomics-style literature, about a nursery in Israel that got fed up with parents arriving late to collect their children, and started charging latecomers.

What happened? People got even later.

Previously, it seems, they had felt guilty about arriving late, because they felt a social obligation to the people running the nursery. Now they were able to pay a fiver or so, and arrive as late as they liked, guilt-free.

Fundraisers must  be a resilient bunch to cope with all the knock-backs that come with the job.

But according to our Charity Pulse survey, which asks charity workers how they’re feeling about their jobs, fundraisers are suffering from low morale.

With the economic downturn continuing to make people less willing to part with their hard-earned cash, and the rubbish summer generally making everyone feel miserable, who could blame them?

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen some movement on the government’s mutuals agenda – the idea, championed by the Cabinet Office, that public services should be spun out into employee-controlled social enterprises which, it says, will be much more efficient at delivering services than the lumbering giants in the state.

One announcement, at the end of April, was the launch of the “first central government mutual”, a project called MyCSP – short for My Civil Service Pension – which last month won 15 contracts to administer public sector pensions, in addition to its initial job running the principal civil service pension scheme.

The government announced last week that it has introduced a bill to Parliament which will bring the Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme into law.

This new scheme is pretty simple, at heart, and also a pretty good idea: it will allow charities to claim something equivalent to Gift Aid on £5,000 a year in cash donations, even if they haven’t got the right forms.

The Canal and River Trust doesn’t yet exist, but it’s already got a partnership with Google.

What’s more Google, who’s agreed a partnership to display the towpaths on Google Maps, is one of three major organisations who today agreed to put their support behind the new CRT, which will next month spin out of government with responsibility for managing over 2,000 miles of waterways.

It’s the sort of exposure that most charities would kill for. But then most charities don’t have the profile of the CRT: a cast iron guarantee of £800m funding from government, as well as the third largest portfolio of historic buildings in the British Isles, and a collection of natural assets guaranteed to bring in visitors by, well, the boatload.

This week, my ‘thank you’ package arrived from the charity I signed up to with a door-to-door fundraiser last month, and I’m sorry to say it went straight in the bin.

I have to admit, I was relieved to see it at first as it meant I hadn’t handed over my bank details to a con man. But after that initial relief passed, indifference took over and it was added to the junk mail from cleaners, taxi firms and roofers.

Rather excitingly the ATM giving initiative is kicking off this week, allowing people to make charitable donations through some 8,000 Royal Bank of Scotland cash machines.

Hopefully the whole concept of making giving money as easy as taking it out will inspire lots of spontaneous philanthropy across UK high streets.