We need a better discussion of poverty and welfare

A while back I wrote about how conservatives needed to start talking about poverty.

Two days ago an old cinema in Shipley caught fire – it’s now being demolished as an unsafe building. One tweet I saw suggested that it might have started from a tramp lighting a fire to keep warm on a cold, snowy night. It may turn out that there was some other cause but, sadly, this suggestion could very well be true. For whatever reason there are people sleeping rough on even the coldest night – and this is poverty.

Too many of us look at this and throw up our hands in despair. After all we’ve had a welfare system for over 100 years and a welfare state for nearly 70 – and still there are people who end up unable to heat their home, wondering whether they can feed their children and lacking in any hope or aspiration. So when I see people “defending” the welfare state, I want to scream and point to the terrible injustice of poverty.

In rounds terms the UK government spends about £100bn on alleviating poverty (this is just the welfare budget bit of it so the true figure is maybe a bit higher) - there really ought not to be much poverty left if this money was distributed well. The problem is partly that government really isn't very good at running things and that we design general systems lacking the responsiveness and flexibility needed to respond to the reality of poverty. But fixing that won't fix poverty.

In one respect us Conservatives have it right - the best way to eliminate poverty is for people to have a job and the opportunity for personal betterment. But, even when we move away from relative measures of poverty, there remains, at any given time, a lot of people who by any measure are in abject poverty. When Bradford Council's corporate scrutiny committee looked at this, my back-of-the-envelope estimations gave a figure of 15,000-20,000 people in the City who are genuinely wanting, really are poor. Stretch this across the nation and we get to a figure of about 2 million or so people who are in poverty.

Blessedly, for many of this 2 million, the situation is temporary, they get the benefits sorted out, maybe pay off some debt or get a job and are able to move to a more stable place, at least for the time being. But this still leaves a lot of people - I don't know how many, suspect no-one knows for sure - who are living in terrible poverty and can't get themselves out of it. And, yes, we do a fine job most of the time helping them, either through the benefits system or through the wonderful thing that is people's charity. The thing is, however, that this isn't getting to the heart of the problem, it's treating the symptoms rather than the cause.

As conservatives, people who believe in the free market society that made most people much richer than past generations, we need to resist the temptation to line up with the progressive left and say that cause is down to the system, that liberal capitalism is somehow the reason for that ex-soldier sleeping rough outside Tower Hill tube station or that single mum crying herself to sleep because she's nothing to feed the kids tomorrow. If there are a million people stuck in terrible poverty, there are an accompanying million reasons for that being so.

It seems to me that our nationalised and centrally-directed welfare system, for all that it works for most of its users, simply cannot give the time and attention to people that would allow plans to get that ex-soldier or that single mum out of their poverty. If we are to redesign a system, it needs to come with space to allow better support for such things as mental health, drug and alcohol dependence, disability and budgeting. And, yes, this means challenging spending reductions in local government and looking at how we can make ideas like the (badly named) troubled families programme work. It also means recognising that providing emergency cash, food and clothing has to be part of a system - things like food banks should be seen as part of society's response not as a reflection of failure.

It also strikes me that we need to see how the creativity of private initiative can be directed to helping these million or so folk stuck in poverty. Big government isn't innovative (probably rightly) but there are a lot of people working in and around government who could be given the opportunity and incentive. I'm struck by the degree to which charities and voluntary groups are ready to take risks, do things a bit differently, in order to help those they were formed to help. How we get more of this should be something exercising the mind of government. David Cameron's 'Big Society' was a good start that was, sadly and wrongly, castigated by people in the voluntary sector suffering from a bad case of 'not invented here syndrome'.

The elimination of poverty is not something that can be achieved by government on its own, least of all by tearing down the system of liberal capitalism most likely to deliver a long term answer. That Cameron observation that "there is such a thing as society, it's just not the same as government" should be our starting point. The task of government is to enable people who want to help to do just that, to remove the controls preventing support. At the same time government needs to start being more trusting of the people who walk in through its doors seeking help.

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Don't give a single penny of your hard-earned, post-tax income to Oxfam

It's always a little depressing when you read something from a university - an elite university to boot - that is really dumb. And even more depressing when you discover that the author of the dumbness isn't some over-idealistic second year student but the "Director for UK Poverty" at international development charity, Oxfam.

Yes I know, I know. You all though Oxfam was all about feeding starving folk in war-torn Africa. Well think again. Oxfam's connection to its original mission of relieving famine is tenuous at best. This 'charity' (and I place it in scare quotes deliberately) has ceased to be one dedicated to such a purpose but has become instead a lobby organisation using its income to create jobs such as "Director for UK Poverty" that have precisely zero connection to the idea of relieving poverty and everything to do with promoting an odious - and discredited - political position.

Here's a taster:

So, even if it is difficult to see how people can escape from poverty without working, it is also increasingly difficult to claim with any degree of understanding that work is the route out of poverty. Lots of jobs which are essential to our society and economy – and indeed to bigger business – need wider support.

By wider support, Oxfam mean higher taxes and more welfare benefits. And the idea that there is any - even the tiniest - comparison between children growing up in the soft embrace of the UK's welfare system and children growing up in, say, Congo or Laos is utterly, criminally wrong. The life chances of UK children with access to free healthcare, free education, generous welfare payments and extensive social services is better than those for most of the world's children. Yet this man from Oxfam wants us to believe that, in global terms, what he calls poverty in Britain is comparable to actual elsewhere in the world.

The article continues for some time in this vein, presenting selected facts and gratuitously exploitative graphical comparisons all wrapped about with references to 'social justice' - as if that actually means anything. And the solution? The pathetic, risible, thoughtless, ill-informed and crass solution? The 'social justice'?

Take more money off someone else, live up to the adage, "there's always someone, somewhere not paying enough tax and it isn't me". It sickens me that the only response to inequality these people can dream up is higher taxes on an undefined group of "tax avoiders". And, in this case it reminds me why we should not give a single penny of our hard-earned, post-tax cash to Oxfam.

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Everything that's wrong with lottery funding - in one quotation

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The quote is from a chap called Henry Kippin who works for an organisation called Collaborate CIC (who do something very important around" creative thinking, policy development, and a ‘shared space’ for insight, debate and problem-solving"). It's in the house magazine of professional urban nonsense, New Start:

A proactive navigating of sector boundaries has precipitated more creative, iterative and diffuse ways of reaching scale – blending public funding with social finance and a more proactive role for the private sector. Far from protecting a sense of safe isolation, funders celebrate confident interdependence and regularly take collective risks on path-breaking initiatives to build social capacity and resilience. The impact on funding beneficiaries feels profound; offering the possibility of new routes to impact, and an alternative to the increasingly fraught relationship between social action and the local state.

I'm pretty sure that Henry knew what he meant when he wrote that paragraph - it's a picture of the 'social funding' environment in 2025 if we all do what Collaborate thinks we should do. The problem is - and I know you've spotted it - that the prediction does actually say anything of substance. Roughly translated it says that 'social funders' (that's the lottery, charitable trusts and other formal philanthropy) will be most effective if they work in partnership with the public sector in their funding decisions. You could call it 'collaboration' but in truth its the alignment of private initiative with the policies and priorities of the state.

Such an arrangement suits the public sector and, since that is the pond in which they swim, also meets the needs of those who work for the big social funders. But for that social funding to be most effective it should be challenging the state - investing in things that government can't or won't do. This isn't about plugging perceived gaps in provision but rather is a route to new ideas and new activities. What Henry and his pals are proposing isn't a beautiful collaborative future but rather the de facto nationalisation of social funding - the further submission of charity to to objectives of big government.

Right now most of the social funding out there goes to a very limited pool of recipients. Funding is most likely to go to organisations with full time workers where the focus is on capacity, social infrastructure and campaigning rather than on what most of us normal folk think of as charity. Most of the social action taking place today isn't being done by these organisations but rather by a host of little groups doing things they think important. Nine out of ten charities and community groups don't employ anyone yet to read what organisations like Collaborate say you'd think this was the exception not the norm.

If social funders want to make a real difference they need to change what they do and how the fund. Not by getting more cuddly with the state or even holding hands with private business, but by widening their net and supporting the small battalions of volunteers that really do make a difference in all our communities. Sadly though, people like Henry with their jargon-ridden wibble will win the day meaning that the distance between real voluntary work and the activity of the "third sector" gets ever larger.

Thousands of organisations simply don't bother approaching those big social funders. Not because they don't need support and aren't doing great work. Rather it's because they take one look at the information provided by the funder and decide they have no chance of getting support. "No point in us applying for funding, they never give money to organisations like us round here" - I've heard this dozens of times and, however much Henry and his pals want to say it ain't so, I know it's the truth.

So if Henry wants to change things - wants a better future for 'social funding' - he should start arguing that support should be directed to real social action being done by ordinary people in every community rather than for some sort of grand unified theory of collaborative funding that's really just code for doing what the government wants.

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What on God's earth is the 'Social Integration Commission'?

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OK I checked it out:

The Commission has three main aims:

1) Explore the nature and extent of social contact between people of different ages, ethnicities and social grades

2) Assess the impact of social division on the UK economy and society

3) Make practical and affordable recommendations across key policy areas

We will publish our initial findings in June 2014 and share our recommendations in January 2015.

Not at all sure about all this and it's pretty difficult to find out who set the commission up and for what purpose. After all the word 'commission' is rather quango-esque and implies some sort of government approval or endorsement. Which I guess is why that name was chose by The Challenge who actually set it up.

The Challenge - I know, I know. What, who or how is The Challenge? Apparently it's:

...the UK’s leading integration charity which exists to strengthen communities by bringing people from different walks of life together.

No, I'd never heard of them either. But what I can tell you is that The Challenge doesn't get much income in the regular manner - it had an income slightly north of £27 million and spent just short of £25 million in the year to 31 October 2013. However just £1.88m of that £27m income came from voluntary giving. The remainder of the money is a contract to run the government's National Citizen's Service. This isn't what you or I would understand as a real charity.

So we have a pseudo-charity funding a body set up to look and sound like an official body tasked with a specific policy enquiry. A body chaired by a former advisor to Tony Blair. So the predictable result is this sort of unevidenced opinionating: 

Matthew Taylor, chairman of the Social Integration Commission, said that the increase in faith and free schools is stifling diversity and stopping children from different races and backgrounds mixing.

This may be the case (although my Catholic school was more ethnically diverse than more other schools in the area) but Taylor presents no evidence merely a sort of mushy, neglectful, bien pensant criticism of the government's education policy.

This really is a lesson in how government-funded charities use that position (and the money) to create means to lobby government despite the oft expressed desire of the government to stop this practice. Worse still, the Social Integration Commission presents itself as a semi-official enquiry guaranteeing it coverage- all just a little disingenuous.

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Shock as prohibitionist finds Drinkaware and British Institute of Innkeeping are funded by the drinks industry!

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There is an academic called Jim McCambridge at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who has written some stuff about charities receiving benefit from the drinks industry. Specifically, this tin-pot health fascist suggests that somehow we can't trust these charities because of their links to the drinks industry:

The Alcohol Industry, Charities and Policy Influence in the UK, published this week, looks at major charities in the UK that are both active in alcohol policy and funded by the industry.

These are Drinkaware, which receives 98 per cent of its funding from the industry; the Robertson Trust, which is almost completely funded by the whisky-maker Edrington, itself controlled by the trust; and the British Institute of Innkeeping, which is funded by membership fees and member services.

According to the LSHTM researchers, Addaction and Mentor UK also receive industry funding as well as public sector grants. The study notes that these two charities share office space above a pub.

In Mr McCambridge's somewhat warped world, funding from corporations is always self-serving and that support for these charities is part of a wider strategy to pull the wool over our eyes about the evils of alcohol. Now Mr McCambridge, despite working at a medical institution, isn't a medic but a sociologist and social worker. Nothing wrong with this of course but it rather muddies his authority to speak of these matters. So far as I am aware nothing in Mr McCambridge's study suggests particular expertise in business strategy or charity law. And, just for completeness, Mr McCambridge's main funder (for his substantive research into drugs policy) is the Wellcome Foundation, a charity entirely funded from the pharmaceuticals industry.

What this report has done is pretty straightforward - Mr McCambridge has visited the public site of the Charity Commission and looked at the report and accounts for the charities his disapproves of and has found out what he already knew - they receive all or part of their funding from the drinks industry. It wasn't exactly a secret but from this public information, Mr McCambridge has manufactured a sinister world where charities funded by the drinks industry are having a major influence on the setting of policy in public health.

Central to this argument is that Addaction and Mentor UK didn't join in when various organisations walked out of the government's Public Health Responsibility Deal in a huff. Now I'm pretty sure the government would welcome Mr McCambridge and his pals back onto the panel looking at alcohol policy - alongside representatives of the drinks industry, the retail business and the food industry. So moaning that Addaction and Mentor UK influence policy is frankly a bit pathetic - all the bodies that walked out could influence that responsibility deal if they just got their knickers untwisted.

This report is just another example of dissembling by the prohibitionists and killjoys who want all of us to pay because a few people have a problem with booze. And the saddest part of Mr McCambridge's pathetic little rant is that the charities he attacks are all doing dreat work either funding research and social programmes, delivering drugs and alcohol support or lobbying on responsible drinking. These are the good guys - Jim McCambridge isn't.

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Oxfam - knowingly misleading us about wealth and income

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I don't take the view that Oxfam's charitable purposes prevent them from raising concerns about poverty in the UK. Indeed, you can look at the charity's purposes here:

OXFAM'S OBJECTS ARE TO PREVENT AND RELIEVE POVERTY AND PROTECT THE VULNERABLE ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD.  OXFAM FURTHERS ITS OBJECTS THROUGH INTERLINKED ACTIVITIES OF HUMANITARIAN RELIEF, DEVELOPMENT WORK AND ADVOCACY AND CAMPAIGNING.

You may feel that the way in which the charity interprets these objects can be challenged - I'm guessing this lies behind Conor Burns' decision to report Oxfam to the Charity Commission yesterday. You may also feel that Oxfam, in the minds of the public at least, is there to respond to the humanitarian crises that blight humanity and to support programmes to lift the poor out of poverty. And that publishing adverts that are more-or-less indistinguishable from the current campaigns of the Labour Party is less than wise. You'll definitely feel that the ad hominem attacks on Conservatives by Oxfam are also unjustified even if those Conservatives are critical of the charity's work.

But none of this contravenes Oxfam's purpose. What we should be more concerned about - other than Oxfam's focus on rural environments and the immoral sustaining of poverty-creating subsistance farming - is the manner in which the charity uses a dissembling approach (some might say deliberately misleading) to promoting its point:

1% of Britons own the same amount of wealth as 54% of the population. RT if you think this is unacceptable
— Oxfam (@oxfamgb) June 9, 2014

Let's dissect this tweet. What Oxfam wants you to think is that the inequitable distribution of wealth links to the inequitable distribution of income and, therefore, to the creation of poverty.  Now it is undoubtedly the case that wealth is unevenly distributed but it is also the case that this has little or no connection to income. Indeed it is perfectly possible for a person to have a significant income but no wealth. By way of example consider a thirtysomething couple who have just bought a London flat for £250,000. To do this they've borrowed 90% of the money from a bank or building society and, in a lot of cases, the rest of the money from the bank of mum and dad. They'll have a car on a lease agreement, credit card debt and perhaps the remnants of some student loans. They have no wealth, they're part of that 54% in the Oxfam tweet. But they will have income - probably a household income significantly above the national average. They are not poor.

Oxfam want us to believe that the lack of wealth equates to poverty because it suits their argument. But it is completely false to suggest that we have food banks because half the population have little in the way of wealth. To be clear, if you've no debts and a fiver in your pocket you are wealthier than a large chunk of the population - best part of 2 million full-time students for a start.

What Oxfam's campaigns don't tell us is why we have food banks, how zero hours contracts came about, why prices have risen (if indeed they have) and what lies behind extortionate childcare costs. The charity don't mention that food banks are needed mostly because the administration of benefits is a shambles rather than because of benefit cuts. We aren't told that half the increase in the cost of energy results from cross-subsidy to support 'green' energy - most of this going to wealthier land- and home-owners. And we aren't told that the high tax on fuel results in additional costs for food, clothing and household goods.

Levels of poverty (and this is relative poverty not the absolute poverty that calls for food banks) are falling in the UK, perhaps not fast enough but falling nonetheless. But it doesn't suit Oxfam's message to explain how this is happening or to note that liberalising employment and reducing regulatory burden on the private sector is what will succeed in reducing poverty over the long haul. Instead, Oxfam prefer to misuse statistics - as we see above - to create an impression that poverty is a bigger problem. And Oxfam also want to perpetrate the myth that someone being rich - in wealth or income - is the reason for someone else being poor.

Oxfam know that world poverty has plummeted over the last couple of decades, falling faster than ever before. A billion people have been lifted out of absolute poverty. OK they're not yet up to our western standards of living but they're headed that way. And Oxfam also know the reason for this fall in poverty but choose to ignore it and promote the keeping of peasants on barely sustainable subsistence farms through subsidy. Oxfam know that it is free market capitalism that gets people out of poverty. But Oxfam tell the public something else - Oxfam lie to us.

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Poverty: perhaps it's time to seek solutions rather than blame?

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Political systems must love poverty - they produce so much of it. Poor people make easier targets for a demagogue. No Mao or even Jiang Zemin is likely to arise on the New York Stock Exchange floor. P. J. O'Rourke

Julian Dobson writes, in his inimitable style about poverty in Sheffield:

A couple of weeks ago at the State of Sheffield event, with civic leaders, voluntary sector movers and shakers, academics and more, it was mentioned that one in five children are living in poverty.

This was a meeting to hear the facts, not a call to action. Yet there are some facts that can't simply be added to compendiums of data, analysed, mulled over and wheeled out the next year for comparison. 

Julian goes on to report 'anger' (I would prefer to describe it as faux-anger) and to argue that this rage must be focused to 'hard thinking' with the observation that "you can't live on anger".

The problem for me is that this anger (usually from comfortably off folk) is as much directed to finding people and institutions to blame for poverty as it is to either mitigating or eliminating that poverty. Fingers are pointed at banks, at governments, at politicians and at grand but nebulous things like 'capitalism' or 'inequality'. The problem is that none of this does anything to reduce the number of people 'living in poverty'. Indeed the endless search for bigger and bigger numbers reduces the issue to a game of poverty top trumps rather than addressing the real and pressing problem of absolute material lack.

P J O'Rourke pointed out that there should be no poverty in the USA. Not as some sort of moral statement but simply as an observation about the amount of money spent on anti-poverty programmes by the US government - the income gap (i.e. the amount of money needed to make poor people not poor) was about $50.3bn back in 1991 and the amount spent on recognised anti-poverty schemes by various agencies of government was approaching $98bn. Ergo no poverty.

The same applies in the UK. We spent around £100bn every year alleviating poverty (and this doesn't include such things as free school meals, subsidised housing or funding directed through the voluntary sector, let alone the value of free education and healthcare - it's just half the benefits bill). The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimate that there are 13.5 million people below the 'poverty line'. A simple calculation tells us that, assuming my £100bn estimate is right, we have about £7,500 per poor person. And bear in mind that most of those people are not on zero income. It should be enough to eliminate poverty.

The problem is that we have a really inefficient and incompetent system of distributing money intended to alleviate poverty. This isn't just the amoral bureaucratic incompetence of making people wait weeks with no income at all while some sort of turgid paperchase is conducted. It's the stupidity of a benefits system that pays money to people who are not remotely poor. And it's the nonsense of spending billions on advocacy, policy and planning rather than more purposefully on helping poor people.

What we've seen recently is that ordinary people are better able to organise the alleviation of poverty than is government. There has been a great deal of nonsense talked about food banks and other voluntary or community responses to poverty but the real message is that these new institutions - private, flexible and creative - are a success in the way that the poverty relief systems and institutions of government are not.

Getting angry is a pointless response to the challenge of poverty. Nor is organising endless seminars, conferences and workshops where poverty is discussed by people who aren't remotely poor (but who make a fine living out of talking about how they help the poor). The answer perhaps lies in private action, in charity and in mutual support - in those very things that were destroyed by the nationalisation and centralisation of education, welfare, and health care.

Sharing my rage in a tweet or even in a blog post does not solve the problem. Any more than does the totting up of poor people, the categorising of their ills and the publishing of calls for government - the very institution that has proven incapable of relieving poverty - to do more. Worst of all are those who want to point the finger of blame at the blameless: at the wealthy just for being wealthy, at the banker for wearing a suit and driving a nice car and by repeating the big lie of the left again and again - that one man's wealth makes another man poor.

This simply isn't true. Poverty isn't the same as inequality and nor does inequality create poverty. Yet people repeat the lie until it corrosive envy starts to destroy the very thing - creating and adding value - that points the way out from poverty. It really is time to start looking for solutions - local, creative, flexible and caring solutions - rather than celebrating vast tomes that merely place the blame.

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Helping Africa (well sort of...)

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This is brilliant - and so true:



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So what is a charity?

We've been used to the debate about defining a 'charity' mostly through discussion of the beneficiaries - should Eton have charitable status? Or the Royal Opera House for that matter?

However there's a different debate - sometimes it might be called the 'sockpuppet' debate - where the organisation with charitable status is, essentially, a delivery agent for the government.

Here's a good example:

The accounts show that St Andrew’s increased its income from £168.7m in 2011/12 to £178m last year. Expenditure rose from £156.2m to £161.2m and the charity increased its funds carried forward from £175.4m in 2011/12 to £192.6m last year.

The charity received donations totalling £22,000 in 2012/13, down from £30,000 in the previous year.

Note that last line. This multi-million pound 'charity' raised just £22,000 in what I would call voluntary income. And the rest?

The charity, which employs about 3,100 people and receives the majority of its income from the NHS...

And, as a result, this organisation:

... has 57 employees on salaries of more than £100,000 a year

Including a chief executive paid £653,000.

It seems to me that this is a large and successful business paying its senior people very well and I'm sure providing fantastic care for its mentally ill clients. But is this what we mean by charity?

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This really isn't a big surprise

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I'm not making a partisan point here but it shouldn't be a surprise to us that:

The Work Programme is not doing enough to move the hardest-to-help members of society closer to work...

Note the language - 'hardest-to-help' and 'closer to work'. The Work Programme - charged primarily with supporting all those falling off the end of six months with no work - will focus on those cases with the greatest chance of success. And they aren't 'hardest-to-help' or 'furthest from work'.

Think about this for a minute - the limited funds available (we may argue over the size of the pot but it will always be limited) are surely better spent on that 'greatest good for the greatest number' idea?

Which means that:

...those people who are homeless, have mental health issues or drug and alcohol problems...

...will probably miss out.

Maybe, instead of writing letters and trying to browbeat the government into changing the system (to the detriment of somebody else - probably more than one other unemployed person), these large charities might care to spend some of their voluntary income on helping these folk?

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Leveson mission creep - a warning to voluntary organisations

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Folk like me (I think but am not quite sure) are not caught in the mission creep that is the proposed Royal Charter to control the press - at least as solo bloggers. But if - like I do - you are involved in managing a site that publishes news, blogs, events information and other stories, then take note of this:

The result is that they apply to any size of web publisher – if there’s more than one author, the content is edited and there’s a business involved, then you must join a self regulator.

And don't think that you can hide behind being a charity. Remember also that the proposals are for strict liability.

The Open Rights Group have set up a link for you to raise your concerns with Party leaders and your MP. You should - however much you welcome the broad Leveson principles - consider carefully whether the proposed Charter will encompass your organisation and whether you think that is right.

Update: Lord Lucas is sponsoring an amendment that will exclude smaller organisations and individuals from the proposed regulations:

Insert into New Schedule 5 of the Crime and Courts Bill ‘Exclusions from definition of “relevant publisher”
9) “A publisher who does not exceed the definition of a small or medium-sized enterprise as defined in Section 382 and 465 Companies Act 2006.”

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Why does this need to be said?

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Charities should make sure they thank their donors and "say it very quickly", according to the international art dealer and philanthropist Frederick Mulder.

You won't keep many donors if you don't thank them.

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New Charity Commission boss starts well...

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There has been a deal of debate about the funding of charities and the extent to which too many are too dependent and too close to the state. And William Shawcross, the new Charity Commission Chairman has picked this up:

Some charities risk becoming too dependent on the state, the new chair of the Charity Commission has warned, saying there needs to be debate on whether the charity register should make clear how an organisation is funded.

And Shawcross pointed us at how the public perceives charity:

He suggested that some charities risk becoming too dependent on the state, adding that most members of the public would say a charity was an organisation funded by private donations not public funds.

A reminder that the legal definition of charity - the purposes of the organisation - is very different from the public perception.

A big - and welcome - contrast with the previous Chair, I feel.

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"MP calls for ban..." Here we go again!

MPs like a good call for a ban - guaranteed to get them a headline! And here's Charlie Elphicke a member of the Public Administration Select Committee (boy does this remind me of Jim Hacker):

Charlie Elphicke, Conservative MP for Dover and Deal and a member of the Public Administration Select Committee, said at a meeting of the committee this morning that face-to-face fundraising was "one of the great infestations of modern life that lashes out at people in the street" and was "toxic to the charity brand".

"If parliament acted to stamp out this abuse and invasion of our personal space, would that be the right thing to do?" 

Well actually, Charlie, that answer to your question is "no". You - by which I mean parliament and MPs - have no responsibility for the "charity brand" (whatever that may mean). Charities are private organisations and their public image is a matter for their trustees and no-one else. More to the point, chugging may be annoying but it is not an invasion of your personal space and a charity fundraiser - usually a student supplementing their income - who "lashed out" at anyone would be quickly charged with assault.

Banning things just because we don't like them or worse, calling for bans just to get a headline, is an appalling attitude. Too many MPs - from every side - seem however to think it OK. It isn't.

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Who needs cash?

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Looks like my wife might be right. She's been saying for a while that the days of cash are numbered and now I read this:

The foundation, which runs the micro-donation scheme Pennies, commissioned a survey of 1,700 UK adults in October to establish which forms of payment they now use and their giving habits. One in 10 respondents aged between 25 and 34 said they never carry cash and rely entirely on cards, while one in three regularly leaves the house without cash. Five per cent said they live a completely cashless existence.

Interesting stuff...


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In which the Charity Commission becomes a lawmaker...

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I'm inclined to side with the Charity Commission in this matter except for one minor point. It isn't the Commission's job to define the law:

“This decision makes it clear that there is no presumption that religion generally, or at any more specific level, is for the public benefit, even in the case of Christianity or the Church of England. The case law on religion is rather ambiguous.  Our view is that the definition is rather dated, and it is our job to define it adequately.”

If there is a case for removing charitable status from religion then that is a matter for Parliament not the Commission.

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No self-interest here at all then?

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What do you think?

A new support service for charity chairs is aiming to launch in the spring.

The proposed organisation, which is likely to be called the Institute of Chairs, is intended to serve as a source of support and information for charity chairs and help to improve the workings and governance standards of charities.

The organisation is being set up by the governance consultants Ruth Lesirge and Rosalind Oakley, and was unveiled at a meeting at the Charity Commission’s offices in London earlier this month.

Does look just a little like a ramp for a consulancy! (And please no jokes about "charity chairs"!)

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So do you care?

A long while ago I recall – in a slightly vague and woolly way – my mum talking about recruiting volunteers. People to do simple things like drive mini-buses, serve teas and coffee, deliver meals-on-wheels, run a housebound library service and many other little tasks.  The gist of my mum’s grumble was that people weren’t prepared to help out. Not because they were too busy or helping somewhere else but because they had off-loaded “caring” onto the government.

“That’s the Council’s job,” they’d say adding a comment about how they pay their rates before turning back into the house. And, as the volunteer leadership crumbled away it was replaced by paid workers (as was my mum when she finally retired as Secretary of Penge & Anerley Age Concern) – professionals whose job it was to do the “caring”.

I’m sure all this is a bit of an exaggeration but the essence is true. As state social services professionalised and expanded into areas previously the world of the local voluntary group, the idea of ‘caring’ was lost. The word wasn’t. It became a stick to beat those who believed – and still believe – that private action in our local community cannot be replaced by state social services. Conservatives – those who believe in private social action – were told that, for holding to this belief, we didn’t ‘care’.

I also recall listening to an earnest, green socialist (who as it happens cares deeply, but that’s a different story) saying that volunteers shouldn’t be used to do tasks that a paid person could do. So much, I thought, for the community litter pick, the hospital car service and the Working Men’s Club old people’s Christmas party. Volunteers were to be reduced to the margins – ‘caring’ had been nationalised. Our only act of care was to be the paying of taxes to employ the carers.

And it got expensive. Back in Penge, when mum retired, the cost of running that day centre rose because where once in was run by volunteers now it is run by professionals. All provided for through a grant from the Council. This change took place everywhere as social action in local communities run by volunteers was replaced by services delivered by paid staff.  Most of us got this – rather than have any social pressure to be charitable, we could go about our lives secure in the knowledge that our taxes were going to provide all the ‘caring’ the community might need.

The problem is that, for all the sense of vocation in the “third sector”, people working there are not merely ciphers for all the ‘caring’ that the rest of us used to do but don’t any more. And neither does the enormous social services bureaucracy or the vast behemoth that is NHS non-clinical services serve this ‘caring’ purpose. It may be right for taxes to fund these services but that does not make the taxpayer ‘caring’.

Nor does ‘delivering’ (how the public sector loves that word – perhaps they all had a secret wish to be postmen) social services make us ‘caring’. These are just jobs – useful, worthwhile, valued (we hope) jobs. But not ‘caring’. Government does not ‘care’ only people, by themselves or with others of like mind, can ‘care’.

Most of us care about our nearest and dearest – children, parents. More than we think, people care about their neighbours, about the neighbourhood where they live and about giving other folk the space to succeed. None of this caring requires government, taxation or the employment of ‘workers’. It just requires us to care.

It may be a failing of government that there are children going hungry. It seems very likely that it is surely a failure of parenting as well. But the debate about this issue is not a debate about whether or not people offering differing solutions “care” and to couch it in those terms is to debase the idea of caring, to make it meaningless.

If there is one area in which our political debate is ill-served it is in this use of “caring” and “non-caring” as terms of political positioning. This was made possible by what we can call the nationalisation of care. This isn’t to say that people stopped caring – that would be impossible – but to say that the scope for us to care beyond the narrow confines of family and neighbours has been taken away from us by the dominance and control of state social services. And by the way in which the voluntary and community sector – the remnants of Burke’s little battalions – came to rely on the taxpayer rather than on the idea of charity.

I had hoped this was changing, that social action – local, communal and caring – would replace that childishly futile debate about who does or doesn’t care. But no, writers in left-leaning papers still routinely press the “Tories don’t care” button that they know their readers will love. And their counterparts respond by becoming ghastly caricatures of John Galt in their celebration of designedly uncaring language.

The other day I read something by a left-wing economist sort that reminded me why I’m a Conservative:

But there is another strand of conservatism which is wholly consistent with the idea that we owe our fortune to the past. Edmund Burke famously said that society is "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

Which raises a paradox. Whilst economic research now supports Burke's view, much of the right no longer does so, preferring ahistorical inidividualist tosh...

In its way this was the idea that Cameron tried to rediscover with the “Big Society”. The idea of stewardship, that ownership isn’t everything and that we all – rich, poor, young, old – have something to contribute. Not to the state. Not just in the form of money – let alone taxes. But in whatever way we can, in the place we call home.

We built this place. And each of us should care for it and for our neighbours who live in it. And, you know, the truth is that we do care.

Take of English flowers these --
Spring's full-vaced primroses,
Summer's wild wide-hearted rose,
Autumn's wall-flower of the close,
And, thy darkness to illume,
Winter's bee-thronged ivy-bloom.
Seek and serve them where they bide
From Candlemas to Christmas-tide,
For these simples, used aright,
Can restore a failing sight.

These shall cleanse and purify
Webbed and inward-turning eye;
These shall show thee treasure hid,
Thy familiar fields amid;
And reveal (which is thy need)
Every man a King indeed!

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No austerity for Oxfam!

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It has been a bumper year for top international aid charity, Oxfam:

The charity's accounts for year end 31 March 2012, published today, show that the overall total combined income rose to £385.5m from £367.5 the previous year. 

Wonderful news - great to discover that, despite trying economic times, the British public continue to dig deep into their pockets to help the third world. Or rather have their pockets dug into by government:

While voluntary income decreased by almost 7 per cent from £138.4m to £129.7m, resources from the government, institutional donors and other public authorities rose by almost 16 per cent from £138.1m to £159.8m. 

You didn't know that over half of Oxfam's income comes from the government did you? Or that this amount has increased year after year? That nice lady in the shop didn't tell you. The chugger didn't tell you. The tear-jerking ads didn't tell you.

And they certainly didn't tell you that much of that increase in Oxfam's funding comes from the EU (the British government cut its funding of the charity) - doubtless in exchange for becoming yet another mindless cheerleader for Euro-babble. And I guess that Oxfam don't care now that the Common Agriculture Programme kills more folk in Africa than the EU saves through its 'generosity' with taxpayers money.

...

A brief defence of 'chuggers'

Nearly all of us have the ability and capacity to say "no", to refuse to talk to someone in the street, to shut our door to the caller and to keep personal information to ourselves. "Chuggers" - those swarms of young men and women littering our high streets - are just doing that very basic charity thing. Asking for money.

Yet these people have become the latest target for those fans of bans, controls and restrictions. It seems that insistence and persistence - admirable qualities it seems to me - are to be condemned because too many of us lack the ability to say "no" to a fundraiser.

And here's the reality:

"Fundraisers are hard-working individuals, spending 6 hours if not more on the street getting rejected for most of the day. I have being doing this for a year now and have been spat at more than one, reduced to tears, had things thrown at me and hit once, mostly by grown men. Like a lot of fundraisers I am only 18! We are just human beings trying to raise money for a good cause, we're not all doing it for easy money." 

To tell people they're not welcome, to stop one form of activity on the street because we dislike it, is quite simply wrong.

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