Charity matters
Date: 08 January 2010
Authors: Finola Moss
Issue: Vol 160, Issue 7399
Categories: Opinion, Constitutional law, Public
Charity evolved from an individual’s determination to help those not provided for by the state. Its value to society is dependent upon independence of that state and philanthropy.
The charity sector, now rebranded the voluntary sector, is worth £180.3bn in recycled profit and assets, all tax free. If our society is indeed “broken”, then this money could and should have gone a long way to fixing it. However 49% of charitable bodies’ annual returns fail to provide even broad details of how this money is spent.
Philanthropy cannot be ensured, yet charities remain unaccountable for the quality of their services, or the effective use of their money.
This fundamental flaw in third sector provision was not addressed by the Charities Act 2006, enacted to increase government control and use of this socially influential sector.
The Act created new charitable purposes, explicitly mirroring government policies and, more crucially, appeared to attempt to convert a non-ministerial regulatory body, the Charity Commission, into a law making one, with power, in the guise of satisfying the public benefit test, to end the life of any of the 183,506 registered charities—Catholic adoption agencies and public schools being its most recent targets.
Although the Act remained silent on the amount of political campaigning a charity was allowed to engage in, the Advisory Group on Campaigning and the Voluntary Sector considered charities’ political influence “as a way of addressing the ‘democratic deficit’ in the country”, as people trusted them [charities] more than politicians”.
Last year it put pressure on the Charity Commission, to “clarify” its guidance on charitable campaigning, which now reads, “a charity may choose to focus most, or all, of its resources on political activity for a period”, but with an important caveat, that it must not be the sole reason for its existence.
This “clarification” appears to be an attempt to change the law, which only allows campaigning, if ancillary to and in furtherance of a charitable purpose, which cannot be political. This guidance will no doubt have the effect of encouraging charities to engage in more indirect activities, at a time when society needs their “actual help” more than ever.
Self-interest
Why encourage activities whose effectiveness and value to society is impossible to measure? The motive appears to stem more from self-interest than philanthropy.
Such activities will allow government increased use of the sector, as a vehicle to promote, educate and enact its policies, while the sector already finds such activities an excellent PR and fundraising device.
Education
Women’s Aid has recently increased its campaigning and educating activities in support of the government’s initiative to end domestic violence. It joined forces with the NSPCC to produce a powerful political force to extend the definition of “harm” in the Children’s Act 1989 to now include “impairment suffered from seeing or hearing the ill-treatment of another”.
As a consequence “harm”, for the purposes of satisfying the threshold criteria in care proceedings, is statutorily diluted to “ill-treatment”, which can include such nebulous concepts as witnessing the “emotional or financial abuse of another”.
So where does this leave a parent suffering from domestic violence?
Once Women’s Aid was independent of the state and the NSPCC, helping physically abused women by providing temporary and then permanent accommodation away from a violent partner, now it is a campaigning and educating charity that wishes to increase its role in society by promoting the existence of the emotional abuse of children by domestic violence.
The number of women being accommodated in Women’s Aid refuges appears to have fallen in recent years, yet the number of children taken into care, based on present or future emotional abuse, due to domestic violence, has increased to 30% of all care applications.
Women’s Aid now assesses such abuse under the Common Assessment Framework, having become government and public educators in all aspects of domestic violence.
Fifteen years ago it was unlikely that a social worker would have been able to gain access to a Women’s Aid refuge, such was the residents and charity’s fear of care proceedings. Rather than helping the vulnerable, this change in the law and Women’s Aid’s charitable role could result in women not reporting domestic violence, nor fleeing to a refuge, for fear of losing their children.
Diversification
Charities must be independent of the state, and fully accountable for both the effective use of their money and the quality of their services since as a society we must ensure that our most vulnerable are protected and philanthropy rewarded.
Finola Moss, Sheffield Hallam University.
E-mail: f.moss@shu.ac.uk
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