Acevo chief warns government over NHS balance sheets

Finance | Gareth Jones | 4 Jul 2011

Sir Stephen Bubb has written to the government demanding that it reverses proposals to consolidate charitable funds onto NHS balance sheets.

In a letter to Secretary of State for Health Andrew Lansley and Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander, he warns that such a move could have an adverse effect on donations and could result in NHS organisations using charitable funds to “plug holes in their own budgets”.

He added that NHS charities would have to endure costly governance changes in order to protect their funds.

He wrote: “At a time when charities are under significant financial strain, and when the government is pursuing the aim of 'liberating' NHS organisations to focus more on the people they exist to serve, it would be wholly inappropriate either to tie charities up in pursuing costly and unnecessary governance changes, to hurt their ability to raise donations, or to put them at risk of having their charitable funds purloined by struggling NHS organisations.

“It also raises the bizarre spectacle of a Conservative government, committed to promoting charity and giving organisations more freedom from the centre, achieving what the nationalising Labour governments of the 1940s could not - the effective nationalisation of NHS charities.

“I would strongly urge you to resist such moves, and instead to follow the recommendations of the dissenting report - namely to delay the requirement to consolidate NHS charity accounts until the Department of Health has brought forward proposals (which I understand are under consideration) to give NHS charities greater freedom, thereby ultimately making the consolidation issue obsolete.”

Directory: Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (ACEVO)
Who's Who: Sir Stephen Bubb

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