Opinion

The 'infrastructure industry' must remember what it's for

Finance | Tania Mason | 3 Feb 2010

The shortcomings of the ChangeUp programme started to become apparent last year when the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee accused its administrators of poor planning and inadequate target-setting. Tania Mason gives her opinion.

More shame has been heaped upon the programme this week with the publication of the first qualitative evaluation of ChangeUp’s first four years, carried out by the Third Sector Research Centre, GuideStar Data Services and others.

The best thing they could find to say about the programme, which swallowed up £150m of public money between 2004 and 2008, is that it contributed to a “significant distance travelled in the way that third sector support services are organised”.  Wow.

Worse, it transpires that these “third sector support services”, by their own admission, have not even bothered to find out whether the support they were paid to provide, had any effect on the charities they were providing it to.  They didn’t seek to measure it, apparently, because the frontline organisations probably would not have known whether the support came via ChangeUp or not. So they didn’t even bother to ask.

It’s as if they forgot they were a means to an end, and saw themselves as an end in themselves. Let’s be clear – these ‘support services’ do not cure disease, or care for abused children, or mend injured cats. OK, so they assist other groups to do so, but they don’t do it themselves.  And it’s a pretty safe bet that the vast majority of those kids would still get rescued and those cats patched up, even if those support service ceased to exist.

This surely offers more proof, if any were needed, that the burgeoning ‘infrastructure industry’ that has sprung up within civil society to ‘build the capacity’ of frontline charities needs to be re-examined.  These local consortia, who were given tens of millions of pounds to ‘support’ their local Alzheimer’s Action or Cats Concern, didn’t even try to find out whether the money spent had helped. This smacks of arrogance, of losing the plot, of forgetting what you’re there for.

Now the £150m has run out, and by March next year an additional £88.5m will have been used up as part of ChangeUp too. It will be interesting to see how many of these support services are still around to support frontline charities beyond 2011.

If the UK’s enormous budget deficit means that there is less public cash for these kinds of unsustainable, grandiose schemes, I for one won’t be shedding any tears. If there is any spare cash for the sector, the government should spend it in a much more straightforward way, giving it directly to charities through Grassroots Grants-type programmes.

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