John Marshall
CEO
Centrepoint Outreach
26 Jan 2011

I agree with Nigel and Alexine.
When people ask me about the merits of supporting a national charity - I suggest they check out their accounts first!
They are often shocked at some of the high salaries - not to mention expenses paid on top! NCVO CEO £120-130K? Expenses £22,381? Pension contribution?

NCVO money would be better allocated to delivery of front line services!

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Nigel Edward-Few
Chief Executive
19 Jan 2011

While Charlie Elphicke may have got his information slightly incorrect, it is only in the matter of degree. In my view, his observations, and what I perceive as his criticism, legitimately stand.

Some of the charity leaders' (and further down too I might add) salaries being paid are, indeed, far too high. There are too many 'career' charity workers in my opinion. By that, I do not mean people who have been in the sector for a long time as I now have, but those who see it as much of a career path as moving up the corporate tree selling the oft abused bean or widget. I know several people who have jumped from organisation to organisation to increase their lot while never spending enough time in any one organisation to gain credibility or to actually achieve very much in their very short tenure of any one post.

It is no wonder that the public is sceptical of the sector when people start trying to defend the indefensible in terms of very high salaries.

In my previous role, I offered to take a 15% pay cut and my SMT all offered 10%. I and they were far from the top of the pay tree for the role of CEO or SMT member in the size of the organisation that I led. We did so to try and put the charity on a better financial footing and also to avoid redundancies of genuinely needed middle and junior roles. That is not being prepared to sacrifice others for our own security of tenure.

In joining my present organisation, especially given that it is a smaller one than my previous charity, I was comfortable with taking a 14% pay cut, albeit that we have had to rein in our expenditure as a family.

At the risk of sounding pious, having started in the voluntary sector as a young idealist 'wanting to change the world' while having no family responsibilities and being able to live on what were then pitiful charity salaries, then after almost 20 years in the commercial sector following, I did not return to the voluntary sector 20 years ago to make bucket loads of cash nor pursue a 'career'. I did so to try and make a difference; to put some of the skills I had been fortunately able to learn and some of the considerable salary that I had earned to a wider public benefit.

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VIck
n/a
19 Jan 2011

What a crock!!! he likes to give the orders and demands, yet is the biggest fat cat of all!!!

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Alexine
19 Jan 2011
Response to [VIck]

As chairman of a smallish charity which is run entirely by volunteers with NO paid staff, I regularly get circulars from the NCVO encouraging us to join, and so far we have seen no benefit that membership would provide us with. So we do not join. No wonder the membership fee is pretty high with salaries on this scale!

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David Fitzpatrick
Chief Executive
Hertfordshire Community Foundation
21 Jan 2011
Response to [Alexine]

Having qualified in the private sector, I have now been running charitable organisations for over 25 years now, and discussions such as these frustrate me.

One of my common sayings is that we are voluntary, not amateur: any charity must be run professionally and treat its staff (and its volunteers) properly. That includes pay and conditions. There can be no justification that because someone works in a charity, s/he should be paid peanuts, not have a pension and have none of the benefits “expected” in the private and indeed public sectors. I am incensed when people who have received shedloads of money and pension rights within the private sector, walk across the floor to “civil society” and then complain that some charity staff are paid too much! And for many of us working in the sector, life-work balance can be shot to heck. Without wishing to play the martyr, I (like many others doing what I do) work a minimum of a 50 hour week and, currently, when bid deadlines loom, between 60 and 70.

As a grant making Foundation, our concerns with any applicant are not “what are their running costs”, but what do they do? What is their impact? Do they do, what they do, well? Do they add value? If they do then, frankly, what they pay anyone is almost irrelevant.

I am not an apologist for NVCO… they are big enough to fight their own battles, but it is annoying that some observers are honing in on pay without considering the scale of the organisation and what it does. Declaring an interest, my charity is a member of NCVO. For that, we get massive discounts on a range of goods. We get professional advice and well researched documents. We get freephone help and an organisation that campaigns on behalf of the sector, at the heart of government, here and in Europe.

Am I concerned if staff are paid “x” amount? No: I am concerned that I get value for money for our subscription and that, if I have a problem, I can get to whoever needs to resolve the issue.

I fear that some of the discussion around charity pay and conditions is a well engineered PR smoke screen to take our attention away from the failure of anyone to tackle the excesses of the banking and finance world. If we have any spleen to vent, let us please vent it there!

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