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Princess Royal Trust name to be dropped in merger

Governance | Tania Mason | 11 May 2011

The Princess Royal Trust for Carers brand looks set to be consigned to history as the charity prepares to merge with Crossroads Care and create an entirely new name for the merged entity.

Out of all the dozens of charities that Princess Anne is involved with in one way or another, the Trust is the only one that incorporates her title.  The charity was created in 1991 on her initiative to provide support and advice to carers throughout the UK, of which there are now believed to be around six million.

Registered in Scotland, the Trust is an infrastructure organisation providing information and support services to 144 independent Carers’ Centres and 89 young carers’ services which deliver round-the-clock support to over 424,000 carers and around 25,000 young carers. In the year ended 31 March 2010 it had income of £5.3m, down 27 per cent on 2009, though 2009 included a one-off donation from ITV of £2.4m.

Crossroads Care is also an umbrella body, for around 100 member charities across England and Wales, but it provides more hands-on, direct support to help carers and give them a break from their duties. Its 2010 income was £3.1m, up from £2.2m the year before.

The two charities have different funding bases – both receive funding from local authorities but Crossroads is more likely to have service-delivery contracts, while the Trust gets a higher proportion of its revenues from individuals, trusts and major donors.

Complementary offer

Andrew Cozens, vice chair of the Trust and also chair of the steering group driving the merger, said the two charities had been working together for some years, even sharing employees in policy development, and a full merger seemed the “next logical step”.

“A lot of what we do is very complementary and so in this tough economic climate it seemed right to be asking ourselves some tough questions about whether we wouldn’t be stronger and more cost-effective together. The next three to five years is not going to be an easy time for charities, so we looked hard at our joint offer and our respective positions in the carers’ world, and sought some external advice.

“The key thing to remember is that both charities are, to varying degrees, national hub organisations that have members or partners and it’s the hub organisations that are merging.  We are trying to develop stronger offer to our networks - it’s not in our minds that it will automatically lead to the constituent organisations merging locally, because they are all independent charities.”

Princess to continue as president

Cozens said the intention was to “keep the distinctiveness of the offers but build a stronger brand”.  A new name has not yet been decided but he admitted it was almost certain that both existing monikers would be dropped in favour of a fresh one. The Princess Royal would continue to president of the new charity, he said, but was “quite relaxed” about the use, or not, of her name. “We wouldn’t take any steps she wasn’t happy with.”

Extensive consultations have already been undertaken with both networks and this will continue until the merger is completed, expected to be later this year. The independent charities that are part of the two charities’ networks will have the option to rebrand under the new merged name if they wish, but will face no pressure to do so, Cozens said.

It was too early to say whether there will be job losses, Cozens said, though he stressed that the move was not driven by cost-cutting.

“The spending cuts will really start to bite from this year but in general carers’ services have been protected where possible,” Cozens said.  “But yes, there is a lot of pressure, on all charities, not just us.”

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