Tania Mason interviewed Paul Young for her feature on service delivery charities in April's Charity Finance. This is the edited transcript of his comments.

We’ve increased our income quite a lot although the statutory proportion has remained about the same.  My understanding, as I’ve only been here just over a year, is that Addaction has been at the leading edge of the way the contract culture in terms of use of public funds has developed for use in relation to recovery services, our field. So generally our growth has been through us winning new contracts on a competitive tender basis.  In some cases those are wins from other public sector organisations such as the NHS, but in some cases they are wins at the expense of other charities.  There’s been a definite trend in recent years for commissioners, often organised on geographical bases, to take a number of relatively small contracts which they may have spread across a number of providers, and consolidate them into one or two much larger contractors. The total amount of money in the larger contracts is of course less than all the smaller contracts put together and what this tends to do is rule out small to medium-sized orgs which may be more local or regionally-based. Because if you are a relatively small charity say of say, five, six or seven million pounds a year, you’ve got a contract of £1m or so from one commissioner, it’s big in relation to your turnover but manageable, but when that contract comes to an end and the commissioner goes back out to tender, this time the contact is for £7m, £8m or £9m. In that case often as a small charity you won’t even get past the first hurdle. The commissioner will do his due diligence, take one look at your accounts and say it’s too big for you.