Cambridge House, the poverty and social action charity that wound up with some of the data of former Charity Business clients, has reportedly launched its own charity outsourcing function.

Sources told civilsociety.co.uk that the venture will be called Enterprise @ Cambridge House and will be run by a qualified bookkeeper.

Cambridge House would not confirm or deny the reports. It said the only person in the organisation that was authorised to speak to the press was its chief executive, Clare Gilhooly, and she was unavailable for at least a week.

But the organisation has already confirmed that it was considering adding an outsourcing service to its suite of products - in its original statement of 16 January which explained that it had acquired the Charity Business data, Cambridge House said it had been investigating the possibility of buying Charity Business.

In the end, it ended up securing the data of some of the Charity Business clients when it went to retrieve its own records after Charity Business folded. One report suggested it got the data of 48 charities, about a quarter of the entire Charity Business clientele. Cambridge House has since been taking steps to get this data back to its owners.

Ex-Charity Business clients invited to collect data

Now Cambridge House has invited former Charity Business clients to come and collect their hard-copy data from an industrial estate in Swindon next Monday and Tuesday. Business development and finance director Burger Edwards emailed the former clients last week offering half-hour slots to facilitate the collection, stating it had secured the storage facility until Saturday 18 February.
 
Late yesterday it sent another email containing instructions for those collecting data on behalf of ex-Charity Business clients. It stated that a signed letter on the charity’s letterhead giving authorisation to the person designated to collect the data will need to be provided at the point of collection, and a copy of that letter should be emailed to Cambridge House by 3pm today.

One consultant who has been charged with collecting the records of several ex-Charity Business clients from the Swindon lock-up, told civilsociety.co.uk that the timescale demanded by Cambridge House to provide this authorisation was unreasonable.

The consultant, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of jeopardising his clients’ access to their data, said it was impossible to collect signatures from charities dotted all over the country in just a few hours.

“Why didn’t they tell us days ago that we had to provide signed letters of authorisation?” he said. “They seem to be making it difficult for the charities to get their data back.”

Disk malfunction

Cambridge House also appears to have encountered a problem extracting the electronic data from the disks it acquired from Charity Business. On 2 February, Cambridge House sent an email to ex-Charity Business clients that said:
 
“As you are aware we have been working on extracting the electronic payroll data and returning it to the respective organisations. We have completed this task for many of the organisations and were working hard to do the same for all those still outstanding.

“Unfortunately yesterday, much to our dismay the hard drive containing this data stopped functioning properly. We have sent the drive to a specialist in the hope that the data within can be recovered in full. We will keep you posted on how this is progressing.”
 
By yesterday, at least one of the client charities was still waiting to hear more.

Cambridge House declined to comment.