Charities are playing lobbying “power games” and need to listen more to their beneficiaries, according to Liberal Democrat peer Shirley Williams.

Speaking at the NCVO’s 14th annual Hinton Lecture last night, Baroness Williams of Crosby (pictured) lamented the fact that western nations are, in her view, failing to reduce inequality because the poor are still excluded from the debate about how social justice can be achieved.

She said that while she recognises that voluntary organisations and charities “have a large role to play”, she said she was concerned that “a number of charities play power games with one another and are sometimes rather keen to lobby against each other”.

She added: “That may be because you have now got much more power than you had, and therefore you start to see some of the excretions of power applying to the voluntary sector and charities just as in the past they applied to government and corporations and so on.”

She went on to praise the hospice movement, before returning to the theme of lobbying: “What I would say to charities is ‘be a bit humble, realise that you can learn a bit from the people you serve’. Some charities, she said, don’t think they have anything to learn from their beneficiaries and service users.

“I think you have a huge role in making the old public services much more responsive to the people they serve, but I do want to emphasise, and sorry to put this again, that some charities are starting to get very seriously caught up in what you might call selfish forms of politics, and I think they need to think very hard about that.”

Elsewhere, Williams argued that the Charity Commission should do more to encourage innovation among charities, saying that it tends to have “rather conventional views about what constitutes a charity”.

Baroness Williams, who as Shirley Williams was a Labour minister in the 1970s before becoming a founder member of the SDP in 1981, issued a further warning to charities when answering a question on the right of charities to campaign.  “I think charities should be allowed to campaign,” she said.  “That’s not my objection.  My objection is that sometimes they don’t consult people who are members of their charity about their campaigns.”

Last night’s annual Hinton lecture in central London was hosted by NCVO in memory of Nicholas Hinton, the highly-respected former chief executive of NCVO, Nacro and Save the Children who died while on a peace-keeping mission to Croatia in 1997, at the age of 54.

Additional reporting by Andrew Hind