Charities have taken too much money from a government which tries to exert too much control and does not pay enough attention, a reception at the House of Lords heard last night.

Baroness Julia Neuberger, a crossbench peer who was a Gordon Brown’s adviser on the voluntary sector when he was Prime Minister, was speaking at a reception hosted by the charity think tank NPC.

She said that it is “always an issue” that the government of the day wants to exert more control over charities.

She said Brown had once suggested the idea of “mandatory volunteering”. She said “governments find it hard” to accept that the sector's activities were voluntary, and that communites had to take the lead.

“Governments would like to to get a grip on the voluntary sector and control it,” she said.

But she also said that some charities had “taken too much of the government’s shilling” and that this has led to confusion “at best” and impacted charities' ability to deliver change.

‘Mystified’ that charities are not more involved

Neuberger also said she was “mystified” that charities had been mentioned little during the General Election and the recent Budget.

  She said that Brexit showed that the “country is more divided than it has ever been in my lifetime”. She said she was surprised that more was not being done to “encourage civil society to do those things that they do” to bring people together.
 

“The role of civil society and the voluntary sector is pulling people together,” she said.