Larger charities are increasingly coming in for attacks from mainstream media outlets.
Last Wednesday, the Times published an article drawing spurious links between a major grantmaker and a charity it had not actually funded.
The day after, the Telegraph ran a piece about three well-known charities’ ethnicity pay gaps, all in favour of ethnic minority staff, which it suggested was evidence of “positive discrimination”.
Critics including Reform UK’s Suella Braverman and the Free Speech Union’s Toby Young were all quoted expressing their disapproval.
The charities mentioned in the piece should actually be praised for taking the initiative to publish the pay gap data, which most organisations do not, voluntarily. Workforce diversity is a real issue in the sector and it is quite unfair for those taking some kind of action to be lambasted for trying to address this.
‘Bloated charities’
But the most vigorous onslaught on the sector came on Saturday, again in the Telegraph. “Britain’s bloated charities are paying the price for corporate greed” was the headline, accompanied by a gleeful description that many are “teetering on the brink of collapse”.
It names several major charities that have announced job cuts in the past year or so due to financial pressures, surmising that they have been “crippled by soaring salaries and identity politics”.
Much of the piece could have been written a decade ago, with the same old attack lines rehashed that have been used against charities by hostile commentators for years. To get the sector’s perspective, the author even approached the former leaders of umbrella bodies ACEVO and NCVO rather than their current chief executives.
The piece contains all your favourite hits – charities are “pushing contentious political issues” instead of delivering services, becoming overly professionalised and spending too much on back-office costs rather than “the cause at hand”.
It adds that “expensive headquarters, six-figure salaries and large campaigning and DEI departments are becoming ever harder to justify” given the sector’s financial pressures.
None of this is surprising from the Telegraph but the quotes from some sector figures adding fuel to the anti-large charity fire are unhelpful.
Platforms
It is of course reasonable, and even important, to point out the disparity in the sector – with the 10 biggest registered charities holding about a quarter of sector’s wealth overall.
As one sector figure says in the piece, big charities tend to get more government money while “the little ones get an absolute kicking”.
But a former Oxfam trustee quotes misleading figures about the charity’s spend on fundraising, which include its vast retail network, and accuses it of “supporting job creation for a specific type of virtue-signalling activist”.
Meanwhile, Stuart Etherington, who led NCVO for 25 years until 2019, says that many charities “grew far too quickly” during his tenure and “certainly could have been leaner in terms of infrastructure support”.
He adds that the sector has attracted “ambitious professionals who saw running a charity as a career in its own right and who thought growth was everything”, which the article uses as a springboard to say how “handsomely paid” CEOs have become.
These comments may have all been well-intentioned (and cherry-picked from more positive quotes about charities) but they have been used as weapons to denigrate the sector overall in the Telegraph’s hatchet job.
The sector should not shy away from having difficult discussions but we must be careful which platforms we have them on. One which has been ramping up its criticism of charities in recent months might not be the right place.
Defence
Others from the sector are more defensive of modern charities in the Telegraph piece and emphasised their current predicament of increased costs and falling donations.
Stephen Bubb, who left ACEVO a decade ago after leading it for 15 years, tells the publication: “If anything, professionalism hasn’t gone far enough.
“We are absolutely no different from a private business: if we expect charities to conduct a third of all medical research, to run lifeboats, provide mental-health services and solve homelessness then of course they need highly paid specialists and professional infrastructure.
“We want them to do more of the state’s work, but we don’t want them to look or behave like large organisations, which makes no sense.”
Bubb, now executive director of the Gradel Institute of Charity, also comes out swinging in defence of the sector’s right to campaign.
“In the 19th century, practically all of the social legislation our society is built on today was driven not by people in parliament but by charities – I’m talking about essential rights for animals and for women and children,” he says.
“Even reform around seemingly small things like seatbelts and smoking were both driven by charities and have saved a lot of lives.”
This robust defence of the sector is a welcome inclusion but it hardly provides balance to the weight of negativity in the rest of the piece.
It may be futile asking mainstream outlets to lay off a sector under extreme financial pressure and whose staff and volunteers have faced attacks from anti-migrant activists in recent months.
But those with knowledge of the sector can surely do their bit by pausing before providing hostile commentators with fresh ammunition.
