Thursday 4 February 2016

Charities

From The Sun

BRITAIN’S biggest OAP charity has accepted £6million a year from an energy giant in return for pushing expensive tariffs to the elderly, The Sun can reveal.

Age UK recommended a special rate from E.ON which saw pensioners typically pay £1,049 for a year’s fuel — £245 more than on the firm’s cheapest 2015 rate.

...

The energy giant has been paying Age UK at least £6million a year in return, around £41 for every person who signed up.

From the Guardian

Except he’s not a chauffeur (although he certainly looks like one to me, driving Camila around, in a car), because there’s the other driver who is paid £30-40,000 a yea ... shhhh, keep quiet about that. And Annie, 34, who has been entirely dependent on Kids Company for years. And the swimming pool (OK, not such a big one, but undeniably a swimming pool), and the pomegranates in the bowl, and the massive telly in the lovely art deco house for disadvantaged children – and for Camila when she fancies a swim, or possibly a pomegranate.

From the Telegraph

How is it that organisations that secure only 10 per cent of their income through charitable giving are able to represent themselves as “charities”? Very easily, it seems. Analysis published in 2015 by the Centre for Policy studies found at least 24 per cent of total funding of Britain’s largest charities comes from public finances. Because of lack of transparency, the figure may be as high as 49 per cent.

It seems to me that if we can thank Kids Company for anything, it's that it's shone a light on charities, something that is long overdue.

10 comments:

Steven_L said...

Loads of them are just scams. I get really fed up of otherwise intelligent people who simply equate "charity" with "good" / "wholesome" etc without any further thought on the matter.

Rich Tee said...

The reason so many of them started receiving tax money is because of the belief in the 1980s - which is probably correct - that the state is generally no good at running things, so it would be better to give the tax money to smaller charities who can spend it more effectively, which created the so-called "third sector", the tax-dependent charity that does what social services used to do.

Lola said...

RT. Yeah, the egregious Blair's 'third sector'. Except that it wasn't funded to improve the efficiency of 'benefits' but to capture another sector to the state thrall - nationalisation by stealth. It's all about power, or the lefties trying to continue the revolution by devious means since it is now entirely evident that socialism doesn't work.

PJH said...

"...the figure may be as high as 49 per cent."

Or as high as 99.4%

ASH. Year ending March 2015


Voluntary donations: £5,116
Total income: £767,446


That's 0.6% of income as donations.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Agreed, but bloggers have known this for about a decade, it was Devil's Kitchen who first started outing fakecharities.

Bayard said...

"Loads of them are just scams."

Of course they are. Why not when a little work setting up some organisation that wants to ban something will enable you to end up with a six-figure salary for a couple of day's work a week?

Mark Wadsworth said...

Lola says "it wasn't funded to improve the efficiency of 'benefits' but to capture another sector to the state thrall

Well is it that way round? Or was it some greedy nominally private individuals creaming off taxpayers' money?

It's like the banks and the government - do banks control the government or does the government control the banks?

Either way, it is bad.

Tim Almond said...

Steven_L,
That's why it's worked for so long. And growing up in the 80s, I remember seeing charities as pretty honourable (and many still are today).

Rich Tee,
The problem is that that's not why charities work - it's that government is hardly involved, so it became like a market.

Lola,
Yup. It was quite a clever thing. But people are figuring it out.

PJH,
ASH was a deliberately created sockpuppet by government.

Mark,
I agree. Us bloggers have been saying this for a long time. It's good to see everyone catching up, though.

Anonymous said...

I've always thought it strange that places of worship qualify as charities? 'Tax Aid' for the local synagogue,mosque and church is a joke.

Tim Almond said...

paulc156,

Historically, churches were very much linked with charitable activity. The earliest schooling, the "Sunday Schools" were education, plus alms for the poor. I guess it's a hangover from that (but yes, needs changing).