People with progressive views sometimes harbour some ambivalence towards charities, particularly those engaged in social welfare work. They believe that governments should guarantee an acceptable standard of living, and make special provision for those who are unable to provide for themselves. Viewed in this light, philanthropic efforts to help people meet basic needs such as energy costs can seem like a grim throwback to the 1930s, or Victorian times. But while such reservations are understandable, the crisis now confronting charities has grave implications and requires urgent attention from policymakers and wider society.
Boris Johnson’s government, and particularly Rishi Sunak’s Treasury, deserve to be judged harshly for decisions including cruel cuts to benefits. Meanwhile, sympathy is rightly directed at the people whom these policymakers seem determined to punish. But the vital role played by the voluntary sector, both in frontline services such as food banks and in policymaking, must not be ignored. The stark reality is that the organisations we collectively rely on as a backup safety net, to make up for the deficiencies of our depleted welfare state, are under huge pressure at a time when their resources are already stretched to breaking point.
A recent analysis by academics showed that a typical charity’s income dropped by 15% in the first months of the pandemic – a steeper fall than took place after the 2008-09 banking crash and recession. The Association of Medical Research Charities calculates that its members collectively lost £292m in income between 2020 and 2021.
The most recent survey of individual giving carried out by the Charities Aid Foundation offered a more mixed message. It found that the total amount donated rose in 2020 – to £11.3bn from £10.6bn a year before. But it also pointed to a “worrying trend”: fewer people are donating. Adding to charities’ woes is the rate of inflation, which in March hit 7%. Given that an increasing proportion of donations are made via direct debits, which individuals are unlikely to uprate to keep up, this means that even if all current donations were to continue, charities’ incomes would fall in real terms.
For those who live in comfort, the extremity of the situation faced by increasing numbers of households may be difficult to grasp. The summer will provide some respite from the pain of sky-high energy prices, since heating can be turned off. But there is no hiding from the desperation caused by a situation where incomes do not provide enough to live on. Nor should there be. A recent survey by the Trussell Trust found that almost one in 10 parents are likely to use a food bank in the coming months. Research from the Health Foundation shows that women in the poorest areas of Britain now have a lower life expectancy than the average female in every other OECD country apart from Mexico.
In a recent short film for the Guardian, Sunita Ghosh Dastidar said: “It takes a village to raise a child, but who raises the village?” The answer, in a wealthy country such as the UK, ought to include far more generous support from the state for areas that were denuded by deindustrialisation, and have continued to lose out in the shift to a highly financialised property and service-driven economy. But the voluntary sector and the institutions it encompasses, from local youth centres and women’s refuges to the research arms of national charities, are vital pieces of our social fabric. Opposition politicians and campaigners must keep up the pressure on ministers with regard to rising rates of poverty and destitution. But the crisis facing the voluntary sector should concern them, and the rest of us, too.
