Your editorial on charities makes many useful points about their contribution to social life and appropriately highlights the harsh nature of the current funding environment (The Guardian view on hard times for Britain’s charities: struggling to do more with less, 31 December).
However, it is overoptimistic about the ability of charities to resist capture by funders when you state that “their priorities are not distorted by the profit-seeking motives of market-based providers”. This is true, but their priorities are frequently distorted by the requirements of their funders. In a target-driven society, funders – state, corporate or charitable – have their own performance indicators to meet.
Consequently, as our own research has demonstrated, charity organisations often cannot access funding for the expressed needs of their members and user groups. They have to modify their bids to a greater or lesser extent, with few able to access funding for essential core running costs. As a result, the projects funded are shaped by having to describe their outputs in ways that allow their funders to meet their targets. Due to this mismatch, provision is imperfectly aligned to local needs but moulded to meet externally defined priorities.
This may well result in less effective services and a loss of trust between charity and community organisations and their user groups, who experience the project leaders as acting in the interests of funders rather than as their advocates. This also results in considerable stress on managers and trustees, who have to negotiate the conflicting demands of users and funders.
Linda Milbourne
Birkbeck, University of London
Mike Cushman
London School of Economics
Your editorial is right to highlight not only the parlous financial state of the voluntary sector, but also the fall in the numbers of individuals volunteering their time. There is a particular group of volunteers whose decline in participation risks amplifying the sector’s problems: trustees. After seven years as a trustee on the board of a charity, I am stepping down, and will be taking time to reset my work-life balance before I consider carefully whether to take on another such role.
There are many rewarding aspects to being a trustee but, in order to provide the requisite support and challenge to the charity’s executive during these financially straitened times, I have also found the experience increasingly draining. I don’t think I’m alone.
Over those seven years, it is noticeable how much harder it has proven to find a pipeline of suitable volunteers who are willing to commit their time to join unpaid charity boards. Yet good governance is fundamental to persuading donors to trust charities with their funds. I fear that a hollowing-out of able trustees has left charities even more vulnerable to funding cuts, and may result in poorer value for money when overseeing the spending of those dwindling funds.
Ben Norman
London
Your leader is right to highlight the complex relationship between the charitable sector and the state in providing services. This is clearly exemplified in relation to financial support for families by the state, where Tory policies succeeded, in effect, in ending universal benefits that meet a minimum standard of living. This resulted in high levels of dependency on charity for food, clothes, heating and other essentials. The challenge facing Labour is to reverse the Conservative policy context, built on deterrence and cutting public expenditure, and restore the principle of state entitlement in meeting living requirements as a right.
Prof Mike Stein
University of York
Your editorial rightly highlights the challenges facing the voluntary sector. One area that needs urgent attention is the crisis facing free independent advice charities, which millions who are most in need in our society rely on.
Advice services support people at moments of real jeopardy – when a missed bill, a rent increase or a benefits decision can push people into crisis. Early advice prevents problems from escalating, and saves homes, jobs and sometimes lives. Yet these services are at a breaking point due to chronic underfunding, staff shortages, and skyrocketing demand driven by the cost-of-living crisis and the strain on the welfare system.
AdviceUK’s recent report shows that demand for free, independent advice in 2024–25 was 40% higher than the 2018–22 average. Alarmingly, 88% of surveyed organisations report major recruitment and retention difficulties, and only one in 10 feels extremely confident that they have the resources to operate beyond the next year.
We urge the government to act now by investing in a national advice workforce strategy, as is done in public services like health, education and childcare. This would ensure that the sector is fully equipped to meet demand and would create wider value too: research shows that every £1 invested in free specialist advice saves around £2.70 in wider public costs by preventing problems from escalating into the NHS, courts and councils. A practical, sector-informed workforce plan will help advice charities meet the challenges they are facing now and in the future.
Sarah MacFadyen
Head of policy, programmes and media, AdviceUK
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