It has become clear in earlier chapters which kinds of charities are most likely to spark controversy. Education is a battleground and is likely to remain so because of the charitable status of most fee-charging schools and the perceived inadequacies of the governance of academies. Public service delivery is full of uncertainties and hazards for charities, linked to the perennial wider tensions between the sector and government. Overseas development is also hedged about with risks, ranging from the diversion of funds for improper purposes to the safeguarding of beneficiaries and changes in the political climate: at the start of 2020, for example, Anne-Marie Trevelyan MP, who had earlier tweeted ‘Charity begins at home’, was appointed as the secretary of state for international development, and DfID was, controversially, later merged into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Charitable think-tanks, as was seen in Chapter 3, can find it hard to comply with regulatory requirements for party political independence and are frequently the subject of dispute and controversy. The environmental campaigner George Monbiot, for example, considers it ‘remarkable’ that the think-tank Policy Exchange, which has influenced many Conservative policies and does not reveal all its funders, can remain a registered charity.

Although not dealt with specifically in this book, religion – one of the earliest charitable purposes – has also been highly controversial. The Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church have both been caught up in well-publicised scandals about child abuse. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse reported in October 2020 that 390 members of the Church of England clergy had been convicted of offences against children between the 1940s and 2018 – an average of more than five a year. Professor Alexis Jay, chair of the inquiry, said: ‘Over many decades, the Church of England failed to protect children and young people from sexual abusers, instead facilitating a culture where perpetrators could hide and victims faced barriers to disclosure that many could not overcome.’ Earlier, Catholic Care (Diocese of Leeds) spent three years trying to overturn the Charity Commission's refusal to allow it to change its objects so that it could discriminate against gay couples in its adoption service.

Theatres and concert halls, many of which are charities, were brought to a halt almost overnight by the first coronavirus lockdown in March 2020. Flagship venues including the Royal Opera House, the Royal Albert Hall, the National Theatre, the Royal Festival Hall, the Birmingham Symphony Hall and the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester closed their doors for months. The orchestras and theatre groups that would have performed in them – many of them also charities – were suddenly deprived of most of their work. It was a desperate time for both institutions and individual artists and performers: they were the first to be shut down and feared they would be the last to restart normal activities.

In July the DCMS announced a £1.5 billion fund to support culture, heritage and the arts, of which £500 million in grants and £270 million in loans were distributed to arts organisations by the Arts Council. A five-stage ‘roadmap’ was drawn up for a gradual return to live performance, but this was halted at stage two during the second lockdown in November: rehearsals and training were allowed, as were performances for broadcast and recording purposes, but no live audiences were permitted. Many charitable venues found alternative ways of reaching audiences: the National Theatre broadcast videos of past productions and asked for donations from people who watched them, and the Royal Albert Hall arranged a two-week programme of Promenade concerts without an audience and made them available on BBC television. Glyndebourne Opera performed in the open air in the summer. But it was going to be a long time before normal levels of activity and income were restored.

Arts charities divide into three rough groups. The first is the kind of organisation mentioned above: national or regional arts charities, often with some public funding, that provide art for art's sake and fulfil their main charitable purpose of ‘the advancement of arts, culture, heritage and science’ by providing high-quality cultural events to audiences from far and wide. Below this, a second layer consists of local arts charities that usually have additional purposes, including education, community development and the advancement of health.

This book was all but finished when the COVID-19 pandemic landed in the UK. After March 2020 we watched with dismay as successive lockdowns and ensuing restrictions wreaked havoc on charities, cutting off fundraising revenues while also driving up demand for help and support. Charities suffered one body blow after another. The big organisations announced redundancies at an alarming rate: the BHF shed 300 jobs, the National Trust 1,200, Oxfam 200, the RSPCA 300, CRUK 500 – a quarter of its workforce. Less publicised cuts at charities with smaller workforces were inevitably a greater threat to their survival. Small charities with no workforce were either asking more of their volunteers or going into hibernation.

By the end of 2020 the total loss of jobs was expected to top 60,000 – more than 6% of the total charity workforce, or 1 in every 15 jobs. In June 2020, Pro Bono Economics predicted that the sector would suffer a funding shortfall of £10.1 billion in the second half of the year – a hole in income of £6.7 billion plus a rise in demand for services totalling £3.4 billion. This crisis is unprecedented in nearly two decades we have spent observing the voluntary sector: nothing has come close to such a huge change in such a short time. The austerity imposed by the Coalition government after the 2008 global financial crash destabilised many charities, but the effects were more gradual and less extensive.

Revising our text to incorporate the impact of the pandemic on charities has been to follow a moving target, with new stories emerging almost daily of fresh challenges and difficult decisions facing charity leaders. We have included accounts of heroic responses, particularly in volunteering, alongside stories of cuts and warnings about sustainability. There were rays of light such as the distribution of £200 million of public funds to more than 8,000 small and medium-sized charities, and media excitement about the late Captain Sir Tom Moore completing 100 circuits of his garden before his 100th birthday, gaining a knighthood and raising £39 million for the NHS.

One of the quickest and most effective responses by a charity to the coronavirus emergency in the UK came from FareShare, which distributes surplus food to people who need it. Before the pandemic it was handling about 20,000 tonnes of food a year, supplying about 930,000 people a week; by the middle of June 2020 that number had more than trebled to 3.2 million. But it was still not meeting all the demand, which was expected to grow as economic pressures increased in the wake of the crisis. “We’re really terrified about the next couple of years,” says FareShare's chief executive, Lindsay Boswell, a former army officer who also ran the Institute of Fundraising for many years.

FareShare was established in 1993 as a partnership between the homelessness charity Crisis and the supermarket giant Sainsbury’s, but became an independent charity ten years later in order to extend its help beyond homeless people. It now works on two levels: its core business is taking large quantities of surplus food from the industry supply chain, sorting and repacking it and allocating it to member charities that pay a nominal subscription and distribute the food to their beneficiaries. But in 2017 it also launched FareShare Go, in which more than 7,000 local charities collect and distribute surplus food directly from nearby supermarkets at the end of each day: all 3,000-plus Tesco stores and some Waitrose and Asda ones take part.

FareShare Go hit problems in the first coronavirus lockdown, when panic buying cleared many supermarket shelves, leaving nothing spare at the end of the day. But the opposite was the case for the charity's core service as the hospitality industry ground to a halt: food producers and suppliers found themselves with mountains of stock they couldn't sell to restaurants and cafes. Boswell says:

But the boost in supply continued to be outstripped by demand as the number of front-line charities and community groups seeking food from FareShare more than trebled.

When the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the United Kingdom early in 2020, charities were among the first to draw attention to the resulting social distress and to take action. Foodbanks reported growing demand and did their best to meet it. Domestic abuse charities responded to a 50% increase in calls as successive lockdowns wore on. Calls to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) went up from an average of 600 a month to more than 900. The mental health charity Mind stepped up its advice and advocacy services, and 750,000 people joined a Royal Voluntary Service network of volunteers to support those who were self-isolating.

This was nothing new. It was, rather, a fresh illustration of the role charities play at times of national and international crisis. Many of them are experts in their field, close enough to people and communities to see where the need is, and flexible enough to respond swiftly. They were active in the two world wars; they joined the relief effort in the disastrous floods in eastern England in 1953; they played a leading role in tackling AIDS. During the war in Afghanistan, Help for Heroes was established and expanded rapidly to care for injured veterans. Charities respond continually to natural disasters abroad and at home.

They are also an integral part of society in normal times, best known for their work from day to day with those who are poor, sick, homeless or living with disability. But their role is not confined to the relief of individual need. They also play an essential part in education, medical research, the democratic process, the advancement of rights, the guardianship of culture and heritage, the stability and development of local communities, leisure, the protection of the environment and the delivery of public services. This complex proliferation of organisations and their role in promoting social and economic progress is not always well understood or recognised.

The purpose of this book is to make the breadth and depth of the work of charities more visible and better appreciated by categorising what they do and bringing it to life through case studies and interviews, including examples of their response to the coronavirus emergency.

People rarely seemed to worry much about the details of charity governance until well into the present century. Taken on Trust, a report by the NCVO and the Charity Commission in 1992, indicated that up to a third of charity trustees did not understand their legal responsibilities, or even know that they were trustees. Then, as now, the vast majority of charities had no paid staff and were both governed and run by their trustee board, so the demarcation between governance and management was virtually non-existent in most of the sector. Even in larger charities with voluntary boards of trustees governing paid executive teams, many boards were collectives of retired White men with a relaxed approach to governance. Important functions such as strategic planning, stewardship, performance monitoring, managing stakeholder relationships and ensuring legal compliance were seldom on the agenda.

Diversity was and remains a particular problem. There is growing acceptance that diverse boards make better decisions, but research has consistently shown that charity boards generally are short of women, the young, people from minority groups and those with disabilities. In 2017, 86% of the UK population was White, but 92% of charity trustees were White, as were 99% of trustees of grant-making foundations. One study by a recruitment agency found that 34 of the 100 biggest UK charities had entirely White boards and senior leadership teams. Charity boards clearly have some way to go in reflecting the proportion of the population that identifies as being from a BAME background. Various proposals have been made to improve recruitment from minority groups, such as an end to word-of-mouth recruiting, targeted advertising of vacancies and payment of board members. Progress has been slow, however, despite commitments to action by a number of individual charities and some of the sector's representative bodies.

A turning point in charities’ approach to governance was the collapse of Kids Company in 2015. The question of checks and balances exerted by its board over its chief executive, Camila Batmanghelidjh, meant that governance was thrust into the spotlight, and suddenly trustees all over the land were searching out The Essential Trustee, the Charity Commission's key guidance: the evidence of the chief executive of Nucleus Arts (see Chapter 11) bears out this point.

The value of charities that support victims of violence against women and girls quickly became apparent during the first coronavirus lockdown in the UK early in 2020. In the first few weeks, calls to the National Domestic Abuse Helpline, run by the charity Refuge, increased by 66% and visits to its website increased tenfold. And at the end of April another domestic abuse charity, Women's Aid, doubled the hours that its live-chat service was available, after demand rose by 41% in one week.

Charities were not surprised by this, as similar spikes in domestic violence had also happened in other countries, such as China, which had locked down earlier than the UK. They immediately asked the government for emergency funding and remodelled their services to comply with lockdown rules by working at home, online or by telephone. The government responded with a £76 million fund, including £10 million for refuges, which was distributed by Whitehall departments to charities they already worked with.

One such charity was Hestia, which runs refuges in London and the south-east of England. Its chief executive, Patrick Ryan, recalls that in the first week of May, it managed within a few days to open a new 12-bed refuge in a building previously used by foreign students. A month later, it received funding to open a second 12-bed crisis refuge. Hestia also resurrected a pre-existing relationship with the Royal Pharmaceutical Society for a new initiative at Boots stores, which put up posters and added details to its till receipts about the charity's Bright Sky app, which provides a UK-wide directory of domestic abuse services. Ryan says:

International development charities were among the first to suffer from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Stephanie Draper, chief executive of the aid charities umbrella group Bond, predicted that the sector could lose up to 40% of its total annual revenue. A survey of Bond members in April 2020 revealed that more than 40% of them thought they would have to close within six months, with smaller bodies most at risk. Among the first to cut jobs was Oxfam, the giant of the sector: it announced that its international division would shed 1,450 of almost 5,000 jobs and withdraw from 18 countries. A tenth of the 2,000 staff at Oxfam GB were at risk.

The fall in income came as personal donations were hit by economic hardship, fundraising activities fell back, charity shops closed for months and income from the state began to shrink. In July, the government cut £2.9 billion from overall aid spending, a 19% reduction on the previous year's figure of £15.2 billion: more than 70% of aid spending goes through the Department for International Development (DfID), from which some large charities get up to 20% of their income. Matters were made worse, according to Draper, by the government decision to merge DfID with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from September 2020, raising fears that money would be diverted from the most needy countries to strategic and political priorities. Draper said the merger “marked the beginning of the UK turning its back on the world's poorest people”, and called it a “tragic blow” when the government also reduced its commitment to international aid from 0.7% of gross national income – enshrined in law since 2013 – to 0.5% for 2021. Despite opposition from hundreds of charities, MPs from seven parties and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Chancellor Rishi Sunak confirmed the intention in his one-year spending review in November 2020, breaking a 2019 manifesto pledge and, in effect, cutting the aid budget by a third to £10 billion in 2020–21. However, the move required a change in the law and the government looked likely to endure a bruising battle to get it through Parliament.

Charities have always delivered services, ranging from support for the poor and destitute to education or hospitals. The crucial questions have been: who decides what the services should be, and who finances them? In mediaeval times the decisions were mostly made by religious institutions and the services delivered by monks or church officials. The resources came either from the Church's extensive property income or from donations; when the wealthy made large donations these were often earmarked for a specific purpose.

But these services were patchy, and eventually the need for greater consistency and wider access prompted the state – if only to head off social unrest – to make decisions about what the services should be and to finance them out of taxation. At first, state provision of services was minimal and charities remained the principal providers of social services. But over several centuries the balance changed – slowly at first, but then more rapidly when the Industrial Revolution gave rise to increasing social problems in the expanding cities.

The process culminated in the establishment of the welfare state in the 20th century, which in turn led to the modern phenomenon of charities being contracted by the state to provide some of the services that the state requires by law or deems desirable. Such provision of public services is one of the most controversial aspects of the work of charities in modern times and forms the focus of this chapter. There are two main controversies, both of which are essentially political. The first is about funding: the pressure on public authorities to control public spending pushes charities to put in the lowest possible bids in order to win work, which can lead to a lowering of standards of service or prompt them to subsidise public contracts from voluntary income. The second is about independence – whether charities that accept work under contract from government should refrain from speaking freely about it and challenging politicians and their policies.

The financial crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic added dramatically to these familiar concerns. Roughly half of charities’ contracts from the public sector come from central government, which even after the relaxing of the first lockdown restrictions was facing the worst recession in modern times, foreshadowed by a 20.4% shrinkage of the economy between April and June 2020.

When George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, died after a White police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes in the US city of Minneapolis in June 2020, there was an upsurge of protest around the world, especially in the UK. There were marches and demonstrations all around the country throughout June, even in provincial centres such as Bournemouth and Cheltenham; protestors dumped the statue of the 18th-century slave trader Edward Colston into Bristol harbour and daubed the words ‘was a racist’ on the statute of Sir Winston Churchill in Parliament Square in London.

The protests took place under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement, which started when Trayvon Martin was shot dead by a vigilante in Florida in 2013. The movement gathered strength from a shocking series of police shootings of Black people in US cities in the following years, and a UK version of Black Lives Matter was set up in 2016 for a demonstration on the fifth anniversary of the fatal shooting by the Metropolitan Police of Mark Duggan in north London. But the protests of June 2020, some of which resulted in clashes with police and a number of arrests, created a dilemma for the estimated 200 registered charities in England that are Black led or work in the area of race relations.

“Most of them are involved in service delivery and are not campaigning organisations,” says Elizabeth Balgobin, a charity governance consultant specialising in equality and diversity:

Nevertheless, some charities published statements of support, including the Bristol-based Stand Against Racism and Inequality (SARI), which said it would not be joining in demonstrations because of coronavirus social distancing rules, but ‘stands in absolute solidarity with the mission and belief of Black Lives Matter, “imagining and creating a world free of anti-Blackness, where every Black person has the social, economic, and political power to thrive” ‘.