Weather And Charities

Weather

Last autumn and winter were unusually wet and this autumn has been the same so far. The Ouveze is full, fast flowing and discoloured, if not yet in full flood, the consequence of several days of rain over the past week. Today, however, was bright and sunny which gave me the incentive to get out and plant the flowers and bulbs I had bought earlier. There are another 80 narcissi bulbs out front, some replacing those I removed last spring to make way for further planting, but probably about half that number additional to last year. I have also made additional use of cyclamen this year as they seem to like the conditions and bloom more or less continuously. So the front of the house should look good through the winter and into the spring. Unfortunately, cyclamen don't do blue and I'm not keen on pink so I've opted for red and white.

Charities

One of the differences I found when I came here was the absence of the ubiquitous charity shops in the UK. Had there been one nearby I would probably have volunteered, as I did in the Oxfam bookshop in Reading before coming here. So a recent news item caught my attention.

It appears that a book is due to be published very shortly on the charity industry in the UK. It appears not to take any moral stance but is full of facts and figures that would seem to pose some very disturbing questions. For instance, the charity “industry” in the UK has a turnover of £80 billion. That is a staggering figure, making it one of the more important industries in the UK. Indeed, that could be seen as a wonderful feather in the cap of the British, giving so much to charity; but is all that money going where it is intended?

Unfortunately not, it would seem. There is no suggestion of fraud but there would seem to be a huge problem of proliferation of charities. The total number is just short of 200,000 so that, unsurprisingly, the Charity Commission which provides overall governance is struggling to maintain any kind of control. Of that total, nearly 2000 are dedicated to issues concerning children, which most people would agree should be a major focus; but 2000? Other interesting figures are that there are 581 charities devoted to cancer care/cures, 354 devoted to birds and 255 to animals. The obvious question is not whether all these charities are worthy in their own right but whether this is an efficient way of channelling donations to the quite probably worthy, and needy, causes.

Every charity, quite properly, must show that it is appropriately administered and the larger ones must have their accounts professionally audited. Administration costs money and so does auditing; a reasonable estimate of auditing costs for the larger charities has to run into hundreds of millions of pounds. An apparent loophole in declaration of accounts seems to allow such costs, and sundry others, to be allocated as charitable spend. The result is that when charities proudly proclaim that X% of the money they receive goes where the donor expects, that is in fact far from the case. A truer figure would indeed seem to be around half to two thirds of what is officially claimed. Surely that needs legislative attention, of a form that would encourage charities to amalgamate and increase the percentage of donations that actually goes to the front-line operations that donors normally intend.