Health and care matters

ACEVO has a strong membership in charites and social enterprises in social care, health and disability, so we hold an annual national conference to debate issues of concern and hear from key people in the sector.

We had a bumper crop this year. All the main parties set out their stalls. Paul Burstow MP, Jeremy Hunt MP and Andy Burnham MP spoke, but perhaps the most interesting session was when Simon Stevens (head of NHS England) set out some of the issues he faces leading NHS England, and asked for our views.

Inevitably, since the emergence of the disgraceful new grant conditions to be imposed by DCLG to snuff out advocacy in our sector (that morning's Times) there were questions on this. Paul Burstow from the Lib Dems was quick to denounce what he called "the Pickles gag" and Jeremy Hunt, though he would not comment directly on the Pickles move, was clear about charities' right to campaign.

We launched our Alliance Contracting report at the conference. There's more details here.

Alliance Contracting is a new way to promote more collaboration in health and care settings - a post-competition approach that builds on more collaborative approaches and consortia-building. Current government procurement is so often costly and overly bureaucratic. It has favoured private sector bodies too much because we don't operate on a fair playing field. Andy Burnham was particularly supportive of this approach.

Indeed his policies of entrenched rights for the third sector in delivering services, and 5 to 20 year contracts were music to the ears of our members. In fact, as I observed to David Brindle of the Guardian, I think this is the most radical approach to the sector of any politician in any party. Much to be supported and perhaps a benchmark to encourage others to follow. We shall pursue at out forthcoming third sector hustings on 24 March - everyone very welcome!

And let me leave you with some photos of our speakers yesterday.

Shawcross reappointed - my letter to Jeremy Heywood

Last Thursday morning I was surprised to read of William Shawcross’s reappointment as chair of the Charity Commission, which was announced without prior warning or consultation. His three-year term was to end in October, and the reappointment process would usually begin in a few months’ time.

The Commission is an important public body, and not the Cabinet Office’s personal fiefdom. At a time when it has been under sustained and severe criticism - and when as the National Audit Office acknowledge, they are starting to turn things around - this is not what they need. It will only add fuel to the fire of those who accuse the Commission of being a plaything of government patronage, rather than a forceful, independent regulator.

I wrote to the Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood to clarify a number of points about the reappointment process, as was reported by Saturday’s Times.

Here’s a copy of my letter, which is also on the ACEVO website:

29 January 2015

Dear Sir Jeremy,

I am writing to you to express my concern at the process behind today’s appointment of William Shawcross as Chair of the Charity Commission. I would like to seek your assurance that due process has been followed. 

As you know, the position was due for renewal in October 2015. Shawcross’ initial appointment followed a period of advertisement, shortlisting and a pre-appointment hearing from May 2012. I and many of my colleagues in the charity sector, our supporters, donors and beneficiaries are therefore surprised to learn that the appointment has been made already.

The fact that this appointment has taken place less than three months before a general election will serve only to raise those concerns in the mind of the public. They deserve and require assurance as to the absolute propriety of the processes that have been followed to make this appointment. As such I am writing to seek your assurances on the following points of information.

1.    Was recruitment conducted in accordance with the Code of Practice for Ministerial Appointments to Public Bodies? According to this code, reappointments can only be made once evidence of a satisfactory performance has been made.

2.    Who was on the committee that made the appointment? The previous committee was chaired by Mark Addison, a Public Appointments Assessor representing the Commissioner for Public Appointments, who is independent of the Government. It also included Sue Gray, Head of Propriety and Ethics in the Cabinet Office. Given the public nature of this role a committee for reappointment would have been appropriate.

3.    Were other persons considered by the committee and did they meet the requirements stipulated by equalities legislation and in accordance with suitable non-discrimination policies appropriate to the position?

4.    What representations were sought from Cabinet Office’s Propriety and Ethics Team about the process and what notice was taken by the appointments committee of those representations?

5.    Given the crucial public nature of this role, how will the process behind the appointment and the fact of the appointment itself be disseminated and communicated to the charity sector and the wider public?

The charity sector is vital to the health and wealth of our nation. Charities must be independent and free to speak truth to power and to deliver in the public good. To do both they depend upon the trust and confidence of the public. Trust and confidence are fragile. While trust in charities remains high, it would be unacceptable for questions over the regulator to compromise trust and confidence in the charitable sector.

I look forward to receiving your reply. In the interests of transparency I am placing this letter in the public domain.

Yours ever,

Sir Stephen Bubb

Give charities a seat in the boardroom!

A startling intervention on the shallow approach of big companies to the charity world came as a welcome surprise this weekend. Britain’s biggest companies have a superficial relationship with charities and volunteering, the Bank of England’s new chief economist said, as reported in The Times and The Economist.

Speaking at the Pro Bono Economics lecture, at the charity he helped to found, he made a strong plea for greater interaction between the non-profit and for-profit sectors. The Times reported that:

Andy Haldane used his first speech since taking up the job to criticise companies for failing to recognise the full value of charities, which he believes contribute as much to the economy as the entire energy sector.

He singled out in particular the dearth of boardroom members drawn from charities. The presence of only one non-executive director from a charity in the entire FTSE 100 ‘is not consistent with volunteering having entered the corporate bloodstream’. There was also no excuse for one-third of FTSE 100 members having no volunteering programme for their staff, he said.

The only FTSE 100 board member from a charity is Jasmine Whitbread, the international chief executive of Save the Children, who is a non-executive director at BT. However, she spent much of her career in the corporate world before joining the charity sector.

Charity chief executives often preside over huge budgets, have to motivate people willing to work for nothing or very little, manage services all over the country or abroad, and have to build and protect their brand.

In the Pro Bono Economics lecture, Mr Haldane said that volunteering in the UK might amount to as much as 4.4 billion hours per year, not far off 10 per cent of the total hours put in by the paid workforce. In terms of value to the economy, it could be £50 billion per year, or about 3.5 per cent of GDP — similar to the size of the UK energy sector. However, too many companies failed to appreciate its value, he said.

‘My suspicion is that many companies are still not close to recognising fully the benefits from volunteering,’ Mr Haldane added.’And let me illustrate that with one startling fact. Among those FTSE 100 companies, how many board members are drawn explicitly from the voluntary sector? Precisely one. That is not consistent with volunteering having entered the corporate bloodstream.’

He predicted that companies would wake up to the value of charities and have far closer relationships with them, largely to recruit and retain the best staff.

Younger people have shown that it is a pre-requisite that the company they work for does more than just make money, he said. ‘Generation Y, born from the 1980s onwards, place a much greater weight on a diverse career experience, with a strong social dimension, than their predecessors. And generation Z, the millennials, are unlikely to buck that trend. Where they lead, companies will surely need to follow.’

Mr Haldane was formerly the Bank’s head of financial stability, a position he held during the banking crisis. The lack of diversity on banks’ boards was said to be a factor in the crisis. Critics said that it led to ‘group think’, a culture where no one challenged anyone else’s view.

An excellent way to start to tackle this problem of groupthink would be to bring in the talents of charity CEOs. 

Most big British companies have corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes, which make donations to charities and encourage staff to volunteer their skills. Many now have special days where staff can take time off to do voluntary work. But this is generally superficial and may even just be patronising to the people whom staff go to work with. It makes board directors feel good but it neither helps them really understand the sector nor care for its future. I have met too many of them who think running voluntary organisations is ‘just a bit of charity work’.

Yet many of ACEVO Chief Executives run complex voluntary organisations,  where thousands of people operate in highly ethically-conscious environments. Their ‘bottom line’ is far more complicated than a mere profit/loss and investment calculation. They have learnt also to earn and keep the public’s trust, while managing some of the biggest brands in the world. As an aside, I’m pleased to see this theme is on parliamentarians’ radar at least; it crops up several times in our Red, Blue and Yellow Books of the Voluntary Sector, the first of which is launched at Labour Conference this Sunday.

It is time these good people were sitting on the boards of our top companies. Years ago I was asked to sit on the ‘Tyson Task Force’ which looked at board room diversity. A good report emerged but the recommendations were weak and amounted to little more than exhortations. That was a decade ago. Little has changed. Now it’s time more was done to reform boardroom governance in the City. And this won’t happen without legislative change. So I’m pleased that our party conference programme will start off one part of this debate; promoting greater dialogue between charity CEOs and politicians. Next it’s the turn of the boardrooms themselves…

Charities speak for their beneficiaries, never for political parties.

A recent story in the Times, and picked up by the Daily Mail, highlights the attempts by the Charity Commission to make us declare spend on political campaigning.

It has been roundly criticised across the sector and I trust the Commission will now drop these proposals. We would be very happy to discuss with the Commission how we , as a sector,  can make our accounting more transparent and work with them on the trend towards impact reporting which demonstrates to the public the impact of their donations.

It's impact that matters , not the sterile reporting of where money is spent. This is where we can tell the story of what we do with the money we receive , whether from government contracts or from the public or corporate donors. We should have a common position with the regulator on how we tell that story – but unfortunately we have got divisive proposals that add more red tape at best and at worst make us suspicious that the real purpose of the Commission is ideological not regulatory.

When prominent members of the Commission are publicly quoted criticising our essential role in campaigning then it is hardly surprising we suspect the intentions of these proposals. Let’s hope that the many submissions that have been made to them will bear fruit and a rethink in how we do this.

Meanwhile let me reproduce the letter I wrote to the Times yesterday which makes our case concisely.

Sir, Stephen Pollard (Aug 26) suggests that charities’ campaigning is partisan, and that they are not transparent. For centuries charities have spoken out against injustice and suffering. In law, charities have a duty to work to alleviate the problems they tackle, and to try to prevent them arising at all. Charity law reflects this by allowing them to speak out on “political” issues in line with their mission.

The Charity Commission recently proposed requiring charities to declare how much they spend on “political campaigning”. A drive toward greater transparency is good for charities and good for society — and most if not all are working to be highly transparent.

However, the attempt to separate “political” campaigning from their other work is at best illogical. At worst, it panders to an infantilised debate that gives the false impression that campaigning is an optional extra to a charity’s work with beneficiaries.

Charity campaigning may be political but this does not make it partisan. Those in power are entitled to object to what is said, but not to charities’ right to say it. Charities speak for their beneficiaries, never for political parties.

The commission’s proposals must be seen in the context of the government’s Lobbying Act and of other attacks on civil society’s right to speak truth to power. It is no surprise that charity leaders speak out in defence of their beneficiaries. We should be glad of it. Society and our democracy would certainly be poorer if charities were muzzled.

Sir Stephen Bubb

Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations

Furniture Reuse and Tony Benn.

In Nottingham yesterday (Eastwood to be precise; the birthplace of DH Lawrence) for the 25th anniversary conference of the Furniture Reuse Network. A brilliant organisation that takes beds, sofas and various white goods that people are discarding and puts them back into reuse by those unable to afford these things. It’s like the food banks, but instead of supplying things to eat, it supplies the means of cooking it.

My old Brixton friend Matthew Thomson used to be the CEO. Now he runs the great ’Fifteen' social enterprise and restaurant, down in Cornwall. Craig Anderson is the CEO now taking the organisation forward. An active ACEVO member, he argues for professionalism in our approach to fulfilling our mission, and is charting a strong course for the network.

Furniture re-use is big business now; not surprisingly the recession has seen a big rise in demand, making the Network ever more relevant. I'd been asked to give the opening keynote address alongside Eric Pickles MP. Eric was good - I've known him for decades, since his time as Leader of Bradford. I was able to pay tribute to him for pioneering the Localism Act. I chided the sector for not making extensive use of the Rights clauses of the Act: the right to challenge, to acquire assets, etc. And we still have not fully used the Social Value Act to challenge commissioners.

I spoke on the theme of optimism. Though there are many reasons to be depressed, there are also major opportunities for our sector to deliver better services and to use our voice to challenge and advocate for our beneficiaries. I talked of our proud history of "voice and choice". And I'm afraid I had to chide Eric for the Lobbying Act, which has hardly anything to do with lobbying, and a lot to do with gagging campaigning charities. I said although ACEVO and our friends had secured much change - perhaps we got as much as 70% of what we want - a third sector leader should never be satisfied unless they have got 100%.

I talked about sorting commissioning. Council officials and civil servants have not been terribly good at drafting contracts, and the private sector has got away with serious failing. A handful of big firms mop up most of the cash, as I said in my recent letter to the PM.

The Government needs to "get its house in order”, to ensure the contracting-out of public services to private providers is subject to proper scrutiny and provides value for taxpayers, MPs have warned. Public Accounts Committee chair Margaret Hodge said recent outsourcing failures involving firms such as G4S and Serco had exposed "serious weaknesses" in the Government's management of private contracts. Her committee recommended extending FoI legislation to cover the contracts.

Of course this would also mean we were covered too. I'm not sure extending the legislation is a good idea. It would be time-consuming and bureaucratic. But we will need to be more open on contract matters I suspect.

Richard Johnson, former MD of Serco and an adviser to ACEVO, told Today: “if your strongest motivation is to secure the cheapest possible price, you are ultimately going to be driven to the largest contractors".

Last but not least, it was very sad to wake to the new of the death of Tony Benn. When I moved to London in 1976 I lived in Notting Hill for a number of years, and got to know the Benns well. Tony's wife Caroline was the Chair of Holland Park Governors, where I was also a governor for a while. So I used to go round to their place; their eldest son Stephen is an exact contemporary of mine. And I kept in touch.

I used to debate with Tony about public service reform, though I’m afraid he had the view that public services were the role of the State and charities were at the margins. I even asked him to debate the issue at one of our ACEVO CEO Summits. He was brilliant and had the audience in the palm of his hand. I've heard him speak on many occasions. It was always a privilege. And his courtesy in debate would always win him admirers. His writing was a joy. He will be missed.

The Top 500

A miserable Sunday as I trudged through Brockwell Park with the drenched Hound. But it was much enlivened by the Sunday Times! They have published a list of the Top 500 key influencers in Britain, and I appear in this list as one of the 20 most influential people in health. Other sectors featured include politics, broadcasting, finance, sport and the like.

As it says in the ST blurb “It's not about how much money you have, or who shouts loudest." Just as well, at least re. the money bit. Debretts helped compile the list with panels of judges who were tasked with finding the top 500 people who "demonstrate outstanding qualities of influence, achievement and inspiration".

It was neat for me that my brother Nick was the Panel Chair for retail so, as far as I could see, we were the only 2 brothers to appear on the list.

I know I have just written a piece with that bold headline about leaving your ego at the door, but I have to admit to being dead chuffed about this. It does highlight the work that ACEVO and I have been pioneering in health and social care, carrying the baton for reform and change and new ways to deliver better services for citizens. It’s a boost to us as we continue to push for a bigger role for charities and social enterprises in delivery and in advocacy. The health sector is such a closed shop of those who work within the NHS that I was delighted to see recognition for our third sector.

And nice to note a number of others from the sector like ACEVO members Ciaran Devane (Macmillan Cancer Support) and Gillian Guy (Citizens Advice), though the charity section of the list was light on charity leaders. The 20 top influencers in the charity section were dominated by philanthropists like Branson, Elton John and Lord Sainsbury. I like to think I was holding the umbrella for our professional sector too!

It just won't do!

Still, the Lobbying Bill can't find a single supporter outside the government's inner circle. Though some groups looked perilously close to that on Friday after Andrew Lansley announced minor concessions to charities' needs. 

Lansley's small concessions have yet to be fully outlined, but it looks like they still don't make the cut. ACEVO members' reactions certainly indicate the battle must continue, to push for the Bill to be withdrawn and redrafted with the usual, proper scrutiny as the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee suggests.

The fact is that the Bill remains fundamentally flawed. Our issue with it is not simply how it affects charities, but the fact it suggests they, and not other groups in society, are to blame for the public's loss of trust in politics. 

In truth, as ACEVO has led the way in arguing, the Bill still punishes civil society for the problems caused by corporate lobbying and by politicians themselves. 

To return to one case I used in my Times article last week, Lansley's amendments will perhaps leave Cancer Research UK slightly less constrained in their campaigns for cancer research funding or for restrictions on cigarette advertising. But the Bill still does nothing to tackle the other side of the coin: tobacco lobbyists covertly pressuring government to soften up their policy on plain cigarette packaging, for example.

So we should redouble our efforts to get this Bill withdrawn. Even in this week's form, it still misses the fundamental opportunity it has to make our politics more transparent and trusted. Minor tinkering is not good enough. We need to go back to the drawing board.