Getting the Message Across

Today, we see NHS England announce a tangible commitment to close inappropriate hospital settings for those with learning disabilities. This is a long overdue milestone – initially, we were promised that this would have been realized by June 2014. Over the next 3 years, we should see these institutions which have been campaigning against closed down, and those within them being transferred to more appropriate community care.

This is a victory for all those – both individual campaigners and charities – who have been campaigning against the inappropriate treatment of these vulnerable individuals.

Physical restraint, over-medication and seclusion are shocking ways to treat our fellow citizens and I'm determined we must do better. That is why I welcome today’s closure programme. That's why I welcome the plan to scale up community provision. In my view it’s a step-change. High time some will say, but I'm confident it is now going to happen.

And a clear indication of the will to change comes with the announcement of the closure of the biggest of the NHS learning disability hospitals, Calderstones, and the plans to provide modern and professional care in the community.

This will take time because we must ensure proper discussion and consultation with people and families; making sure what is provided meets the best possible care for people who have been for so long so badly let down by the system.

I am not content to simply rely on proposals and what I have seen myself to find out what’s happening on the ground. Collecting the views of those on the front line is crucial to making sure we get these changes right. This is why I’m launching a major fact-finding mission. You can find out more about this here (To make sure all voices are heard, an easy-read version of this can be found here).

To prevent a repeat of the failures which we’ve seen, I'm also calling on the government to bring forward new legislation to enshrine rights to challenge for people with learning disabilities. This has been promised. But it needs to go hand in hand with closures and reprovision so that people with learning disabilities feel confident of their power to effect change.

But we are seeing progress. After years of inertia, it looks like something is finally being done. This is the time for change.

As if this week wasn’t busy enough, the NAO also released their report into Kids Company yesterday. They found that current Cabinet Office leadership did not observe proper oversight and leadership of the Kids Company. Neither they nor the Office for Civil Society seemed to have any appetite to engage with Kids Company's lack of reserves, governance and chronic cash flow difficulties.

Asheem Singh, my Director of Policy, was on BBC Breakfast yesterday, emphasizing that this is something that needs to change. Leadership and governance are crucial to making sure that charities are successful – something that the government would do well to recognize.

It is right that government works with charities to reach the most vulnerable in our society – this is one of the things that charities do best. But they need to remember to look after the bottom line. The good work of charities is done on the front line, but built on the back office. Kids Company forgot this, and we have seen the consequences.

A Cohesive Society?

I was at the Conservative Party Conference and listened to Theresa May this morning. She was right to talk of the importance of a cohesive society. Which is why it is all the more inexplicable that Conservative Party Conference organisers banned the event ‘Faith and British Values: The Muslim Charity Question’.

And banned it at the eleventh hour and without notification to either the hosts ACEVO or the sponsors the Muslim Charity Forum.

The event was rearranged outside the Conservative Party zone of control. At that event, at the Friends Meeting House outside the Tory perimeter, I said that you can't prescribe a cohesive society by government legislation. A cohesive society is built by citizens and communities. So working with the leadership of Muslim charities, with faith groups in general and with charities is vital in tackling extremism and alienation.

Muslim charities, together with the rest of our charity sector must be on the inside, central to developing a strategy to tackle extremism. The message sent by the Party’s decision to ban ‘Faith and British Values’ was simply counterproductive.

And it is already clear that many in the Conservative party are upset and perplexed by this decision. At our rearranged event I was pleased that the Chair of the Conservative Forum was both present and spoke. Whoever in the conference organisation made this regrettable decision, it must not be allowed to cloud or impair efforts by our sector and community leaders to work for a more cohesive society.

It was great to see so many people coming to our event at short notice. It was gratifying to have the support of faith leaders, and especially the Quakers who made their meeting house available to an event designed to promote the contribution of the Muslim constituency within the charitable and wider community.

ACEVO has developed a strong working relationship with the Muslim Charity Forum and we will continue to give them strong support in promoting what they do and developing their leadership and governance.

The massive Twitter traffic controversy over the banning of this event has shown the sector unites in dismay at the way in which we were treated. Muslim charities are part of the solution to cohesion, not part of the problem. We will be looking at meeting with Theresa May to discuss how we can develop this. If you think that it is us in the sector alone who feel strongly about this please read what Daily Mail columnist Peter Oborne has to say in his article for Middle East Eye. http://bit.ly/1Ojn6MY

Women in Charity

One of the great advantages of a leaders’ network like ACEVO is the opportunity to network with other CEOs. That’s why ACEVO has always had such strong events and conference programmes. And we have always been aware of the need to ensure a strong regional presence and a programme that recognises diversity.

I’m rather proud of the fact that ACEVO has run a Women CEOs Summit for a number of years now. I don’t know of any other umbrella that has something similar to offer. We know that gender equality is rather a long way off and there are too few women CEOs in top national charity jobs (according to ACEVO’s most recent Pay Survey, only 25% of charities with a turnover of £15m or more have a female CEO).

This year’s Summit, kindly sponsored by RBS, has a rather stellar line up and a mega booking for it. It features a line-up ranging from Stella Creasy MP to chiefs at the Department for Education, Women’s Aid and Girlguiding UK. The Summit has been so popular that we are now fully booked and are running a waiting list!

The speakers will consider how women leaders should respond to a challenging climate for women and women’s services. They will also be talking about how women leaders can find a leadership style which works for them and how we can inspire the next generation of young women leaders. ACEVO’s policy and projects officer Lauren Kelly has been of huge help organising this year’s summit so I thought I’d include a few words from her with her take. She writes:

“This year’s Summit comes at a time of significant challenges and opportunities for women in the UK. Austerity has hit women particularly hard. Women have been disproportionately affected by staffing cuts in central government, local authorities, and the NHS as they make up the majority of public sector workforce.

Meanwhile, the combined force of tax credit cuts, reductions in housing benefit, and the three-year inflation freeze in child benefit month has weakened their safety net. According to the Fawcett Society, £22bn of the £26bn saved from welfare reform since 2010 has come from women’s pockets. As women still tend to be the primary carers for children and for frail older people, cuts to services hit them harder than men.

There has been slow progress in other key areas of inequality such as violence against women and under-representation in Westminster and other seats of power. Leaders of young people’s services tell me they are deeply concerned about the increasing pressure on young women to look a certain way and sexual inequality amongst young people.

The UK has seen a flourishing of equality activism, which some are labelling the ‘fourth wave’ of British feminism. Women – and many men – have taken to the streets to protest against sexist policies with respect to female representation, sexual violence, housing, immigration, news coverage, and even bank notes, amongst other things.

The result has been cross-political acknowledgement that number of women in government and in top positions across private, public, and third sectors is unacceptable and more women willing to speak up against casual sexism. To build upon this momentum, we need only to keep pushing and to harness the current public and media interest in women’s issues. I hope that attendees at this year’s ACEVO Women CEOs Summit will come away inspired to raise their voices.”

"So that was August"

I've always thought August is a bad time for holidays so tend to stay around and make use of the meeting free month.  Though this time it may have been meeting free but rather media full.  Making the case for the professional third sector and the need for strong leadership and governance in the wake of Kids Company in particular.  It put the fundraising issue into context I thought.

I spent my Sunday lunchtime talking to Sky news about fundraising in the light of the excellent letter from some of the top national charities CEOs which outlined how they will act to implement new arrangements to reinforce the highest ethical standards.

We welcome these reforms as necessary to restore any deficit in public trust.  Fundraising is the lifeblood of many charities and we can’t afford to lose too much of it.  There is a danger that less asking will mean less giving.  Given the huge strain on many charities coping with increased demand its vital these efforts continue to be supported by the public. The recent major media attention to the refugee crisis shows how vital the work of bodies like the Red Cross, Save the Children, Oxfam and Unicef are - to name but a few of those at the centre of efforts to relieve real hardship and distress.

One thing I try to do in August is visit members where they work. Its been a memorable time. Starting with the Reader Organisation in Liverpool; based in a splendid  "Calderstones Park" (they are planning on buying it off the Council). They aim to encourage children in reading out loud - so based in groups and where reading is valued and promoted among many kids for whom reading is uncommon. They are based in the old mansion in the park. Once home to one of the great Liverpool trading families its now a major community asset.

I also spent a day in Lancashire visiting facilities run by Future Directions for people with learning disabilities. The CEO is an active ACEVO member Paula Braynian and she took me to visit a range of facilities from high to low dependency.  I was able to talk to a number of people who had spent time in the NHS long stay hospital Calderstones and was shocked to hear their stories about treatment there that is so often based on a regime of seclusion, medication and physical restraint.  It was both heartening to hear their progress in a community facility and horrifying to reflect on the trauma of their time in an institution.  The 2 people I saw had spent 10 and 12 years in institutional care at that hospital.  One of these was a woman who had has a broken shoulder as a result of physical restraint.  And now they are cared for in a home that refuses to use such restraint, has no seclusion rooms and won't use medication for control.  A woman that was judged to be so dangerous to herself and others they predicted she would be back within 3 months is now managing her own medicine, leaving the home regularly to see her parents and teaching on courses about self harm and why it happens.  She has even started volunteering with older people.  It brought home to me so vividly

why we must close down institutional care and move people with learning disabilities into community support and independence.  That is why my work following up on my November report on Winterbourne is so crucial. I will not rest until institutions are closed and we give people with learning disability the future and the well being they deserve but are so often denied. I'm planning on a year review of that report by the end of they year.  

Then a change of tempo and it was the wonderful Battersea Dogs and Cats home, led by the dynamic CEO Claire Horton.  This charity has been around for over 160 years and like the RSPCA was founded on the principle of direct action to home strays but also campaign for better conditions for our nation's animals.  The revisionist wing of charity history, much in evidence in parts of our media, forget that many of our great national charities wee founded with those twin aims.  People who argue the RSPCA, the NSPCC, or the RSPB should somehow just "stick to their knitting" don't understand the founding mission of those organisations where campaigning was woven into the fabric of their very existence. Caring for an abused dog is good. Preventing and rooting out abuse better.

As a dog lover I so enjoyed being shown around the wonderful facilities there and chatting with Claire about the animal charity world! There was a rather lovely terrier who was looking at me dolefully but I don't think my very own Jack Russell would be keen on a rival....

Battersea is a great example of why Britain should be proud of its charitable heritage - Battersea is an example that has been copied around the world and they continue to attract attention across the globe for their work.

You should read the great story of the Home, "A dogs life" produced for their 150th anniversary. 

Then continuing the animal theme I went to the Vauxhall City Farm, led by Matthew Lock, one of ACEVO's younger CEOs.  A wonderful place where sheep and alpacas, ducks and chickens roam within sight of the looming towers of MI6.  They have a new block of stables for the horses much used by Riding for the Disabled.  Its both an educational and health promotion venture where they work with London schools in introducing pupils to the adventure that is nature.  They are in the process of a major development but are keen to expand the work they do, particularly on the health front.

Then last week I was in Suffolk to visit the Befriending Scheme, a relatively small but growing charity led by a CEO, Shirley Moore, who started with them some time back doing 5 hours a week and now runs this fabulous charity full time with over 20 staff and 300 volunteers.  Its provides support in the community for people with learning disabilities as well as those with other disabilities that would otherwise isolate them at home.  Shirley has wonderful plans for future developments and we talked about these over lunch in the lovely town of Lavenham.

Now Parliament is back and meetings begin in earnest.  I already have 6 today! Will they be as educational as my charity visiting I wonder...

Give more. Get healthy!

Had a great lunch yesterday with David Halpern, the CEO of the behavioural insight unit.  Better known as the nudge experts, they have been responsible for some fascinating  innovations in the way our public services work.  David is publishing a book on the theory of nudge next week.  Get it.  I shall. 

They have been responsible for some in depth work on how to nudge people to give.  And today they are publishing some new research on giving and health.  And it shows that spending money on other people is good for your heart!  

Giving generously lowers high blood pressure, an ailment that contributes to the deaths of an estimated 7.5 million people prematurely worldwide each year.

This remarkable effect that being unselfish with money has on health was discovered by a team of psychologists that ran two studies among older adults with high blood pressure.

The first involved 186 people living in the United States who were aged between 55 and 74 and suffered from high blood pressure.  The team analysed how much money they contributed to religious groups, political organisations and causes, friends and family and other organisations.

The researchers found the more money the participants spent on others, the lower their systolic and diastolic blood pressure was two years later.

The second study examined 73 participants with heart complaints aged over 65 from the Vancouver area of Canada.  They were randomly assigned to spend three lots of $40 dollars either on themselves or others for three consecutive weeks during a six-week study period.

When examined afterwards, participants who gave to others showed significant improvements in systolic and diastolic blood pressure compared to participants assigned to spend money on themselves. “Thus, prosocial spending was linked to lower blood pressure,” the team concluded in a paper about the trials.

The researchers believe these results represent the first-ever empirical evidence that engaging in “prosocial spending” can lead to lower blood pressure and healthier hearts.  They speculate that the improvement may take place in part because the generous act activates the release of the stress-reducing neurohomones.

This beneficial impact of generosity on well-being is good news because heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. High blood pressure, which puts people at a higher risk of a heart attack, currently affects 67 million people in the U.S. and, according to the World Health Organization, 1 billion people worldwide.

In their paper the team adds: “Together, these findings suggest that spending money on others shapes cardiovascular health, thereby providing one pathway by which prosocial behaviour improves physical health among older adults.” The team's paper goes on: “Across two studies, we provide the first empirical evidence that prosocial spending may lead to lower blood pressure among older adults.”


I wonder if this will be widely reported?  A good antidote to some of the hostile media publicity on fundraising.  It's great news for charities like the British Heart Foundation and their door to door fundraisers. So supporting them is not just good for the charity that is our leading heart research body but responding to their fundraising will help lower your blood pressure. What could be fairer than that! 

We need charisma?

The debate around leadership at the Kids Company has revolved around charismatic leadership and whether this is enough.  As I said on the Today programme when the story broke charisma is good and indeed many of our great charity leader are both charismatic and  passionate, but when it is not coupled with sound administration and governance it can be disastrous.

Charisma is one of those things that we are supposed to fall for and admire.  God-given grace and charm is magical, not to be sniffed at.  Or is it?

I was fascinated to see that the dear old BBC Radio 4 is about to embark on a series about it in many walks of life, ranging from St Paul to Sarah Bernhardt and into the 21st century.  And I thought I'd reproduce the blurb from the BBC website to provoke thought on this. Franc one Stock writes,

 "Charisma is an external force of nature: confidence, charm, power, "quick-thinkingness", combined with physical impressiveness.

The more I thought about it, the more dangerous the whole concept became.  Beware of charisma, I say.  It will lead you into trouble.  I wracked my brains and in fact only a few business candidates come to mind.

For example, though they might like to think that they are - accountants are not charismatic, though they now often rise to the top of large organisations. Neither are bankers, though they may wield great power for a time.

Charisma is about more than power. It's about influence."

Corporate charisma:

For example, Henry Ford is probably the most striking example of what must be corporate charisma.  Farm boy, suspicious of banks all his life, opportunist who created the production line (out of existing manufacturing techniques) because there were no skilled engineers to be hired in Detroit (they were all making railway wagons).

Because he had to take unskilled immigrants with little English he broke work down into small repeatable tasks on a moving line.  He reduced work to monotonous repetition, but he paid well for it.

Fordist mass-production and the production line became so influential that they rapidly became the way of doing things in manufacturing, not just of cars but of almost everything else. 

Big and hugely influential maybe, but was this charismatic? I think it was.  Henry Ford used to go "camping" with his friends Edison and Firestone in a convoy of tent trucks.  The press would follow and record their fireside chats.  Edison had an ear trumpet.  Trumped up charisma, but a pretty big impact on the way many of us still work. 

Business charisma often coincides with a wave of technology change, which the charismatic leader rides like a surfer.  Ford was a part of the great automotive disruption of the early 20th Century.

Charisma has a lot to do with how the American media portray their business leaders.  Getting rich quick is only half the story.  Business leaders need to be "awesome" as well, and probably short-tempered.

Jack Welch was charismatic during his long reign as a chairman championing shareholder value at General Electric.  But his reputation shrank almost as soon as he was out of office.

Like politicians (as Enoch Powell nearly said) the careers of most of those admired as "charismatics" end in failure.

Larger than life:

One charismatic business person of whom that was not true was the late Steve Jobs of Apple.  He was, I'll admit from my only encounter with him, utterly charismatic in how he behaved and what he achieved.

Jobs upended personal computing, the music industry, animated cartoons, and retailing.  But he was impatient and irritable, not nice.  Maybe that goes with the aura.

Francine Stock has zeroed in on one of the cornflake kings, W K Kellogg, who made a fortune out of his brother's cereal invention, which was launched out of his clinic in Battle Creek, Wyoming.

But where are the British charismatics? Fry, Rowntree, Cadbury - were those self-effacing Quakers charismatic? The question is naturally self-contradictory.

One genuine candidate is John Spedan Lewis who gave the John Lewis company away to the workforce and then sat at home writing awkward had-to-be-answered letters to the partnership's weekly newspaper, the Gazette, for the rest of his life.  A forceful man, a forceful idea.  No-one else I can think of in Britain gets near.

And apart from Steve Jobs, the only other candidates I have met were Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, superbly charismatic together as only movie stars can be.  They bent the air when you looked at them, especially her.

But do we need charismatic leadership? The media do: charisma makes good stories, larger-than-life people behaving quite unlike the rest of us.

The force-field of charisma and its impact on others is usually accompanied by huge self belief. Several of the American billionaires are convinced they will find a way of living forever, for example.

Falls from grace.

Charisma breeds a dangerous deference in underlings. It leads to diaries so packed there is no time for reflection, and no need for it either.  Self-confidence is fine for movie stars, but in the business world it stops bosses from being challenged, and from realising that their big ideas are mostly fleeting, insubstantial and troublesome.

A bad plan produced by someone temporarily regarded as charismatic looks good at the time, but when the wind changes (or the economy stumbles) it often turns to ashes.  And British business is scarred with repeated stories of seemingly just-for-a-moment charismatic leaders who rapidly fell from grace, and took their companies with them.

One is tempted to say: "happy the land that has no heroes." 

I'm not sure I buy all this but I shall be listening out!

Charisma: Pinning Down the Butterfly is a two-week series presented by Francine Stock starting on BBC Radio 4 on Monday, 24 August at 13.45. 

Kids Company – a watershed moment?

It’s not David Cameron or indeed Gordon Brown’s fault that Kids Company has gone under. Indeed I applaud them for their instincts in wanting to support a charity they knew was working at the front line with vulnerable kids not reached or known by local authorities. But politicians, the charity sector and the public must learn the lessons from what has happened – and support charities that provide crucial services properly.

Kids Company is an important case in point. Their founder, Camilla Batmangeilidh was a wonderful character but she was also clear on one thing: the frontline was where the money had to go. She was very opposed to spending on overheads as she thought all the money must go out to her kids. This is a noble idea but if you take the time to view their publically available accounts their overhead costs are alarmingly low – way below what any sustainable organisation should expect. When you couple that with rapid, government-funded growth, which emerged in the wake of significant cuts to government provided services, problems are inevitable.

It appears that this was made worse by what is often called "founder syndrome." Any chief executive must surround themselves with a top quality team to deliver essential administrative functions. Batmangelidh’s approach appears to have relied heavily on her indomitable spirit, force of character and charisma. Without the sufficient collateral support of good governance and sound administration, these things, are, simply, not enough.

As council social care is cut to the bone, Kids Company was a major player in town. The social consequences of their demise are catastrophic for the individuals concerned and costly to the exchequer. Yet it would compound the catastrophe if criticism of the decisions by government on the funding of Kids Company caused government ministers to micromanage charities with which they work, or out of fear, overlook them altogether.

In order to square this circle, we need a more adult discourse on what it means to run a successful charity in the twenty first century. There is a broad lesson for the media, which must be less hypocritical about what it wants from charities. Take the recent furore on charity fundraising, which arose as a result of charities outsourcing this part of their activity to keep overheads down and funnel more money to the front line.  The negative stories were understandable but must be coupled with the understanding that to bring these functions in-house costs money – and that money will not go to the front line. And yet you can then be sure that the next slew of negative stories about charity overheads are on the horizon.

We must not return to a Victorian-style philanthropy where we rely on the occasional good will of some philanthropists but do not have the temerity to complain about the causes of poverty, to create sustainable organisations that make a difference for the long term and to fund and lead them effectively. The right lesson would be to acknowledge that running an organisation that helps people in the twenty first century requires good governance as well as good intentions – and the Government must support good governance and high quality leadership in the charity sector if it is to prevent future catastrophes.