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| DSC believes that charities are as much about the civic engagement they represent as the work that they do. Jay Kennedy argues that we need to combat the worrying groupthink amongst policymakers in favour of mergers – because efficiency isn’t the point of civil society. |
Aldous Huxley: The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency
As the impact of the financial crisis continues, debates about whether there are ‘too many charities’, having simmered along for years, are about to come to a rolling boil. A worrying group-think in favour of charity mergers as inherently sensible and desirable is starting to pervade public policy.
To me this quote by the author of A Brave New World speaks to the current situation. The voluntary sector is almost by definition anarchic – it is part of the wider society that it both represents and creates. It reflects many of the same differences, variations, tensions and allegiances as exist between individual citizens and communities. It is a mass of often contradictory causes and organisations.
Some argue that this mass is too anarchic, too messy. It needs to be rationalised, made more efficient, more ‘modern’. Government and state institutions have longed for a less complicated sector to deal with, the impetus for greater uniformity driven by the bureaucratic and political need to find consensus and agreement. This was the logic of the last regime – representative membership bodies providing ‘consensus’ to the national state on policy, devices such as Local Area Agreements supposedly putting it in place locally.
Others argue that it’s mainly about resources. There aren’t enough to go around, so the sector in a sense needs ‘fewer mouths to feed’ (see responses to our August e-news survey). Then there’s the old chestnut that having too many charities is ‘confusing to the public’ – an absurdity surely, as who else but ‘the public’ is setting them up and supporting them?
In the past, such arguments have manifested themselves in unwelcome calls to require the Charity Commission to make it harder to register a charity. Thankfully to date these have not been taken on board, but the tide may be shifting. Let’s be clear – there’s no reason why the Commission couldn’t play a useful role in linking up similar charities, or providing prospective registrants with information about similar organisations which already exist, which they might want to support instead.
But we should not be talking about making it harder for people to organise themselves to help each other and their communities. So what if there are a few charities in the same community doing similar things? You can’t assume that if they were all one (larger) organisation there would be the same level of volunteer engagement, connection to the community, or closeness to beneficiary need. Nor can you assume that what looks ‘the same’ from the point of view of the regulator or the local authority isn’t qualitatively different in important ways.
In a sense the Huxley quote also gets at the dual personality we seem to be witnessing with the Government’s Big Society idea. Is it about millions of tiny platoons of citizens, going about their business, creating community, sometimes in conflict, for better or worse? Or is it about how services are delivered to the public – the Tesco model of the state, where the most financially efficient method for the taxpayer-consumer is taken regardless of the social cost? The Big Society is sufficiently vague to lend itself to interpretation depending on where you’re sitting. Conceptually it’s a pretty big tent, but even so it’s hard to see how the idea can survive intellectually whilst trying to be both.
DSC has always been clear about where we stand. We have always said the more charities the better – because we believe charities are as much about the civic engagement they represent as the work that they do. On the whole, the anarchy of the voluntary sector is not so excessive to pose a threat to our freedom. In fact we think it supports our freedom. It is on balance a strength, not a weakness.
Of course we can find ways to link groups together and collaborate better. But that it isn’t the same thing as saying organisations should merge to ‘save money’. Decisions about mergers need to be made by trustees in the best interests of beneficiaries. Funders coercing groups to merge, or state institutions creating greater hurdles to registering a charity is not only wrong, it ends up stifling the very civil society we are all trying to build.