Perfect Storms

Guest post by Jeremy Cripps, Chief Executive, Children North East

In the weeks after storm Sandy flooded Manhattan it’s sobering to be reminded of the chaos that turbulent conditions can cause. The same goes for economic weather as meteorology. Children England, the national membership organisation for voluntary organisations working with children, young people and families, have published a report called ‘Perfect Storms’. The report models and provides case studies showing the cumulative impact of the financial crisis and subsequent austerity measures on children’s charities and their statutory partners. It describes two worrying and interrelated ‘perfect storms’ affecting the voluntary and public sectors, and those they support.

First the ‘Business Storm’ threatens the financial survival of charities – individual giving has remained static, the financial crisis reduced investment income, social enterprise income (e.g. running paid training for professionals) has fallen and the deep public sector funding cuts have increased competition for the grants made by trusts, foundations and the national lottery. Costs have risen too due to inflation, higher fuel bills and the costs involved in public fundraising.

Most importantly at the same time demand for services, both in the number of people seeking support and the severity of their problems, has increased dramatically. As a result, staff and volunteer numbers have fallen, reducing service capacity, while those remaining in post are increasingly suffering from burnout.

Second the ‘Locality Storm’ demonstrates these pressures are not isolated, they mirror and interact with pressures on local authority children’s services – both sectors are experiencing higher costs, reduced funding and increased demand.

The consequences are that local support arrangements are starting to break down, threatening the wellbeing of some of the most vulnerable children, young people and families. With many services rationing the support that they provide, principally through waiting lists and raised access thresholds, and others closing altogether, people in need are being pushed towards whatever support they can find. Public sector services and contracts with charities increasingly focus on crisis support at the expense of early intervention, potentially storing up further trouble for the future.

This analysis is based on discussions with Children England member organisations all over the country. It is also a true representation of the circumstances for my organisation, Children North East. Our total income for the year 2011-2012 was 25% less than the previous year, but during the year our services reached 1,033 children, and 5,751 young people, that is 65% more than the previous year. We also worked with adults in 944 families. All this is achieved by 41 part-time, 19 full-time and 6 sessional staff and 111 volunteers.

The children, young people and families coming to or referred to us have more serious difficulties than before, for example we have noticed a marked increase in the number of young people who are self-harming, talking about or attempting suicide. Increasingly it is the norm for our staff to take responsibility to coordinate other services and professionals involved with the child, young person or family. Whilst it might be expected that trained staff take on these roles as part of ‘new ways of working’, there is a serious question to be answered about what it is reasonable to expect of volunteers in these situations.

We are seeing widening gaps in the safety net of public sector provision. For example neither local authority children’s services nor NHS child psychiatry departments have provided an effective service to families of children with behaviour problems, but as both services raise referral thresholds to limit the provision and increase waiting lists to manage demand there is nowhere for those parents to go. Some of them end up with voluntary organisations like Children North East who are not commissioned to provide that type of service but do what they can anyway driven by their charitable objectives such as relief of distress or support for the vulnerable.

In effect our services are taking the place of some of what used to be done by the public sector, but at the same time funding for our services from the public sector is declining. I do not want us to mimic public services and raise our thresholds or create waiting lists because in my opinion the role of the voluntary sector is to stop people falling through the gaps in public sector services. However it is not clear what the solution is.

Children England found their members thought the scenarios described by Perfect Storms are inevitable but unintentional, they also feel that they are deep-rooted and predate the economic downturn that started in 2008, though have been exacerbated by the recession and austerity measures. They are problems of complex systems and therefore do not have straightforward solutions. Perfect Storms concludes that solutions may be found by questioning what vulnerable children and young people actually need; the role of charities in service provision; priorities for public spending; public accountability and the ownership of risk; the future role of public services as statutory powers are devolved to local levels; and training for the voluntary sector workforce.

Jeremy Cripps

Chief Executive

Children North East

Lacking the necessaries of life…..

A couple of weeks ago Jeremy Cripps, the Chief Executive of Children North East wrote a powerful blog about how funding cuts passed from central government to the local authority and then to his charity meant that they were unable to afford to provide a meal for some children in temporary accommodation over the summer holidays that they work with. Jeremy wrote:

here we have a Government without the humanity to care for very vulnerable people until they are deported by giving them even a minimal amount of money to feed their children; a local authority providing shelter for those families but forced to cut back on its spending by the Government; passing that cut on to a  charity which too has to economise; the buck passes to the charity’s staff who cannot stand by and do nothing while in daily contact with children in basic  need of food; so they take it upon themselves to make sure children do not go hungry. This is the reality of the so-called ‘Big Society’ in ‘austerity  Britain’.

This story was picked up by the Guardian Cuts Blog which ran it under the headline ‘who pays for lunch when the state does a runner?’ and another similar story was posted earlier today

Earlier this year, as part of a blogging day during Volunteers Week, Carrie Brookes of VONNE asked readers to ‘imagine if we all stopped volunteering tomorrow’, noting that the value of unpaid care in the UK had been calculated at around £87bn. She finished her blog thus:

The fact is that much of the work undertaken by volunteers and charities saves the state a huge amount of money.  Prevention of problems such as poor health, teenage pregnancies, helping people get back into the workplace, support for homeless people, advice and guidance, drug rehabilitation, they all save the state an awful lot of money.  A lot more than the £87bn mentioned above. We cannot afford to deal with the consequences to society if that support for volunteers and activity they support is stopped. (my emphasis)

The last line of Carrie’s blog provides a flip side to a couple of polemic paragraphs from one of my favourite books, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Robert Tressell, writing in the early 1900′s suggested it would be better if we all did stop volunteering tomorrow in a section which touches on a number of issues relevant to the situation above:

Meanwhile, in spite of this and kindred (charitable) organisations, the condition of the under-paid poverty stricken and unemployed workers remained the same. Although the people who got the grocery and coal orders, the ‘Nourishment’, and the cast-off clothes and boots, were glad to have them, yet these things did far more harm than good. They humiliated, degraded and pauperized those who received them, and the existence of the societies prevented the problem being grappled with in a sane and practical manner. The people lacked the necessaries of life: necessaries of life are produced by work: these people were willing to work, but were prevented from doing so by the idiotic system of society which these ‘charitable’ people are determined to do their best to perpetuate.

If the people who expect to be praised and glorified for being charitable were never to give another farthing it would be far better for the industrious poor, because then the community as a whole would be compelled to deal with the absurd and unnecessary state of affairs that exists today – millions of people living and dying in wretchedness and poverty in an age when science and machinery have made it possible to produce such an abundance of everything that everyone might enjoy plenty and comfort. If it were not for all this so called charity the starving unemployed men all over the country would demand to be allowed to work and produce the things they are perishing for want of, instead of being – as they are now – content to wear their masters’ cast-off clothing and to eat the crumbs that fall from his table’ (my emphases)

It is, of course, very obvious that the state can afford to provide funding for these families. Central government can also afford not to cut funding to local authorities. Local authorities can also afford not to cut their grant to charities by 10%. The fact is they choose not to do these things, choosing instead to spend money on other things or choosing not to increase the amount of money at their disposal, leaving Jeremy and his staff with little choice but to dip into their own pockets. John Veit-Wilson, in his ‘Horses for Discourses’ paper makes this point better than anyone:

Ensuring that all the members of society, residents in or citizens of a nation state, have enough money is a clear role which governments can adopt or reject, but they cannot deny they have the ultimate power over net income distribution.

I don’t necessarily agree with Tressell’s proposal or his representation of charitable organisations (which were very different when he was writing), but I do agree with his analysis of the system of society. How can we call ourselves civilized when we deliberately and knowingly let families live without, as Tressell puts it, ‘the necessaries of life’ when the world has never been richer? At what point will we stop and realise that we have accumulated enough ‘stuff’ and wealth’ and sit down and work out how to divide it up better?

Thoughts, as ever, are welcome……

Steve

ps – in the interest of full disclosure, I’m running the Great North Run this year and am raising money for Children North East. Feel free to donate here

Inclusion or stigma?

Last Friday, Dr. Kathy Hamilton from the University of Strathclyde gave a seminar in Durham on ‘Inclusion or Stigma? Low Income families and coping through brands‘. The paper that the seminar was based on can be found here and the presentation that Kathy delivered can be found here or by clicking on the image below

The seminar was very well received and three things in particular struck me about Kathy’s presentation.

1. Household budgeting

Kathy noted that many of the households considered spending money on ‘brands’ (visible consumption) to be ‘non-discretionary’ and spending on goods and services consumed within the household (invisible consumption) was considered to be disretionary. This was a strategy to ‘protect’ the children in the household from bullying or stigma (or from obtaining the goods using illicit methods) and reminded me of Chris Warburton- Brown’s work on maternal deprivation. (If you haven’t read his blog, please do so here and his presentation at another of our seminars can be found here)

2. Exclusion

The presentation contained a couple examples of ‘strong’ versions of social exclusion. John Veit-Wilson (1998, p45) identified that ‘weak’ versions of the social exclusion discourse focus on changing individuals characteristics whereas stronger versions ‘also emphasise the role of those who are doing the excluding’. This was particularly the case with the lone parents who felt empowered and independent by caring for their children without the support of the father whilst the wider societal discourse of ‘single mothers’ saw them as reliant on welfare; and with the consumption practices that help inclusion at a micro (neighbourhood) level provoking the threat of stigma at a macro (wider societal) level. Here’s a good ‘applied’ example from the Sunderland Echo which reports that ‘Sunderland bar bans ‘chavs’ in bid to end trouble’. The manager of the bar states that there will be ‘no labels which are classed as undesirable‘ (my emphases)

3. Social Marketing

The pervasiveness of the market and the potential (or otherwise) of ‘social marketing’ generated a lot of discussion during the panel session. The idea that an activity (marketing) that is involved in generating the stigma and exclusion that we were discussing could also form part of a strategy to address the exclusion reminded me of a paper (on social capital) by Smith and Kulynych. They argue that:

there are many problems with using a vocabulary … drawn from the predominant economic model to overcome the deficits of this model (p160)

and that

the use of the language of the stock market to discuss … the amelioration of social problems reflect the seeming hegemony of capitalism (p166)

This ‘language of the stock market’ includes not only social marketing and social capital but also, for example, ‘ethical consumption‘, ‘social return on investment‘, ‘ethical finance‘ and ‘sustainable development‘. Smith and Kulynych propose that these terms:

serve to make the social, economic and political relations that characterize capitalism appear a largely natural and inevitable aspect of human activity, as well as to help legitimate these relations.

In other words, the market is often presented as the answer, no matter what the question. This approach, it could be argued, can also be seen in the ‘new approach’ to tackling child poverty in the UK.

But these are just some of my thoughts. As ever, we’re always keen to hear yours……

Steve

*Many thanks to Kathy Hamilton for leading the seminar, Nick Ellis for chairing it and to Alison Garnham, Jeremy Cripps and Victoria Wells for taking part in the panel discussion.

A couple of days before the event, Helen Goodman, the Shadow Media Minister, who was hoping to attend the seminar, called for curbs on advertising directed at children