UK charities are struggling to cope with a £10bn shortfall caused by soaring demand for their services and lost fundraising income due to the coronavirus pandemic, a study by Pro Bono Economics, an independent charity, shows. Two different charities relate the challenges they have been facing.
Leonard Cheshire
As coronavirus took hold in the UK in early March, the disability charity Leonard Cheshire was rapidly thrust into a crisis which threatened the health of thousands of its care home residents and staff, and stretched its finances to the limit.
In common with other social care providers it was unable to get sufficient stocks of personal protective equipment (PPE) for weeks, at the same time as hundreds of its 4,500-strong frontline workforce were forced to self-isolate or quarantine.
A floor of its London HQ was turned into a PPE warehouse while it set up seven temporary regional distribution centres and a small fleet of trucks to get tonnes of equipment and supplies to its 120 residential facilities across the UK.
It is currently spending up to £2m a month from its reserves to meet the costs of extra PPE and additional staff, said its chief executive Neil Heslop – and, he says, it has had little financial support with those extra costs from most of the councils and NHS bodies for which it provides services under contract.
Overhead costs have been slashed – it has cancelled a pay rise for non-frontline staff and suspended its property maintenance programme – but attempts to get help from the government have been refused. The next few months are critical: a second wave of coronavirus could cost it £20m this year, a sixth of its budget.
It could be worse, says Heslop: other disability charities are facing more drastic financial problems. But without state support, Leonard Cheshire faces difficult decisions about cutting services. The danger, Heslop says, is that the UK’s 14 million disabled people are being “forgotten”.
Oasis Project
For Oasis Project, a 20-year-old women-only drug and alcohol charity in Brighton, the initial shock of lockdown and social distancing meant it could no longer do face-to-face therapy with its vulnerable clients. This was followed by an eerie relative calm.
Then after a couple of weeks, the calls came in: under the stress of lockdown, clients began reporting fresh problems with mental health, substance abuse and domestic violence. Referrals for new assessments have doubled in the last few weeks.
As demand is soaring, the financial impact of the pandemic on the charity, which has a £1.2m annual turnover, looks more dire. It planned to fundraise £250,000 this year to enhance its state-contracted services, and that now looks unlikely to happen.
Its chief executive, Jo-Anne Welsh, says she is also worried about a fresh spike in demand for its services in the coming months, as unmet needs among its vulnerable clients that were effectively suppressed under lockdown come to the surface.
“We are very concerned about this potential rise in demand because of what that means for the people we serve and whether they will come out safe,” she adds.
