Where did it all go so wrong for the Tories and the third sector? Beneath the cynical rhetoric of David Cameron’s “big society” there was a proposition. It said to the voluntary sector: we need you. As we cut public spending we hope social provision can – at least to face-saving extent – step in. We will (they implied) cherish you, dish out knighthoods to your top people and invite them to join commissions and parlays.
And for the first few years of the coalition government the bargain seemed to hold. None of the insider accounts of the Cameron years quite explains what happened next. Suddenly, the Tories turned. Tory MPs such as Priti Patel were encouraged to recruit the media in attacking charity “fat cats”. The cabinet sent the hapless third sector minister, Nick Hurd, to conferences to explain that not only would there be no extra money for charities to pick up the pieces from cuts to councils but they would have to put up with severe reductions in support.
The 2012 appointment of William Shawcross as chair of the Charity Commission was a turning point. He patently shares the Tory suspicion that many charities, not just Oxfam, are branches of Socialist International. Thatcherite themes started to be replayed, leading to the launch of legislation hampering lobbying.
The formerly docile National Council for Voluntary Organisations now musters its courage and complains that the governance of the Charity Commission shows its lack of independence. But Shawcross is eminently qualified to do to charities what the former Tory MP David Prior did to the NHS when he was made chair of the “independent” Care Quality Commission: to subject it to assault in order to soften them up.
But while Prior (now a Tory health minister) had the not-so-hidden agenda of clearing space for private companies to provide healthcare, the ulterior motives of Tory ministers in respect of charities are hard to discern. When Chancellor George Osborne proposed cutting tax relief on charity donations, was it an accident or part of some grand design?
It’s inconceivable that Shawcross would have made several speeches making trusteeship sound like the most onerous and unwelcome duty unless he had had conversations with ministers. But again, do they actually want to put people off charitable service?
It’s been the same story with fundraising, where the NCVO’s Sir Stuart Etherington is proposing complicated new machinery that, even if it is really self-regulation, looks and smells like at least one new quango .
Meanwhile, the government is running a coach and horses through the charitable status of housing associations. Even if a mooted informal agreement between the communities secretary, Greg Clark, and the National Housing Federation heads off legislation on tenants’ right to buy, the sector is in a mess. The Office of National Statistics is poised to classify social landlords’ debts as public, reducing to the point of invisibility their preferred status as builders.
And, a further sign of alienation, charities appear to have been left out of the Osborne devolution agenda.
Charities, of course, are too ubiquitous not to feature large in the Tories’ social policies – they love academy schools (exempt from normal regulation) and religious groups who sign up to counter-radicalisation. But delegates at the Tory conference next week will see plenty of evidence the love affair with the voluntary sector that Cameron announced back in 2007 is well and truly over.
