latest

general election

Timeline

1997 • Labour publishes a report on the voluntary sector,

Building the Future Together

• New Labour wins the general election

1998 • The Compact agreed and published 2000 • Limit on minimum donation size for gift aid removed

2001 • The Active Community Unit is established • The three-year, HMRC-funded Giving Campaign is launched, aiming to increase the level and culture of public giving

2003 • Futurebuilders registered as a non-profit company 2005 • Full launch of ChangeUp Hubs

2006 • Capacitybuilders created to administer the Hubs • Office of the Third Sector created • The Charities Act is passed

2007 • Commission for the Compact established

2008 • Grassroots Grants scheme opens • Third Sector Research Centre opens • Hubs close • Transitional gift aid rate established to counteract fall in income tax

2009 • Refreshed Compact published Kennedy gives a broader critique

of the problems contracts have caused for charities. “The government has created an environment where it’s almost an unspoken rule that commissioners at all levels feel that it’s no longer appropriate to give a grant to a charity to deliver it, when in many cases that’s the simplest and most effective way to achieve their outcomes. They’re spending millions of pounds on these hugely complicated tendering processes and the sector is faced with a situation where it has two choices: say no to the money and close down the service or rapidly get up to scratch with this unwieldy, bureaucratic tendering process.”

22

Charity Finance April 2010

He adds: “They said they want to

open up service delivery and make it contestable for different sets of providers but they never really thought about what charities needed to be able to do that successfully, whether it was realistic for most of them to do it and what the impact would be on the sector as a whole.”

Funding

That is not to say that Labour has not provided grant funding; the period has seen a range of initiatives. Among other things, Etherington highlights the “significant investment” in sector- related higher education: “This was such a woefully inadequate area ten to 12 years ago; now you have the Third

Sector Research Centre, you have significant investment in City University at Southbank, and elsewhere, so you’ve seen a growth in both the teaching and research capability about the sector.” Barney Mynott, policy and communications manager at NAVCA, praises the £130m grassroots grants scheme, which opened in 2008, and in particular the endowments programme which forms £50m of that total. “It’s been really quite groundbreaking. For every pound raised by a local foundation they’ve matched it, and the real beauty of that is that it’s not just money going to the foundation but the foundation invests it, so it provides local groups with grants year-on-year.” One funding scheme which proved to

be hugely controversial was ChangeUp. While there is praise for its recognition of

The main lesson

about the dear old Hubs was that government should not impose artifi cial structures on the sector

the need to invest in the sector’s infrastructure, and for the local funding which saw Councils for Voluntary Service (CVSs) benefiting in particular, the decision to deliver the national element of the funding via six ‘Hubs’ based around the themes of governance, ICT, volunteering, performance, finance and workforce was contentious. Just one year after their creation, the government launched the independent body Capacitybuilders to run them, as it sought to stem the infighting by sector bodies over where funding should be allocated. The Hubs were later restructured and renamed as National Support Services. Bubb calls the Hubs “a disaster” adding: “I think they should have been

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