Monday 17 July 2017

Charities Not Getting Paid

This on the CivilSociety website:-

Report: Criminal justice charities struggling to recover costs

Criminal justice charities are struggling to recover all the money they spend on service contracts they are delivering, according to new research. Some 224 organisations responded to a survey by membership body Clinks. The body also did 10 in-depth interviews and analysed the financial data of 752 charities and 220 companies. Only 22 per cent of respondents said they always achieved full cost recovery on contracts they deliver, while 14 per cent said they never received full cost recovery. Some five per cent of organisations said they were at risk of closure, but this rose to 30 per cent for organisations providing specific services for people from black, Asian and Minority Ethnic communities. Compared to the wider charity sector, voluntary organisations working in criminal justice had much lower reserves.

Voluntary organisations as a whole in the UK had on average around six months of reserves in 2013/14. For the same year, organisations working specifically in criminal justice had an average of 1.9 months of reserves, which fell to an average of 1.7 months of reserves in 2014/15. Grant funding from government has significantly declined for organisations who are criminal justice specialists. In the financial year 2008/09, government grants for organisations whose core purpose is to work in criminal justice were worth £23.9m but this had dropped by 50 per cent by 2014/15. But during the same time period, larger non-specialist criminal justice organisations experienced an increase in government grant funding. Many organisations were increasingly concerned about their staff wellbeing, with 41 per cent saying their workers are taking on larger caseloads.

Anne Fox, chief executive of Clinks, said poor conditions were preventing charities from delivering prison services. “Voluntary organisations play such a large role in supporting people affected by the criminal justice system that it is almost impossible to imagine what it would be like without them. “We know that our prison system is in desperate need of reform, and probation services are struggling to resettle people leaving prison. “Organisations are partnering more, developing new services, involving service users and their families to change what they do. In order to truly reform the criminal justice system we must ensure that we have a vibrant and healthy voluntary sector that can deliver change.”

9 comments:

  1. Another success for the cv of Christopher "Reverse Midas" Grayling!

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  2. https://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2017/jul/17/impact-austerity-child-protection

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  3. Everyone wants paying now. But they want paying for processing rather then achievement. Charities have become just as greedy as big cooperations, and being found out to be just as unethical in their methods of getting their hands on the wrong.
    It's a constant cycle of process, referral and redirection until every penny that can be snatched is realised.
    Process= outcome= payment. Actually achieving anything is a personal quest for the individuals that still have some sense of social conscious, although the way things are structured doesn't always allow for those individuals to achieve.
    Ironically, it the concept of payment by result thats facilitated this world of perpetual process,where there isn't any results at all.

    'Getafix

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    1. I always thought charities were meant to be self-funding, dependent on voluntary donations, but there are so many of these state-sponsored charities nowadays, who pay their bosses king's ransom and when not solely reliant on volunteers, keep paid salaries as low as possible and undermine the public services they are ostensibly complementing. They are businesses, not charities.

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    2. There is a classic management theory issue here in recognising the differences between outputs and outcomes. Outputs are the things so do; interviews within x no. of days, reports within three weeks etc. These are generally the things that can be measured easily and measures are generally quantitive. Outcomes are what you have achieved by creating those outputs; reduced re-offending, a happy child etc. These are often qualitative and MUCH harder to measure. The prison service, sorry, MOJ have a history of obsessing about outputs as they are easy to achieve and can be facilitated without too much difficulty because a report ‘on the day’ can be totally superficial b******s as long as it is produced ‘on the day’. Producing a good quality, properly evidenced assessment ‘on the day’ is much harder to achieve. The charities and private companies took on the performance targets understanding the concept of outputs but with no comprehension whatsoever of outcomes within community sentencing and rehabilitation. Hence, we have the efficient production of a useless product. They meet the performance targets but achieve nothing.

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    3. Brilliant summary. I suppose banging your head against a brick wall and howling at the moon are also outputs.

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  4. Recently with someone whilst they donated £5 to water aid from their mobile phone. Immediately after the donation was made an influx of texts were received looking for donations for other causes, plus one stating to stop texts, text Stop to ****.
    The cost of texting Stop? Another £5
    No more donations to water aid I'm afraid.

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  5. Off topic, but Peter Clark the prison inspector has just released his latest report. It says that prisons have greatly deteriated over the last 12mths, and that "youth custody centres are now so unsafe a tragedy is inevitable".
    Pretty damning stuff, but the MoJ are still to respond.
    I wonder if they'll become safer places when the Universal ban on smoking becomes effective on the 31st of August this year? Maybe not eh?

    'Getafix

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  6. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jul/18/youth-jails-staggering-decline-standards-england-wales-peter-clarke-prisons-inspector-report

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