Free charities operate independently of state direction.
"Typically a charitable organisation starts, not infrequently with a religious affiliation, with a small number of highly committed individuals who are prepared to devote their time, skills and money to a cause.
The organisation is then ‘discovered’ by government and politicians are eager that they are seen to support it through public funding. Full time staff are hired to make the programme more professional, then new members are added to the board to lend credibility because of their experience on other government bodies.
Certain of the original objectives are downgraded because of their more controversial character and because of this decision significant amounts of public funding are obtained.
Volunteers, however, begin to feel their support is now unnecessary and drop out. Some of the founding members of the board begin to leave because of disillusion.
Eventually the whole character of the organisation has so changed that it has become virtually indistinguishable from an arm of government.”
- Lord (Brian) Griffiths of Fforestfach, Head of Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street Policy Unit.
The process described by Brian Griffiths is known as ‘mission creep’. All charities – faith-based or not – can suffer from it. It has become a bigger problem as the extent of government influence on the voluntary sector has grown.
Bear-hugged charities
Government may mean well but, like a bear that wants to hug you, it squeezes the life out of many of the charities it embraces. It does this in three main ways:
SHEKELS COME WITH SHACKLES: The state provides a third of the income of Britain’s voluntary sector. In return the state starts to first influence, and then control, the charities it funds. Just as long-term welfare dependent individuals can become less and less employable as their skills rust, so charities dependent upon good connections with government grantmakers can lose their distinctiveness. Catholic Charities USA is held up as an example of a religious charity that has become little more than a ‘government programme wearing a clerical collar’. Father Richard John Neuhaus cites ‘the Catholic Charities USA phenomenon’ as why “seriously religious folk are nervous about their programmes becoming, through dependence upon government, indistinguishable from secular enterprises for which “spiritual factors” are, or so it would seem, an afterthought”. Britain’s Faithworks campaigns for good relations between faith-based ministries and public sector funders.
NATIONALISATION BY REGULATION: Regulation is the backdoor route to state domination. Many privatised utilities are, for example, subject to strict price and operational controls in order for them to serve ‘the public interest’. One of the most important ways in which state regulation is suffocating voluntary sector diversity is through employment law. EU legislation is limiting the freedom of religious organisations to make discriminatory hiring decisions. The slippery slope result of this legislation is the equivalent of making the Conservative Party hire Labour activists or vice versa.
SHEER MARKET DOMINANCE: The fat state is now such a big employer that huge numbers of people in the ‘caring’ or social sectors are employed by the state, or have been employed by the state. Charities, often with hand-to-mouth funding streams, are crowded out of the job market by the state and its reliably taxpayer-funded salaries. Later, charities end up employing people who have worked within the public sector. Public sector employees have their own ethos and this can shape the organisations they work for. Such influences are benign if balanced with the perspectives of entreprenurial, faith-based or legal sector workers. But with the state so dominant this balance is at risk in many charities.
Freeing charities
There are three main ways of freeing charities from shackled funding, regulation and crowding out.
- Stakeholder-directed funding mechanisms, like vouchers and matched funding, ensure that taxpayers’ money still reaches charities but without politicians calling all of the tunes.
- Freedom of association needs to be seen as as important a freedom as freedom of individuals. Churches, mosques, political parties and other voluntary associations should not, for example, have their internal arrangements – and their hiring decisions – controlled by government.
- The only solution to the problem of ‘crowding out’ is a smaller state. The state can still fund free-at-the-point-of-use public and voluntary services (like healthcare and education) but should allow more diversity in who provides them.
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ConservativeHome's Dictionary: Free charity
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