[Closed] Kids Company

http://singletrackmag.com/forum/topic/kids-company

LOL. Mine's better, it's got more replies for s start 😛

And I DID search 😡

Erm.. which one do we comment on then?

MODS: please leave Woppit's and close Al's. Woppit deliberately tries to lever open the jhj Lizard-worm-can.

😉

MODS: Please close Woppit's and leave Al's, for the reasons above. Send Woppit in disagrace onto the Ted Heath thread as a punishment. 🙂

Not to publicly complain about a MODing decision or owt, but BOOOOOOO!!!!

😉

I'm not convinced by her argument that the problem was that they had too many kids for the funding they got.. Surely, even with a charity the basic premise is that you manage your workload to match your resources.

I can't tell whether it's a well meaning but grotesquely inefficient organisation, or a personality cult massaging the rampant ego of the founder. Or a combination of the two?

Is it true that they were actually paying children and young adults to use their services? Turn up to their centre once a week, get £50, that kind of thing?

There does seem to be issues with finance, reliant on gov handouts to pay staff.

And this statement seems ....odd.

"The charity said it always met its obligations to report crimes."

I think the word obligation is what I don't like.

I think there's probably a lot more to this than we're being told at the moment. Looks like the blame game has started, as the mudslinging seems to be getting going.

It looks like various Whitehall minions have been briefing against her. Maybe as she seems to be able to by-pass them and go direct to Dave, who would then write her a cheque.

Dave obviously has a vested interest as this was the poster organisation for his laughable 'Big Society' cobblers, which basically was just getting the charity sector to come in and provide the services the state would no longer provide due to slashed funding.

I expect this is about to get nasty, with all manner of accusations about to be thrown around. It'll probably end up being six of one, and half a dozen of the other. Mrs Binners works in the charity sector. Some are very professional. Some are spectacularly badly managed.

Been brewing for ages I think, they've received millions and millions of tax money and donations, but have not responded well to the financial scrutiny that comes with receiving so much public money.
I think there's an unholy mess here which the government is trying to extricate itself from, before the shit/fan interface.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9437932/the-trouble-with-kids-company/

Bloody odd situation if you ask me.

Damn if we shouldn't see the Accounts. I am totally speculating here but that Ferrari parked outside was a bit odd wasn't it?

BOT: I know someone who benefited (all be it in a small way) and they were very well looked after and supported far more than any "council" run "service" available to them (at the time)

I still want to see the Accounts

#deeppurselargeexpensespoorkids

I can't tell whether it's a well meaning but grotesquely inefficient organisation, or a personality cult massaging the rampant ego of the founder. Or a combination of the two?

Or, they criticised the government which responded by pulling its funding.

All that fabric has got to cost.

I don't think there is anything vindictive by the government. There has been concern for many years over their financial controls and if grants should be given. These concerns were pushed aside by Cameron as he showed his support for the charity. This is something of an own goal if the government is being vindictive.
Harriet Sergeant's reporting of what she had witnessed of large amounts of cash being given to kids who would turn up for the money then disappear again as soon as they got it did more harm to their creditability. It pointed to either manipulation of the system where monies were rewarded for numbers of people helped (being bribed to turn up) or that the money was wasted as there was no interaction with the kids to help them out of their problems, they were just given a source cash. Many celeb's deserted the charity long before these matters become news and you will notice not a great deal are jumping up to defend it now.

Or, they criticised the government which responded by pulling its funding.

They (or more accurately, she) started lashing out at the Government AFTER funding was stopped. As custodian of our money, I think the government have done the right thing.
My gut feeling is being so close to the government they expected to just receive funding, no questions asked.

Also, the government are not alone with their complaints/concerns.

They interviewed a Finance bod from KC on BBC last night, she said something like:

"we have all these staff members we are paying, and even we have absolutely no idea what their job is and what they are doing"

Indeed. (although that does nicely describe the public sector in general, IME, with a few more cups of tea and petty grievances thrown in)

And the essential difference is that a charity that relies on government funding as its main income stream is not a charity. It is a government agency.

That's the beauty of some of these Big Society projects. They can wither and die without being viewed for what they are - a failed government project.

I'd say this is probably happening all over the country. Charities that were pretty small and run by well meaning, but maybe not qualified people, have had to step in and fill the gaps where services provided by local councils no longer exist.

In a very short period of time they've gone from these small organisations to being swamped with demand for their services, leading to them having to set up large scale fundraising initiatives (we're not talking the odd jumble sale here), and having to manage what is essentially the delivery of local authority services.

Thats an awfully big change in mindset required. And an awfully different approach needed to manage the provision of essential services

There was an inevitability to all this. Expect to see it repeated

Indeed. (although that does nicely describe the public sector in general, IME, with a few more cups of tea and petty grievances thrown in)

Except this wasn't the public sector,this was the voluntary sector doing stuff that the public sector should be doing.

This work should be properly funded by government and done by councils, not done by various voluntary organisations who are given metaphorical brown envelopes of cash at random intervals at the whim of whatever politician ants to look good in the media that week.

And the essential difference is that a charity that relies on government funding as its main income stream is not a charity. It is a government agency.

You've clearly no idea how the charity sector works. Most charities exist on a mix of private fundraising and government/local council funding. You'd be amazed at the services you assume are being provided by local councils which are in fact charities. In the care of the disabled for example. As local councils have slashed their services, they have given far smaller amounts to charities, and expected them to provide the same services. This is a big ask. But as these organisations are staffed by very dedicated and well-meaning people, they have taken this task on. Not that you'll ever hear about the hours these people put in to provide for the most disadvantaged in society.

If you think that charities exist on you popping your loose change in a collection tin as you walk out of Waitrose, you're living in cloud cuckoo land.

although that does nicely describe the public sector in general, IME, with a few more cups of tea and petty grievances thrown in

Have a look at G4S and A4E as other examples of non public sector organisation behaving badly. You can use to complain about the public sector as well.

All sectors have crap exemplars is the fairly self evident point and anyone who thinks one sector is immune/better is putting their politics before the facts.

My point was they should not be viewed as 'charities', but as an arm of government service provision. Which they are, without the inconvenient constraints of proper audit of taxpayer's money.

The benefits to ministers are that when they go down in flames, they are not viewed as part of the public sector, which they effectively are, but as some flakey charity.

Various stories here, Govt (inc CMD and Gove personally) instructing £3M payments (recently, more in the past), against civil servants'/advisors recommendations

Channel four reckon that Gove (boo, hiss) ruled against it and was overruled by Dave after Batshitcrazy went direct to him: http://blogs.channel4.com/michael-crick-on-politics/cameron-ordered-payment-kids-company-official-concerns/5020

Can you imagine for one second the reaction of the 'political left' if the government (Gove in particular) had refused funds to a prominent children's charity?

Did it not close because a private donor withheld money?
How is that fitting in with "effectively " being the public sector?

They may well be providing a service to the state, many companies do and some exclusively to them, but that fact does not make them public sector.

Exactly Martin. But thats not going to happen. Daves Big Society wheeze is about him shrinking the state. Massively reducing the services it provides, and expecting charities to do it all instead.

Its having your cake and eating it. This is a massive shift in the delivery of vital services, which has happened virtually overnight.

You can criticise charities all you like, but the way it works is that there are limited amounts of money available, and the charities have to bid for this. To put a proposal together is a serious undertaking. You have to provide minute detail of the services you will provide, and accurate budgets and costings. Believe me, the government isn't just handing out cash willy nilly. The hoops you have to jump through to secure any funding are immense. But as this has proved, expect to be blamed exclusively if it all goes tits up.

Charities are now shouldering a massive amount of what were previously 'state' services. The fact that this kind of thing isn't happening all over the place is a testament to the dedication and professionalism of the vast majority of those working in the charity sector

CB's heart is certainly in the right place but unfortunately she didn't have the skills required to run a big organisation, one of which is the self awareness of your shortcomings and the humility to allow others to fill in the gaps. The Trustees should have helped in overcoming these flaws but it appears they failed for whatever reason.

The Government, these issues have been ongoing for some years, should probably have pulled the plug earlier but no doubt flinched through fear of the bad publicity.

Channel four reckon that Gove (boo, hiss) ruled against it and was overruled by Dave after Batshitcrazy went direct to him: http://blogs.channel4.com/michael-crick-on-politics/cameron-ordered-payment-kids-company-official-concerns/5020

This is probably right because the Civil Servant who signed the direction was head of the Cabinet Office, so responsibility would appear to have been transferred from the DofE where it originally sat.

EDIT: My understanding is that the services provided by Kids Company (and certainly Place2Be which CB was originally involved with 20 years ago) have never been supplied by either central or local government. Place2Be by the way is exceptionally well run and worthy of your support.

Yet another reason added to my list of "why your can't trust Govt with my money"...

Written before the current 'issue':

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9437932/the-trouble-with-kids-company/

I agree with binners.

Re The Big Society, DC ditched that idea when Steve Hilton left, I think DC was somewhat hypnotised by the lady dressed as a pina-colada and kept the taps turned on.
I actually thought The Big Society pointed to an important need - for a culture of volunteering and public service, although it was wrongly sold as a replacement for ye olde welfare state.

Just looks like good old fashioned cronyism and/or nepotism to me.

Really hope there's nothing to the child abuse rumours though.

binners+2

Oh, and this whole ephisode has the wiff of cover ups a lies about it, both from govt and the charity.

Admit it - you've never seen them in the same room together...

Camila Batmanwotsit
[img] http://birney.typepad.com/.a/6a0133f3c430a1970b01348717e91b970c-pi [/img]

Associate Bob
[img] [/img]

Always seemed like it comes down to 2 main things... They genuinely do seem to do pretty amazing, life changing things for some of the kids they help, in ways that not many organisations can do. I've worked with and supported some of their clients and I'm a huge admirer of their successes... (I've no doubt at all that most of the clients I've dealt with in the uni, would not have got there without Kids Company, and considering their backgrounds that's not just a massive deal but it could well have left them in pretty ugly places.)

Otoh I've met Camila Batmanghelidjh, and she mostly seemed to be a self-congratulating ego-monster gobshite.

But at the same time they seem to be about a dozen different sorts of financial and operational disaster. Their successes get you a hell of a lot of leeway in my book but it's not necessarily enough.

Some of the criticisms seem to go to the core of what Kids Company do... They're not social workers, their activities don't fit neatly into ticksheets and 3 ring binders, and that means they can engage with kids in a way that other systems can't (and help kids that can't or won't engage with those systems) See: giving cash payments to clients. But on the other side of that coin is rightly concern about propriety, appropriateness... Transparency basically.

You can be outwardly chaotic and informal but you need a structure behind that which they seem to lack. The accountants seem to object to giving away trivial amounts of money but that to me's wrong- let them do that, just document it! Remove any doubt but don't remove the ability to do what they do.

Financial management's not even the big concern there afaic, since it comes down to balancing accounts against kids' lives- I'm perfectly happy for the to have £3 million quid and for it to be "bad value" because we[i] can[/i] afford it, it's better value than giving away a bank for billions less than it's worth. You could run Kids Company for a century with the money lost in the Royal Mail sale alone. Let's come back to that thought... We don't worry about these sums of money per person when we put someone in prison, that's not good value either. 3 million quid is **** all.

But if you play fast and loose with rules, can we trust you? The cultishness is pretty alarming sometimes, it feels like an organisation that could hold a lot of secrets. My gut feeling is that they're basically sound but who knows? They're big enough that they quite likely have bad pennies and they may not have the capacity to deal with them.

Some of the recent stuff doesn't impress on either side. If there's a possible issue with a charity, there's ways to deal with that which it doesn't seem have been fully deployed- and for all Batmanghelidjh's blustery confrontational responses are offputting, I'm not sure she's wrong. It does feel like they've been under attack lately and that's just not how these things should ever work.

And hey, stories about £3 million quid given to a charity distract from stories about privatisation of irreplacable public resources for less than what they're worth.

I dunno. The best outcome would be to weld that outward informality and rough-and-readiness to a strong stealthy organisational structure behind the scenes but that can't be easy. Especially with a character like that at the top. But this is something that should have been being attempted for years, has it really? I don't think so. The speed of recent affairs seems pretty absurd and it's all been done so publically.

RIP Kids Company. Dodgy as you might be. I'll see people this week that are living an incomparably better life thanks to you. As long as you weren't ruining lives at the same time, or outright stealing from us, I could not personally give a **** if you've been good value.

All very odd IMO

Gordon Brown and Dave both like this woman, and have agreed funding outside of normal channels.

The lady on recent interviews comes across as heart in the right place, but completely out of her depth in terms of competance.

Was she the result of Ted Heath interfearing with kids, and this is how they have tried to buy her silence?

I know that its not representative but there was a kid on Radio 4 today saying that whenever kids got their weekly hand out of cash, they would go and spend it on drugs straight away. 😯

More to come out of the wood work me thinks....

Programme just started on this very topic, R4 if anyone's interested

Very well written Northwind, and I totally agree with you.

Rob Hilton - Member
Admit it - you've never seen them in the same room together...
Camila Batmanwotsit Bob

Don't know about you lot but I keep seeing and hearing "Batman" then it slowly turn into "buttman" ... 😯

Ya, was looking for "Batman" (the one with Robin) upon hearing ...

I must admit I try to pronounce the surname for a while until the news reader started pronouncing ... crack me up every time the surname is mentioned.

Ok, ok I leave this thread ...

So Yentob gets aggressive on the news - normally a sign of.......

On news night now FWIW

Front page on the Guardian today.

Source tells Guardian that two finance directors quit over failure to build up reserves despite funding rising by 75% in five years

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/06/kids-company-directors-were-warned-to-build-up-reserves

Massive incompetence to go bust when your funding increases at that rate. Cash there for senior salaries though.

Senior management also took pay increases over the past few years. In 2009 the employee with the highest salary was paid between £60,000 and £70,000. However, by 2013, the top-paid employee in the charity was receiving between £90,000 and £100,000,

Pretty interesting post from Northwind. Thank you.

I read Batmanghelidjh's book. It's recommended reading in some NHS professions. While it sounds like she does want to genuinely help people it's mixed with a hearty dose of incompetence and puffery. I don't give a shit if she gets a bit of self promotion in there while helping people, but it also seems like she wants to build a cult around herself for self affirmation more than anything else. Still, small potatoes.

Not surprised someone like her leading an organisation would leave the accountability out. She doesn't seem like a numbers person whose thoughts are on how to most efficiently help people. More someone who'll go out of her way to help you if you display a willingness to be helped. Those are the stories her book has and those are the people you'll get the most return on when helped.

I guess the flip side is there are some people who can't be helped. Ultimately, a few senior figures getting fat off the cash is not a problem for me. As a nation we can afford it, and like Northwind states, the country has done much more for people who've done much less for us.

Some of the recent stuff doesn't impress on either side. If there's a possible issue with a charity, there's ways to deal with that which it doesn't seem have been fully deployed- and for all Batmanghelidjh's blustery confrontational responses are offputting, I'm not sure she's wrong. It does feel like they've been under attack lately and that's just not how these things should ever work.

I recommend you read Miles Goslett's piece in the Spectator, [url= http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/milesgoslett/2015/08/the-inside-story-of-how-the-spectator-broke-the-kids-company-scandal/ ]which is here[/url]. I think it is more the case once there was a fissure in the dam, the water burst through as people had the confidence to air their stories.

Crooks will find something untouchable to hide behind. Like a kids charity.
One may smile and smile and be a villain.

Did I imagine it or did CMC suggest if Batmanghelidjh stepped down the funding may continue? If that is the case, then surely she would have done just that to ensure the charity stayed afloat?

Crooks will find something untouchable to hide behind. Like a kids charity.
One may smile and smile and be a villain.

Cancer charities are good for that.

The charity’s accounts were frozen by the courts after it emerged that it had spent only £70,000 of the £3m it had raised on its beneficiaries.

http://www.thirdsector.co.uk/boss-audited-own-charity-repays-part-fee/finance/article/766028

More than £13m had been donated but only £1.5m had been passed on to good causes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/5382608.stm

Did I imagine it or did CMC suggest if Batmanghelidjh stepped down the funding may continue?

That was a condition of the most recent £3 donation from the taxpayer. The charity went bust when a large private benefactor withdrew following child abuse allegations.

Coldplay donated millions. I guess there is some justice in the world, then.

The powers that be are very strict on the criteria for providing funding. Particularly when it comes to finances/reserves.

It looks like they were cut a lot more slack than anyone else would have been given due to their poster boy status. I suspect a lower profile organisation would have had the plug pulled a long time ago. In fact, theres no two ways about it, they'd have been shut down when the irregularities first began to emerge.

With regard to charities trustees being warned? Hmmmmmmm - a lot of the time charity trustees are well meaning but useless. A lot of the time they're not even well-meaning. They're just useless.

A lot of the 'Great and the Good' like to be charity trustees. For no other reason than they like the reflected glory of being associated with high profile good causes. I could give you plenty of examples of, for instance, local MP's or councillors who sit as trustees on charities, who's responsibilities seem to amount to turning up a few times a year, coincidentally when there some high profile event, where there will be a lot of press photographers for them to grin at while looking earnest. They'll then disappear for another six months, and won't have the remotest interest in how the charity is functioning, day to day

Its an affliction of most charities to have these self-serving parasites attach themselves to them (for 2 or 3 photo opportunities a year) as trustees. I'd imagine that someone as hight profile as Kids Company would be particularly susceptible to this. In this case right the way up to the PM

What amazed me about all this is the salary Yentob takes for working for a charity.

Should people working for charity be badly paid?

Should people working for charity be badly paid?

I think the issue is wheter the workers for the charity should be paid, be it operational, support staff or management. They have a job and should be paid the going rate. It is whether high profile trustees, who are already in very well paid jobs, should be paid for work they do overseeing a charity. An analogy is a school and school governors. The staff get paid, the governors are not and should not be paid, I believe someone called it big society.

Should do this...

Should do that...

Big society? More like central planning

We shall see whether Yentob deserved his money - the angry interview suggest....

Binners - what responsibility do trustees have, other than looking photogenic a few times a year?

What amazed me about all this is the salary Yentob takes for working for a charity.

Not seen this. Source? Everything I've seen has him as a trustee, wasn't aware he'd also done paid work for them?

Edit - should have said whether Yentob fulfilled his responsibilities above

Still if understanding the role and importance of reserves is beyond you, then being a trustee might not be a good idea. Do something else, I don't know, like work at Auntie.... 😉

There's layer upon layer of stink around every aspect of this story, and it seems to be coming from every direction, the government, the media, the charity itself..

Government stinky fail: Up until five minutes ago this was clearly a pet project that prime ministers of various colour liked to be able to rock up and be photographed with. A charismatic CEO was helpful, clearly. Nothing wrong with that per se, where it stops being okay is the appearance that normal procurement and oversight processes were ignored as a result and therefore serious concerns being raised, up to ministerial level, were ignored. As someone working in the same sector who has to jump through varying hoops to provide assurance when we take any public money, that is a bit of a wee boiler.

That, by the way, is not to presuppose that any of the concerns and allegations had substance. That concerns were there, but seemingly ignored due to pressure to keep a 'big society' good news story rolling is the stinky bit.

BTW, from the media reporting (and that's a big caveat, since a lot of said coverage has a lot of stink attached), it seems that it was politicians on both sides of the argument calling the shots, all of which stinks. If there were governance concerns, they should have been referred for proper and objective, independent investigation. That's one of the things the Charity Commission is there for. They do this routinely, they remove and replace trustees, either individually or collectively, where necessary, they require improvements in practice where the need is identified. They shut down charities too.

To be fair, again based on what has emerged in part through some very shady looking media coverage, there seems to have been a fair amount of stink emanating from the charity itself. Not the first, and almost certainly not the last charity to get into a pickle seemingly due to a dominant founder gripping the reins too tightly and a dazzled group of trustees going along with them. Not the first charity to close at short notice due to not having the reserves to core with unexpected funding changes, but, if true, basic governance fails that should not have happened.

Perhaps if those with these concerns had referred them to the CC they might have been addressed before they led to the whole thing collapsing, rather than using it as political ammunition...

And as for that media coverage? There a lot of stink, isn't there? All these little sniping allegations. Any organisation of that size, in any sector, will have stuff going wrong somewhere at some time. Even sex abuse. And perhaps there's a car to answer that these were sometimes pushed under the carrier rather than properly dealt with. If true, that's serious, serious fail, way worse than foolishly not building prudent reserves, but to me there's something really of going on...

Picture the scene, as reported in a number of 'news' sources: You're a worker at Kids' Company, some time ago, when you become aware of some dodgy behaviour. Really dodgy. Like, sexual abuse level of dodgy. Being a right thinking person, you report this up the line. However, amazingly, you find that nothing is done, and the allegations are swept under the carpet to avoid embarrassment. Do you

a) do something else with it, go to the local safeguarding team at the council, maybe the police, maybe the charity commission, maybe if all else fails, directly to the media?

Or

b) sit on the allegations, do nothing, until the organisation is in the poo and all over the media for all the wrong reasons and then, only then, you contact the news desk at the Daily Mail?

Something doesn't add up for me. And it stinks.

And what really stinks, for me, is that this story is all about Yentob, Camilla Batshitmental, Cameron, Brown and political games. The ones paying the price for all this stinky is the kids Northwind mentioned earlier.

edlong
What amazed me about all this is the salary Yentob takes for working for a charity.
Not seen this. Source? Everything I've seen has him as a trustee, wasn't aware he'd also done paid work for them?

It's in their finance reports published on their website.

£30k for auditing the books I suspect.

I think the issue is wheter the workers for the charity should be paid, be it operational, support staff or management. They have a job and should be paid the going rate. It is whether high profile trustees, who are already in very well paid jobs, should be paid for work they do overseeing a charity. An analogy is a school and school governors. The staff get paid, the governors are not and should not be paid, I believe someone called it big society.

Trustees of charities are not paid for the work they do overseeing a charity, it's generally not legal for them to be. Trustees are sometimes paid if they also do something separately for the same charity, although for obvious reasons it's best avoided, and doesn't happen commonly. I'm not aware that KC were paying trustees? Again, can someone provide a source?

Reimbursing trustees for expenses they incur in performing their duties is common, and totally different..

It's in their finance reports published on their website.

Ta. Off to have a look..

EDIT: I'm wondering if the stinky extends to misinformation being deliberately disseminated in mountain biking forums? I'm sounding like jivehoneyjive aren't I? Still, can't find 2014, but latest set of accounts on their website, from 2013, say the following on the subject

13. TRUSTEES
During the year, no member of the Board of Trustees received any remuneration (2012 - £NIL). No member of the
Board of Trustees received reimbursement of expenses (2012 - £NIL).

So, unless their policies and practices changed a lot last year, Yentob and co. didn't even claim for their taxis. Like I said earlier, there's a lot of stinky around this story. People making statements that appear to be blatantly false don't help clear the air.

£30k for auditing the books I suspect.

Don't want to flog a dead horse, but do you know who Alan Yentob is and what he does? Do you understand how the audit process for limited companies work? Just to put this one to bed, Alan Yentob is not a registered auditor and even if he was, he wouldn't be able to audit a charity of which he was a trustee. The audit fee was paid to the auditors, Kingston Smith LLP.

Wage bill for 2013 was, give or take, £12m. Yet everyone interviewed so far have been volunteers.

I don't know this Batman woman and have never seen her in action but the big personality/big style thing is so often used as a smokescreen for an incompetent individual or dodgy cultish organisation. And when you get the same shady fringe people involved who are normally involved in local government in inner city boroughs, it's never going to turn out right. Most people like Boris Johnson because he's a charismatic Big Man but read the Wiki entry on him and there's a lot of questionable history. How long before the media dig up something unsavoury about Batman's past?

Firstly, two apologies:

1) I was using a touchscreen earlier and there's some shocking autocorrects in an earlier post which I missed.

2) Sorry if I'm turning into TJ. I will stop at some point. This story has really wound me up though, before some very ill-informed and downright false statements on here wound me up a bit more.

That said, I've got a couple more things to get off my chest:

[u]Reserves
[/u]

I agree with the reporting, if true, that there was a major governance fail if trustees were made aware that running a 23 million pound per annum charity without building up prudent reserves to deal with the kind of thing that just sank them overnight was not a good idea, and they were "over-ruled" by the founder.

I am reminded, however, of the recurring posts every time we have a charity-bashing thread on here (and I'm not saying that this one is, but we've had a few in the past) bemoaning that such-and-such charity is asking for a monthly direct debit when they've got x million reserves sat in the bank. Hopefully, this case illustrates why that might be. Reserves policies have to be justified, and the Charity Commission can and does intervene if it thinks the balance is off.

By the way, it's not easy asking, whether you're asking passers by for spare change outside the supermarket, or the government for millions, it can be a difficult conversation that some of that money isn't going to go directly on medicine for fluffy rabbits, it's going into reserves to suport the sustainability of the charity in the long term.

[u]Professionalism [/u]

So we've had comment about charities getting too big for the founders to still have the right skillset (perhaps rightly), we've had comment about the apparently monumental fail of not putting enough aside to be able to cope with stormy weather (probably very rightly), we had, and this did make me smile, comment in the same post bemoaning both the above fail and the fact that the charity was willing to spend significant amounts on senior salaries.

This case is surprisingly not as rare as you'd think, with a dominant founder perhaps holding the reins too tightly, for too long and getting out of their depth. It happens surprisingly often, in charities of all sizes and areas of work.

However, if you want to have, say, a 23 million pound per annum charity run professionally, it is a bit strange to expect that that will happen without paying the sorts of salaries that people with the skills to run 23 million pound per annum companies have.

What you will generally find, in fact is that salaries in the third sector are generally lower for professional jobs of all types than the equivalent in the commercial sector. People don't make the cchoice to work for charities to get rich, believe me. People take susbstantial pay cuts in fact.

[u]Stinky, Stinky, Stink[/u]

In my ire to post my previous lengthy tirade, I somehow missed one of the stinkiest aspects of this whioel sorry saga, that bit where Cameron, or his ministers, or someone at or around the top of government apparently said the KC - you can have this big wad of cash that you desperately need to keep thw wolves from the door, on the condition that the CEO goes.

THe whole point of having the third sector doing its stuff is its independence. Via its trustees, a charity is ultimately accountable to its beneficiaries. As i sadi earlier, the Charity Commission, can and does insist where necessary that a charity's officer or officers be removed, and it does this in an accountable way, where people have a right of response, and of appeal. For the top of government to effectively blackmail the trustees of a supposedly independent charity in this way is, if true, disgusting.

Wage bill for 2013 was, give or take, £12m. Yet everyone interviewed so far have been volunteers.

The paid staff might be busy trying to work out how they're going to pay the rent next month.

[url= http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/06/the-guardian-view-on-charity-trustees-no-role-for-amateurs ]interesting artcle on the role of trustees[/url]

From the KC's annual report

As explained more fully in the Trustees’ Responsibilities Statement, [b]the trustees (who are also the directors of the charitable company for the purposes of company law) are responsible for the preparation of the financial statements and for being satisfied that they give a true and fair view.[/b]

Our responsibility is to audit and express an opinion on the financial statements in accordance with applicable law and International Standards on Auditing (UK and Ireland). Those standards require us to comply with the Auditing Practices Board’s Ethical Standards for Auditors.

Responsibilities seem pretty clear to me....

@teamhurtmore

Yes, it's clear - the trustees are responsible for the preparation of the accounts. Note that it doesn't say, nor does that imply, that the trustees actually perform the task themselves.

The trustees of the charity I work for are also reponsible for the preparation of the financial statements, but I can assure you that they don't actually do it themselves, because I do.

The auditors are then responsible for auditing the accounts. Hence the name.

the auditors made their responsibility clear....

Can you explain exactly what point you're trying to make, because I suspect you've fundamentally misunderstood something, but I'm not yet quite sure what?

Yes, it's a simple one, to repeat

whether Yentob fulfilled his responsibilities above

@thm

Well, er, clearly yes

are responsible for the preparation of the financial statements and for being satisfied that they give a true and fair view.

The accounts were prepared, audited and filed on time (shockingly, lots of charities file their accounts late, KC didn't). The auditors were happy that they were true and fair, etc etc. and gave them a clean audit report. The standard test for "going concern" is twelve months ahead, so on their year ending 2013 accounts that was okay. Year ending 2014 not been done yet, somewhat overtaken by events...

EDIT: I'm still finding this line a bit weird since

a) there do seem to have been clear governance failings, which do sit at the door of the trustees ultimately

but

b) in terms of the narrowly defined specific company law responsibilities which trustees have regarding their statutory accounts, to which you keep referring, there seems to be no suggestion of any failings that I've come across?

The mismanagement, nepotism,corruption,profligacy ,largesse and downright criminality in parts of the £80 billion+ UK charity industry would not be tolerated in the public sector nor in most of the private sector.I'm surprised that people are still surprised.

Really, I'm pretty sure that there have been, and continue to be, cases of all of those things in both the private and public sectors, based on having read about them in newspapers and the like.

There was a bloke from the private sector got 14 years last week for criminality. Cash for questions, the Guinness takeover, Chris Huhne, Enron, Poulson, phone hacking, the Lavender List, Bhopal disaster, Hillsborough cover-up, Bloody Sunday, cover up of Bloody Sunday, police complicity in loyalist murders, Blair Peach, Orgreave, Stephen Lawrence, cash for access, Jeffrey Archer and brown evelopes on railway platforms, most of the cabinet having gone to the same school as each other, the prime minister being related to the queen, not heard of any of these?

hora - Member
What amazed me about all this is the salary Yentob takes for working for a charity.

How much? I cannot find the numbers on interweb ... 😯

cynic-al - Member
Should people working for charity be badly paid?

Yes or not paid at all.

If people want to get paid go somewhere else coz this is not a career.

I have always considered people working for charity and getting paid, especially salary, is completely wrong. If charity starts paying high/salary then crooks will slowly move in as the temptation and opportunity are too good to be missed ... money is involved crooks are about. Simple.

Free money and getting paid do not go hand in hand ...

Jesus, I've read some shite on here but youve really just upped the ante there to a whole other level

Mrs Binners works for a charity, and has worked for charities for years. She took a big pay cut (from a private sector job) to move into a more rewarding job. She works her arse off. So do all the people she works with. For lower salaries than equivalent private sector jobs

Can you just explain why...

A) she, and her colleagues, shouldn't be paid?
B) how charities are meant to function, any more than any other business, without paid staff?
C) why a charity would be any more attractive to crooks than a private business?

Seeing as you've obviously thought this all through, off you go. I'm all ears.

hora - Member
What amazed me about all this is the salary Yentob takes for working for a charity.

How much? I cannot find the numbers on interweb ...

He's not paid a penny, we covered it earlier.

cynic-al - Member
Should people working for charity be badly paid?

Yes or not paid at all.

If people want to get paid go somewhere else coz this is not a career.

I have always considered people working for charity and getting paid, especially salary, is completely wrong. Once people get paid salary then the crooks will slowly move in ... money is involved crooks are about. Simple.

Okay, you know those MacMillan nurses? The ones that everyone seems to think are fantastic at doing what to me seems the most heartbreaking of jobs? The ones for whom loads of people are happy to jump out of planes, dress up and do fun runs and generally annoy colleagues after they've been immensely and amazingly valuable to families going through hell? How are they supposed to house themselves, feed their children and generally support themselves if they can't receive a salary? Go out at night and streetwalk?

And to be less emotive (because it's exactly the same principle with less heartstrings) how does the person that coordinates the rota and makes sure the staff are safely back from appointments pay their bills?