Monday 24 December 2012

Bonfire of the fake charities

An early Christmas present to us all from the Department for Communities and Local Government, which has released a document titled 50 Ways to Save: Examples of sensible savings in local government. At number 37 we find this...

37. Cease funding ‘sock puppets’ and ‘fake charities’: Many pressure groups - which do not deliver services or help the vulnerable - are now funded by state bodies. In turn, these nominally ‘independent’ groups lobby and call for more state regulation and more state funding.

A 2009 survey found that £37 million a year was spent on taxpayer-funded lobbying and political campaigning across the public sector. Many of these causes may be worthy, but why should they be funded by taxpayers? Councils should also review their memberships to regional quangos and membership bodies: such residual regional structures are redundant following the abolishing of Regional Development Agencies, Government Offices for the Regions and unelected Regional Assemblies.


Ho, ho, ho!

6 comments:

Ben said...

"sensible savings that councils could make"
What, it's not mandatory? Governments will not follow these recommendations?
Easy - cut their budgets.

Dr Evil said...

No charity should receive any taxpayers cash from government, national or local.

Anonymous said...

Government is running out of POUNDS!

These recomendations sound like the beginings of sound policy. As pounds grow fewer and Holy Zealots demand more we find their throats will be cut by PM's that must fund real govmnt programs like food stamps,welfare,unemployment checks,military budgets,public sector jobs like the legislators own paychecks.

Anonymous said...


Did you miss this one, Chris?

28.
End expensive ’leadership’ courses: Councils could review spending money on sending staff and councillors to expensive “leadership” training courses, such as Common Purpose. Such training courses can often run into tens of thousands of pounds.

Anonymous said...

Imitated and duly flattered by DCLG. Nice prezzie for you there, Chris.

Anonymous said...

The one you highlight (paying for lobbyists) is by some distance the best cut of all those listed. Most of Pickles' other solutions are just sixth-form common-room rubbish.

Suggestion no.1 is a joke which just invites smoke and mirror displays by clever (and not so) Sir Humphreys.

2. Social engineering a la Blair.

3. Impose more expence on councils to gather meaningless info.

4. As they say in California 'hallo-oo'.

5. "... also used by local councils" (as in, hardly ever).

6. And in Spendthrift-On-Sea they INCREASED the threshold from £25k to £26,463. Wow!

7. No-one likes to admit it but 'tacking fraud' costs much much more than is ever recovered. Keep tackling, of course, but don't expect dividends.

8. yeah, yeah...

Friends, I'm easily as boring as our Eric and could go through the list one-by-one but it's Christmas so I'll be charitable.

Happy to you one and all.