Actually it hasn't. Apart from the phrase “research has found”, which is a quote from a story in The Daily Telegraph the other day, I made the rest up. Although it might be true, for all anyone knows. “Peer reviewed” might be the best protection from research nonsense that we consumers of traditional and social media have, but peer reviewed nonsense is still nonsense and the effects may be worse: Burt on the heritability of IQ? Wakefield on MMR and autism? Bairstow Cochrane et al on conductive education?
The press, of course, has a lot to answer. The Daily Telegraph claimed an ‘exclusive’ for its report headlined “One in five of Britain's biggest charities spend less than 50 per cent on good works, new report claims” and underneath names three hugely respected charities as among the “worst offenders”: Cancer Research UK, the Guide Dogs for the Blind and the British Heart Foundation. Now, these charities are big enough to speak for themselves and don’t need me to do so. But research bunkum, parroted in haste by journalists chasing copy deadlines, careless perhaps of precision in language too, concerns us all – not least because bunkum is repeated and then takes a half-life, adrift forever on the internet.
Under the by-line “Christopher Hope, Chief Political Correspondent” The Daily Telegraph reported:
Some of the UK’s biggest and best known charities are spending less than half of the cash raised every year by members of the public on good works, a new research has found. (Notice that “new report claims” in the headline has now become more solidly “new research has found”).
The Daily Telegraph’s source is a report "A Hornets' Nest - A review of charitable spending by UK charities", from the rather Orwellian-sounding “True and Fair Foundation”, formerly known as “Miller Philanthropy” founded in 2009 by Gina Miller, the report’s author. You may have seen some of the “evidence” in a table on the Foundation’s website (the table you may have seen in the Telegraph was a reduced list from this)
Shocking, isn’t it? Except it’s bunkum. Which is not to say that some charities should be spending more on “good works”. It’s just that this research shows no such thing.
To be fair, the Telegraph does give several charities a chance to respond, among them: Cancer Research, Sue Ryder, Guide Dogs for the Blind, Age UK, British Heart Foundation; even Which? and Lloyds Register.
So why “bunkum”?
Firstly, these are charities with enormously different income profiles. Many, like the Motor Neurone Disease Association for instance, (not listed here) are almost entirely dependent for income on donors and donations; at the other end is Lloyds Register, which gets almost nothing from donors, its income coming from the profits of its trading entity, Lloyd’s Register Group Ltd. Then there are the charities like Sue Ryder that earn income from a national chain of shop outlets. All very different income profiles, very different financial models, very different charitable businesses - requiring, one would have thought, some fairly subtle and sophisticated analysis.
Secondly, as the table shows, despite these huge differences, the report’s methodology (if so simple an analysis can be so described) is to divide total income, from whatever source, by total expend and to then convert this to a percentage. By this, Lloyd’s Register comes off spectacularly badly. Closer to home (for me), even Sheffield City Trust performs poorly. But unless we understand precisely and in detail the structure and variety of income sources for a specific charity and, what’s more, identify the income from donors rather than other sources such as trading surpluses, grants and fees for services; and unless we understand precisely and in detail the structure of expenditure associated with each income stream; then the sorts of statement seen in the Telegraph and other headlines and in the so-called research report itself, as well as in statements from Gina Miller, then we may have more information but be none-the-wiser. In short, we have only “bunkum”.
Thirdly, the benchmark used by the report, spending of “less than 50 per cent on charitable activities”, a benchmark failed by “1,020 charities” out of the 5,543 investigated (hence the “one in five” of the Telegraph headline, quoting the report), is entirely arbitrary. One might as well take 25% or 75% of total income being spent on charitable activities as the benchmark or, indeed, any other figure. I had a Chair once whose conviction was that all charities should be run by volunteers and “every penny of every pound of income” should be spent on charitable activities. By his standard, the benchmark applied by Gina Miller in her research would have indicted every single large large charity. In passing, (it is worth a smile), it has been reported that the True and Fair Foundation spent 47% of its total income on charitable activities in the last year for which accounts were submitted to and published by the Charity Commission, not paying its own test. (But that's a piece of lazy reporting on my part, as I have not checked that ‘fact’.)
In addition to the charities given an opportunity to respond by the Telegraph, the National Council for Voluntary Organisations ("True and Fair Foundation Report is neither true nor fair"), the Charity Commission (quoted in the Daily Telegraph "flawed"), Third Sector and ACEVO all rebutted Gina Miller’s claims, some in the strongest terms.
If you wish to do so, you can read Gina Miller’s response to critics of her “research” on her website. You must make of it what you will. Whilst her concluding remark may well be true, that “the purpose of charities should be to fund deserving activities and programs, rather than grossly inefficient overhead structures and in many cases over paid Executives and bloated fundraising departments”, it is not evident from her research that this case is evidenced in relation to the charities cited, and therefore I doubt its “true and fair” application to other charities not cited. In a word, bunkum.
But have no doubt, bunkum can damage the charitable sector just as much as it can conductive education. Just ask anyone trying to manage or fundraise a conductive education charity about 'professionals' and politicians attitudes to conductive education.
