David Cameron cannot have a Big Society without money

10 April 2012
WEST END FINAL

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If there are people out there who truly understand the Cameroonian concept of the Big Society, then they're not telling the rest of us, and especially those who run the country's larger charities.

Government spending cuts after Gordon Brown's spending splurges may be inevitable. Important advisers such as Steve Hilton, who is rarely beyond whispering distance from the Prime Minister's ear, say we should not be so Nineties in our thinking. The third sector - the charities and their legions of volunteers across the land - will pick up the slack.

But Thomas Hughes-Hallett, chief executive of Marie Curie Cancer Care, is far from convinced that they will be able to do so. "For the first time since the Thirties there are signs that charitable giving may fall sharply. In the past few months a number of charities have begun to see a real fall-off in giving."

A recent opinion poll shows that a quarter of charity donors expect to give less in the next 12 months than in the past year. It is not hard to see why. The very rich, especially the bankers, feel sullen and despised.

But the bedrock of charitable giving is relatively small donations from people who are not rich and who are being clobbered by inflation, derisory returns on deposit savings and rising fuel costs.

The reality of charitable fundraising, says Hughes-Hallett, is "more Middlesbrough than Belgravia", and one senses that as an Old Etonian who made his own fortune that this is a cause of some shame for him.

In the summer, David Cameron pledged the Coalition to policies that would foster charitable giving across the income spectrum. "There has been a lot of talk about the Big Society and philanthropy but actually there has been little or nothing done to support levels of giving," says Hughes-Hallett.

Indeed, it is worse than that because as government spending cuts fray the strands of the social safety net, charities' incomes are contracting, not increasing. "The Government will have us believe that the Big Society will address this. But this is already a very generous nation in terms of volunteering. And you cannot have a Big Society without money."

This is why Hughes-Hallett is joining forces with others in the sector to hold Cameron's feet to the fire.

The Philanthropy Review, launched this morning, draws senior officers in charities together with big corporate donors such as JP Morgan to lobby the Government to match rhetoric with action. Officially the Government "welcomes" the initiative but the charities are quite clear that ministers are on notice. "Either we can sit like puddings and do nothing about it, or speak out," says Hughes-Hallett.

The review is going to be quick and, it is said, radical in pointing to means to make it easier for people to volunteer their time and donate their money.

The Treasury has long resisted radical measures that make donating easier, fearing they would open the floodgates to tax breaks for the rich and the leaking of revenues, but this has raised barriers to charitable giving.

There are thousands of valuable inherited paintings up and down the country. Often these are unloved, too expensive to insure, yet should the owners wish to sell a painting and give the money to charity, first they would have to sell it and pay the bulk of its value in capital gains tax. So it hangs on the wall, giving no pleasure to the owner and no benefit either to a charity or the Exchequer.

Hughes-Hallett concedes the charities have often lacked imagination themselves, and need to think hard about expanding their incomes. Gift Aid, which allows charities to claw back tax from donors, has been successful but imposes enormous administrative burdens. A scheme to encourage donations through company payrolls has yielded only disappointing returns.

Hughes-Hallett is frustrated by our failure to embrace the pleasure of philanthropy. He has first-hand experience of this. Born into what he describes as a "shabby genteel" family as the son of a land agent, his grandfather paid to send him to Eton and on to Oxford.

He married at 23 and his wife worked to put him through law school, but he settled instead on a lucrative career as a banker, first at Schroders, before setting up Enskilda Securities, which he later sold at a huge profit, thereby acquiring the nickname "Huge-Wallet".

The cot death of his first child, Emily, at the age of 10 months, initially made him more determined in his early banking career. "When something like that happens you want to change your life." In those circumstances, he says, some men get divorced, or move continents, but he chose the moment to set up an investment bank from scratch, the move that made him seriously rich.

He learned from that tragedy that "people are embarrassed by disaster. Friends were marvellous but some of the people we know did literally and metaphorically cross the road, perhaps because they just didn't know how to react."

However, he does not claim that bereavement offers any great insight into life, other than it perhaps "gave us the ability or the urge to wrap our arms around people who need help". His wife Juliet also runs a charity.

Later, the pair had another reason to be involved with charity, because their son had a bad stammer. It was overcome with the help of Michael Palin's stammering charity, which the Python star had set up in honour of his father, who suffered from the condition.

Some years ago, Hughes-Hallett put the majority of his wealth into a charitable foundation, without telling his children, who are now respectively a doctor, a film editor and a student at Leeds University. "Yes, to begin with they were pretty upset they weren't going to get it themselves," he concedes with a laugh.

Now, he says, they are reconciled to directing the money they once thought was theirs into good causes, and each serves as a trustee of the foundation.

There is a wider lesson here, he says. We are talking at Marie Curie HQ in a tower block in Vauxhall, next to MI6, on the very day after Sir Fred Goodwin, the "world's worst banker", was cleared by the FSA of acting "without integrity" in his oversight of the collapse of RBS.

"How nice it would be if he gave a large cheque to Marie Curie to support our work in Edinburgh and Glasgow," says Hughes-Hallett. "People would think much better of him if he did ..." he says, before adding, as one successful banker talking of another who screwed up: "... and please quote me on that."

But the problem is wider than Goodwin rubbing along on a state-funded pension of £700,000 a year. "An awful lot of people in the City have not yet got into the habit of giving, and don't understand how pleasurable it can be." And a wave of philanthropy sweeping through the City would be an excellent way, he adds, of helping the rest of us love bankers again.

The Tories have tended to cast the Blair-Brown years as a period of dirigiste big government spending, though Hughes-Hallett says Gordon and Sarah Brown, as well as Alistair Darling and his wife, were terrific boosters of charitable events, throwing open their homes in Downing Street for functions. "Brown and Darling actually set the bar quite high and I wonder in truth if Cameron and Osborne can rise to meet it."

Marie Curie's main activity is in the care for the dying in their own homes, which is of great comfort to the patient and of enormous saving to the Government. It is not a glamorous mission that attracts young models or Premiership footballers to highlight what Hughes-Hallett calls the business of dealing with old people.

During the spring election, Hughes-Hallett upbraided Cameron for his failure to mention, in the context of charitable giving, the dying and the mentally ill.

There is, of course, more than a whiff of the privileged, public-school ethos around the top echelons of the Cameron-Clegg-Osborne administration. "It was only when I joined Marie Curie 10 years ago that I realised that I had been living in a cocoon in the City for 20 years," says Hughes-Hallett. "In these times of cuts for the most vulnerable it is essential that these senior ministers see at first-hand what people are facing in poor cities as public spending is reduced."

Hughes-Hallett is adamant that he does not seek confrontation with Cameron, his fellow Old Etonian, as the Coalition government demands more and more of charities in pursuit of the Big Society, even if he still doesn't really understand what the Prime Minister is going on about. "We are looking forward to holding him to account," Hughes-Hallett says, "and I'm sure he's looking forward to being held to account too."

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