Giving and taking
THE coalition’s spending cuts will devastate charities in Yorkshire. For all of David Cameron’s talk about the Big Society, the basic truth is that there is less money to go round in 2011. The upshot is that the poor, the sick and the needy are left to suffer. Those with the broadest shoulders will not bear the greatest burden, despite what the country was told in the run-up to the General Election last year.
The problems are particularly acute for small charities, which will struggle to survive as local authorities and other grant-making bodies have their budgets slashed. For many, mergers may represent the best chance of survival. Others will have to consider being subsumed into a larger charity, even if it involves rubbing up against their “sharp elbows”.
The risk of such consolidation, however, is that some specialist care services will be lost because they are seen as being too niche. That is the danger of the Big Society – that those on the margins are ignored.