Andrew Vine: Funds lavished on Oxfam could do good at home

THERE are those within Yorkshire's charity community who will allow themselves a wry smile today, when MPs probe '¨the Oxfam scandal.
Does there need to be a rebalancing of the way funds are shared out? (PA).Does there need to be a rebalancing of the way funds are shared out? (PA).
Does there need to be a rebalancing of the way funds are shared out? (PA).

Not because they were any less horrified than the rest of us at the squalid saga of sexual exploitation of the vulnerable, or the shameful lack of transparency over it, but because the reckoning for the behemoths of the charity world that has been long overdue appears to have finally arrived.

So when first, this morning, the International Development Committee asks hard questions about sex abuse in the aid sector, and then, this afternoon, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee does likewise about the scrutiny of Oxfam by the Charity Commission, quite a number of charities here in Yorkshire that I have worked with will be urging them on.

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The wider questions facing the aid sector were underlined at the weekend, when Brendan Cox, widower of murdered Batley and Spen MP Jo Cox, resigned from two charities he set up in her memory after admitting “inappropriate” behaviour whilst working for Save the Children.

But for independent Yorkshire charities, the real issue highlighted by the Oxfam scandal is the vast disparity in funding.

Not for them vast handouts from the public purse, like the £31.7m of taxpayers’ money Oxfam received in 2016/17, but a hard, unrelenting slog to raise funds. That’s their reality, and in the case of three charities I know, money is so tight that the threat of bankruptcy looms constantly.

Nor for them wages that rival those of the corporate world, but salaries on a par with the lowliest retail employee, or a care assistant in an old people’s home.

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And those salaries do not even begin to reward the work that they actually do.

Like the woman in Leeds who is paid for 20 hours a week to help vulnerable elderly people, but puts in an average of 50 hours because there is so much to do, and her compassion makes clock-watching unthinkable.

Or the one who ploughed on against her doctors’ orders while suffering from cancer to help children with the same illness, or the one who gave up a well-paid job to support children with heart disease and their families, or the one who devotes herself to people with dementia.

Unsung heroes all of them, just a handful who I happen to know of the often unseen and under-appreciated army of workers and volunteers quietly and undemonstratively transforming lives for the better.

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If they could ask for anything, it would certainly not be praise or even thanks, but a fraction of the resources so freely and apparently without adequate checks given to Oxfam.

If any long-term good is to come out of the wretched mess that Oxfam has created for itself, there needs to be a rebalancing of the way funds are shared out.

It has long been frustrating for smaller, independent charities that the big players who shout loudest get the lion’s share of money.

Expensive virtue-signaling in the form of slick advertising and marketing campaigns has paid dividends, allied to a level of political lobbying that the independents cannot hope to match. And somewhere along the way, the compassion and mission to help the less fortunate that is the mainspring of all charities has apparently, in the case of Oxfam, been compromised by a corporate culture in which safeguarding the brand has taken precedence over decency.

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Big is not necessarily beautiful in the world of charities, if it means losing sight of the core mission that really matters.

What the Oxfam scandal has demonstrated is that it is possible for an organisation to grow so large, and secure so much of its income from public funds, that it is more akin to a corporation or a branch of government.

That can breed complacency and a preoccupation with maintaining the status quo – and not just on the part of the charity. Serious questions also need to be asked of the Charity Commission. MPs will want to find out today if such a cosy relationship has grown up that proper governance has been taken for granted.

It is simply inconceivable that any of the dozens of Yorkshire charities that I know would have behaved like Oxfam.

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This is not just a matter of honesty, or the unswerving commitment to doing the right thing, but bound up with the closeness of staff, volunteers and trustees to the work being done on the ground, the recognition that getting stuck in and helping trumps everything else.

These hard-working independent charities have a lesson to teach the big players about what is really important, and it isn’t protecting the brand above all else.

It is still too soon to know what the eventual consequences of the Oxfam scandal will be. But one of them should certainly be a fairer redistribution of funds which are intended to help those in need, not project a corporate image.