FoE to get its comeuppance?

Things may be about to get a bit more tricky for the doughty campaigners at Friends of the Earth. According to the Times' Ben Webster, the Charities Commissioners have taken a dim view of an FoE leaflet that claimed that silica - that's sand to you or me - used in fracking fluid was a known carcinogen.

They were only able to get away with this by claiming that the claims were made by their wholly owned subsidiary FoE Limited, which is not bound by laws about fundraising by deception. 

It's anyone's guess what the Commission is going to do about it. They could crack down on campaigning by charities or they could make the subsidiaries abide by the same rules as their parent charities. Everyone is going to watch with interest, including GWPF, who now have their own campaigning arm, albeit one that operates by much better ethical standards than FoE.

Charities are not what they were

The local press in Northumberland is reporting the appearance in the magistrates' court of the protestors who disrupted the Banks Mining Shotton facility - this was a fairly transparent attempt to have a go at Matt Ridley, in whose back yard the mine is located.

I was interested to see that one of those facing charges is Friends of the Earth campaigner Guy Shrubsole, a familiar name from Twitter.

Perhaps even more remarkable was the appearance of Roger Geffen. That's Roger Geffen MBE, to give him his full title - he was honoured for services to cycling it seems having been the campaigns director of CTC, the cycling charity, for many years.

It's funny to see these officials of registered charities appearing in the dock. Charities are not what they were.

Fake charities nervous

The journalist William Shawcross has been appointed the next head of the Charities COmmission, replacing Dame Suzi Leather, the quango queen whose miraculous path to a position of power has been noted at BH in the past. (I think "miraculous" is the only way to describe a move from trainee probation officer to housewife to head of an NHS trust).

Shawcross seems to be a Conservative man, and according to this article on Third Sector Online, his appointment was challenged unsuccessfully by LibDems and Labour. No surprise there. What is interesting is his attitude to "fake charities" - those bodies who use charitable status to lobby for state funding. In the same interview, Shawcross was asked what he thought of this question:

Click to read more ...

EU funds climate activists

Tell us something we don't know! Still, it's nice to see the mainstream media picking up on a story that has been doing the rounds of the blogosphere for several years.

A new report found Europe has given £75 million to green lobbying groups, including Friends of the Earth and Climate Action Network.

“Taxpayers pay twice: once for the grants, then again with the higher prices that result when environmentalist groups successfully campaign for new regulations,” the report said.

It claims many of these groups campaign for new regulations that could lead to higher energy bills for British households.

Snowdon on fake charities

Chris Snowdon has written an excellent report on state-funded "charities", a subject that has been touched on here a number of times, not least with respect to the Royal Society. Here's what Snowdon has to say about the big 10 green organisations:

The Green 10 can hardly be described as a shadowy organisation. They have their own website where they proudly explain that their role is to lobby for legislation.

‘We work with the EU law-making institutions - the European Commission, the European
Parliament and the Council of Ministers - to ensure that the environment is placed at the heart of policymaking.

While campaigning at EU level, Green 10 NGOs:
• encourage the full implementation of EU environmental laws and policies in the Member
States;
• lobby for new environmental proposals, as appropriate’

Originally, EU funding for these groups was limited to no more than 50 per cent of their annual income, but when members of the Green 10 complained that they were unable to attract enough voluntary donations to match the EU’s grants, the limit was raised to 70 per cent (Boin and Marchesetti, 2010, p. 10). This is rent-seeking of the least ambiguous kind.

Bureaucrats demand more bureaucracy

It's a surprise, isn't it?

A think tank called the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) has issued a report calling for regulation of private universities. According to the BBC:

Anthony McClaran, head of the Quality Assurance Agency - the UK's higher education standards watchdog - welcomed the report.

If you take a look at the HEPI site it's largely run by university people (although some outsiders, including Lord Oxburgh, are involved). If you look at its accounts you discover that much of its funding comes from the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) - it is a fake charity in other words.

So what you see here is the Higher Education bureaucracy attempting to burden private sector providers with as much regulation as possible in order to prevent them from competing. The regulators who will benefit from all the extra work then pipe up and say what a good idea it is. It's naked self-interest and there is not even a hint of the truth on the BBC article.

Public self-servants eh?

(If I had time I'd take a closer look at HEPI - it appears that its chief excutive went from being head of policy at HEFCE to being head of HEPI (on £130k per annum), a body which we have seen derives much of its funding from HEFCE. )

WWF - another fake charity

John Rosenthal has taken a long hard look at where WWF gets its funding. Afficionados of the Fake Charities projects will not be surprised to learn that they huge swathes of their income is derived from the EU.

According to European Commission data, WWF was awarded nearly €9 million in EU support in 2008 alone. In 2007, the figure was over €7.5 million. Most of this support came in the form of ostensibly project-linked grants to WWF-International or its national affiliates.

Snippets from the DCSF spend

I'll post anything interesting I notice on the DCSF spend here. Feel free to add other things in the comments if you like.

Guardian Media Group £1.1m.

Gypsy Media Company £7,500 ("Britain's only media company run by and for Gypsies")

Total paid to firms with "Consultancy" (or similar) in their name £28m. Some of the amounts are eye-watering. Ecotec Research & Consulting are good for £1.4m. Make that £3.2m!!! They seem to have two accounts. Must have been a bloody good report they wrote.

Cap Gemini £44m

Capita £132m

£2,643 for the BBC's Mike Baker.

Children's Workforce Development Council £89m ("exists to improve the lives of children...by ensuring that all people working with them have the best possible training and advice").

School Food Trust £10m

Association of Chief Police Officers £81k

Chetham's School of Music £5.1m. This is an independent school with 290 pupils. That's £17k per pupil.

Hotels £2.5m.

The Book Trust £13m

Common Purpose £13k (well someone was going to ask....)

Connexions £6m

National Academy for Parenting Practitioners £4.7m (works to transform the quality and size of the parenting workforce across England, so that parents can access the help they need to raise their children well).

 AEA Technology (That's the Atomic Energy Agency) £135m!!!!

Teachers' TV £8.6m

 Congress Centre - Trades Union Congress £21.8m!!! This looks like a bung, does it not? Update: It's probably the Union Learning Fund. Definitely a bung then.

Early Years Development Partnerships. There are two of these - one in Blackpool, one in Middlesborough, both getting about £8m each. Why only two?

The Sorrell Foundation. £740k. Ooh this looks like fun. SF is a charity which does design stuff. It was set up by someone called Sir John Sorrell. Their most recent accounts (for December 2007) have income of £768k, so it's more than likely that they are near-completely funded by the DCSF. So much for charitable status. There is an interesting contingent liability in the accounts: "As at the year end, The Sorrell Foundation was in discussions with HM Revenue & Customs regarding the employment status of certain individuals".

Netmums £481k. What for?

2012 Organising Committee £356k

The Public Teat

Some time ago, I rather idly suggested to DK the idea of a companion website for fakecharities.org. This would look at those companies that were living off the taxpayer. It would essentially be a searchable database, where you could look up how much a company was raking in from which bit of the state. It would be called The Public Teat.

By way of an experiment, I applied for the type of information I was envisaging from the DCSF - a department picked pretty much at random. I was a bit surprised to find that I got a response indicating that the information would largely be forthcoming. Bitter experience had suggested that most civil servants will try a refusal first, just to see if you will go away.

I had formulated the request quite carefully. Obviously, I was asking for a lot of data, so I asked for spend only through the main system, with the data restricted to supplier name, postcode and spend for the year.  This meant that it was essentially a simple query through the purchase ledger, perhaps with a join of to the supplier data file to pick up the name and postcode. I asked for the information as an electronic file too, so there were no cost implications.

The response arrived today and as so often in these cases, what was missing was almost more interesting than what was included.  DCSF had raised concerns over privacy as a possible issue in their acknowledgement, and I had said that I would be happy for them to redact the names and postcodes, leaving just a list of amounts.

I was therefore disappointed to see that despite this, they had decided to removed all information about individual suppliers in its entirety. Why would they do that? My guess is that there are probably some individuals who are taking very large sums from DCSF and the disclosure of even the amounts would be embarrassing. But then I've got a nasty suspicious mind. I've reverted to DCSF for the missing information.

The response file is here.

What do these places have in common?

• Monserrat
• Nigeria
• Central Asia
• Thailand
• Burma
• South Africa
• Sierra Leone
• Belarus
• Kenya
• India

The answer is that they are all places we have paid for the RSPB to send its people to work in the last financial year.

Now I can twitch with the best of them, but an organisation that has an income of over £100m per year doesn't actually need taxpayer funding and certainly not to send its staff to exotic parts of the world on booze-ups jollies conservation trips. I mean there are plenty of twitchers who would pay to do this kind of thing.

According to fakecharities.org the RSPB gets £20m a year from you and me, so that's £20m we can save next year at the stroke of a pen. We can't afford it any longer.

Some new fake charities

Renegade Parent notes that the government campaign against home educators is being implemented through fake charities. We already know about the NSPCC, but it appears that BECTA and the Inclusion Trust are also just extensions of government.

Meanwhile the Englishman has a story about the Blood Pressure Association who look to be a prime example of a nanny state quango and a fake charity to boot.

I hope you guys are going to submit these to the database...

Update on May 19, 2009 by Bishop Hill

And another one: Tony at Harmless Sky has the story of Aber Artro Beech Woods. The Countryside Comission for Wales decided that the woods, which were owned by the Woodland Trust, were actually oak woods, despite the vast majority of the land being covered in beech. The Trust has now started to chop the woods down. Very obedient.

Now this is interesting, because the Woodland Trust has been fingered as a Fake Charity, although they have gone to the trouble of denying this, pointing out that only 13% of their funding comes from the state. Given the evidence from Tony N though, 13% seems to be quite enough to get them to do as they are told.

So despite their protestations, it does look very much as if they are indeed a fake.

(As an aside, the Woodland Trust also cleared a wood near me a year or so back. Living as I do in an area of few woods, this was a pity. The trees had all grown up on a raised peat bog, so I think they probably had a reasonable case that they were restoring what was there before, but all the same, it's odd to find a body ostensibly dedicated to looking after trees spending their time chopping them down.)

The NSPCC: anti-child

Sometimes It's Peaceful has done an exhaustive three part posting on the NSPCC. It's not a pretty sight.

NSPCC part 1: anti HE?

NSPCC part 2: anti family?

NSPCC Part 3: anti child?

Really, people have to stop giving money to the NSPCC. They are not a force for good.

UKIP enters the home education debate

UKIP has called for the sacking of Vijay Patel, the NSPCC official who tried to link home education with child abuse.

UKIP is calling for the sacking of a child protection official following "dishonest" claims over home education.

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children is backing a government investigation into home-schooling amid fears that teaching children at home can hide abuse.

"The NSPCC is trying to shift blame away from itself to the home education community," said UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom.

He also picks up on the "Fake Charity" angle I've been pushing here.

It is no surprise that the NSPCC is a government toady given that it ceased to be an independent charity years ago and now is a branch of government. It is heavily funded by the government and does the government's bidding. Today that job is to vilify decent parents.

Excellent. Maybe all this slogging away at the keyboard is having an effect. UKIP have also been busy on the policy front, issuing a position paper on HE, stating that they are fully behind the principle of the existing law and opposing any attempts by the state to get in the way of the freedom to educate at home.

There are said to be something of the order of 50,000 home educating families in the UK. That could be a lot of votes just hoovered up by UKIP.

(Via Carlotta)

NSPCC deletes criticism from its Facebook site

Everybody's favourite fake charity, the NSPCC, has been taking a bit of a kicking at its Facebook site, with home educators, outraged by the NSPCC's linking of HE with child abuse, giving full vent to their feelings about being slurred in this way.

Rather than engage, the NSPCC has first denied doing anything wrong and has now tried to kill the debate by deleting the criticism in its entirety.

Here's the Facebook page before

 And here it is now

Pretty much every trace of the criticism is gone, with only official responses from HE organisations like AHEd remaining. It looks as though they've got rid of the links section completely, presumably because they can't control what people are saying about them on other sites.

This is shameful behaviour.

Outrageous slur followed by innocent denial is a familiar tactic in political circles of course - I'm reminded of the Haltemprice & Howden by-election, when Labour backbenchers dropped heavy hints that David Davis was romanticly involved with Shami Chakrabarti. The smear was outrageous, and clarifications and apologies followed in due course, but by then the damage was done. This kind of subterfuge is the way of the world among politicians: acting without honour or decency is a mark of strength, showing remorse a sign of weakness.

But for a charity to behave in this way is a surprise, and with our conspiracy theorist hats on we can wonder if the NSPCC's sudden lurch into political hatcheting doesn't actually have the fingerprints of government spin doctors on it. Either way, a charity, especially a big one like the NSPCC, shouldn't be adopting the "apologise, shrug shoulders and move on" approach that suffices for the political classes. It has to deal with criticism in a public manner. Its charitable status depends on providing a public benefit, something that it is arguably no longer doing if it is facing such vehement disapproval by one sector of the community with which it is involved.

If it doesn't, people might just start to mistake it for an arm of government rather than the charity it purports to be.

Alcohol Concern: "We're not fakes, honest!"

Good to see that fakecharities.org is back up again, and making an impact to boot. That august publication Charity Finance has posted a news article about the new site, and even goes as far as to quote DK's rationale for setting it up, sweariness and all. That should shock the readers.

There's a couple of limp rebuttals from major charities, for example Alcohol Concern (67% grant-funded), who have this to say:

There’s no consideration in terms of being critical of government when thinking about funding. We are primarily a lobbying charity, we don’t really do public awareness, and if the fact that we get a grant mattered to the work we do we wouldn’t be able to do it.

They don't seem to get the point do they? If nobody is willing to fund your charity on a voluntary basis, that's because nobody values what you do. In fact, most people would probably say that Alcohol Concern is a public menace existing largely for the benefit of its staff.

The answer is clear. Close yourselves down and go and do something useful with your lives.