The Prince Update - December 4th 2020
Our writer Richard Prince shares his regular horizon scan of the sector news, flagging up developments, new funding and opportunities in the social sector for portfolio careerists and others to be aware of.
200+ BAME organisations secure share of £9.5m National Lottery funding
205 community organisations led by, or that support, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities have received a share of £9.5million of National Lottery funding to help recover from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, funding has also been awarded to a further 97 community-led organisations to support their financial recovery as a result of coronavirus, bringing the total grants awarded to 302.
The funding has been awarded through the COVID-19 Community-Led Organisations Recovery Scheme (CCLORS). The scheme is led by independent trust Power to Change in partnership with Locality, The Ubele Initiative and Social Investment Business.
Comment: important news in light of the threat Ubele noted BAME community organisations were facing earlier in the year and the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on BAME communities, and the need for sector bodies to take inclusion seriously
Charities give cautious welcome to £4bn Levelling Up Fund
Voluntary sector organisations have given a cautious welcome to the government’s new £4bn Levelling Up Fund amid concerns about the need to prepare for a shrunken economy and difficulties in the labour market. The Chancellor announced the funds in his spending review and said the money would provide cash for local projects in areas hit hardest by the pandemic and where investment had lagged behind the rest of the UK.
Caron Bradshaw, chief executive of the Charity Finance Group, said: “The ‘Levelling up’ £4bn investment is welcome and we are keen to see how it will be distributed, how quickly, and to whom.” But Bradshaw said the funding needed to be set in a context that took into account the depth of local authority cuts over the past decade, the immediate rising demand in unmet needs caused by the pandemic and the potential consequences of Brexit.
Spending Review 2020 - reactions
A lot of the headlines focussed on the scale of this year’s loss of economic output and elevated government borrowing. They are record breaking. We’ve never seen anything like it. The UK government has increased spending and borrowing this year by more than any other advanced economy bar Canada. The economy is likely to have shrunk by more than a tenth. The amounts being spent on job and business support schemes and on public services are breathtaking. A deficit approaching £400 billion is astounding. Some of their more interesting observations:
The key core spending review decision was to reduce public service spending, other than the £55 billion allocated for Covid, relative to March plans.
It is disappointing that we didn’t have an announcement on Universal Credit.
This was actually a tax raising spending review. The chancellor has chosen to reduce support to local authorities and has given them the ability to raise council tax by 5% instead.
The decision to freeze public sector pay for some will probably save only between £1 and £2 billion next year. The chancellor has perhaps picked a big fight over not very much money
JRF reaction - “No plan to protect people in poverty“
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation comments that “the Chancellor had the opportunity to provide certainty to families enduring an uncertain and fearful winter. The decision to give the £20 uplift to Universal Credit was the right thing to do in March and it is the right thing to make it permanent now. As we are still in the foothills of the economic emergency there is no conceivable scenario in which this uplift will not need to continue, especially as the new wave of unemployment is likely to coincide with the very point it is currently due to be cut”.
They had also called for the Spending Review to:
set out an ambitious plan for a good jobs recovery with employment support and training to help people take up new opportunities
deliver a levelling-up strategy that targets places where employment and pay are low to support local economic growth, spending £14billion over three years on the Shared Prosperity Fund
build more genuinely affordable housing to help close the affordability gap and prevent homelessness.
Charities 'underestimated and overshadowed’ says Bank of England chief economist
The social sector’s contribution is often “underestimated and overshadowed” meaning that it can be left fragile, according to the chief economist at the Bank of England, Andy Haldane. He said the charitable sector has shown a “remarkable degree of resilience” in the face of Covid-19, but that the pandemic has highlighted “fragilities”. For Haldane, “civil society had been one of the unsung heroes of this crisis” against a backdrop of economic uncertainty. Haldane questioned why the financial foundations of the sector are not as secure as they might be. He said: “For me, the sector’s contribution is often underestimated and overshadowed relative to the public and the private sectors.
Haldane estimates the social sector in the UK may contribute around £200bn annually in social value each year, around 10% of GDP. But national accounts will say the measured contribution of the social sector is around one tenth of that amount, that is 1% of GDP. “These are massive holes,” Haldane said, and suggested now was the opportunity to address these issues.
NPC report - How charities have reacted to Covid-19
This is the latest instalment in NPC’s State of the Sector series. Key findings include:
Covid-19 is changing the sector, but in divergent ways. Some have narrowed the range of services they offer, whilst others are broadening their activities to meet new needs or to reflect existing needs becoming deeper and more complex.
Very few charities we spoke to had the capacity to think about the impact of these shifts on their beneficiaries or themselves. Although, many have seen the crisis as an opportunity to take stock and reset, refocusing their activities on the ‘core’ of what they feel they should be doing.
Charities told NPC that they believed a big barrier to increasing their impact was the lack of recognition from government, funders, and society at large.
Government guidance: safe and effective volunteering during coronavirus (COVID-19)
This guidance from DCMS aims to help organisations and groups understand how to safely and effectively involve volunteers during the pandemic.
Seizing the moment: why Covid provides a lasting chance for change
Change.org UK executive director Kajal Odedra writes for the Law Family Commission on Civil Society’s advent essay series, commenting that “Despite its overwhelmingly disastrous impact on our lives, Covid has galvanised campaigning, activism and civic participation. This creates an opportunity for us to reimagine and reshape society for the better. Civil society must act swiftly if it is to be a successful agent of that change”.
Some 65% charity leaders concerned about mental health in their workforce
Nearly two-thirds of leaders at small charities said that they worried about the impact of “stress and mental ill health” on their staff, in a survey of 257 organisations published by Pilotlight and the Garfield Weston Foundation