By Keith Aitken in Edinburgh | 9 August 2011
Britain’s charities stand to lose close to £3bn of income over the next four years at a time when they are being called upon to provide a growing proportion of public services, the National Council for Voluntary Organisations claimed yesterday.
Its report, Counting the cuts, draws on Office for Budget Responsibility projections to indicate a reduction of some £911m a year to the third sector by 2015/16, producing a cumulative loss of about £2.8bn across the Comprehensive Spending Review period.
But the NCVO says the effects may be harsher even than these figures imply, since Freedom of Information requests suggest that around half of all local authorities are cutting third sector funding by more than allocations assume. Other public bodies are raising funding to the sector, but only in return for much greater service provision.
‘There is significant variance in the way that different parts of government and local authorities implement cuts,’ the report says. ‘Many local authorities are making long-term, strategic decisions in partnership with their local voluntary and community sector, but some are not and this is causing real damage.’
In consequence, it argues, some of the economies might prove self-defeating, as short-term cuts to preventative services result in extra costs to the public purse in the longer term, and valuable skills are lost permanently to the sector.
‘The ultimate concern for us is not how individual organisations may fare, but the impact on the people who depend most on them. Those include some of the most marginalised and disadvantaged people in our society,’ the report says.
The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations claimed that losses in Scotland could be up to ten times as high as the £20.4m projected in the NCVO report, because of the way the block grant that determines Scottish government spending operates.
But an SCVO spokesman predicted that Scottish ministers would not pass on such huge cuts to the third sector: ‘They want to invest in the sector and their desire is for the third sector to increase its economic contribution, have a stronger presence in delivering public services and to become more sustainable,’ he said.
