Fifteen different organisations – housing campaign groups and think-tanks – have sent a letter to the Housing Secretary James Brokenshire (pictured above), asking for reforms to be introduced to the 1961 Land Compensation Act. The signatories comprise large well-known organisations such as Shelter, Crisis, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, National Housing Federation, National Landlords Association, Generation Rent and the Campaign to Protect Rural England.  They hope to introduce reforms such that local authorities can capture the increase in the value of land when they win permission to build new homes. Under the Land Compensation Act councils are only permitted to buy agricultural land at a value which is calculated as if the land already has planning permission – which means the land can be many times more expensive than would have been the case. This is regarded by the signatories of the letter as representing a serious obstacle to building new affordable homes. By some estimates the cost of building 100,000 affordable homes could be reduced by £9 billion, assuming that the public sector could purchase land at its original value. The Government also published a Green Paper on Social Housing, which envisaged a role for social housing as a safety net for people in need, and a springboard into homeownership for those who can afford it, but failed to address the question of those who cannot afford to live on the National Living Wage. 

The Department of Education published figures over the summer which show a 15% rise in the number of pupils expelled from state schools between 2015/16 and 2016/17, from 6,685 to 7,720 – the total expulsion rate being 0.1%, slightly up from the 0.08% of a year earlier. With about 40 pupils per day being expelled, the overwhelming majority – 83% – occur in secondary schools. Boys are three times more likely to be expelled than girls, and those on free school meals are four times more likely be permanently excluded. Black Caribbean pupils have an exclusion rate three times higher than the school population as a whole. The commonest cited cause for expulsions was ‘persistent disruptive behaviour’. While the total number of expulsions is relatively low, it is important to recognise the personal and social long-term cost of being expelled from school. Expulsion may not signal the end of hope to gain a meaningful and stable future, but it certainly does not help. The statistics tell us that it is a complex set of factors that underlie most expulsions – a nexus of poverty, low aspirations, adolescent development and hopelessness all interweave and make their contribution. It is not merely the case that more money needs to be spent, but that a more particular focus needs to be made on the lives of the expelled prior to their expulsion, to assist such children to cope with the problems that are often not of their making.

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The Careers & Enterprise Company (CEC) – established by the Government in 2014 to help students move more smoothly into working life – said that around 3.3 million work experience placements are offered each year to schoolchildren, and that this is far fewer than the 5 million that is necessary if official targets for each child to have seven encounters during their schooldays are to be met. The chief executive of the Careers & Enterprise Company, Claudia Harris, said: “English businesses need to engage with schools on a major scale to get young people ready for the world of work. Just doing what we’re already doing won’t be enough.” The CEC has itself been attacked by a House of Commons education select committee for being what it called an “over-bloated quango”; it only agreed in July this year to publish the minutes of its board meetings. The organisation is expected to have received more than £70 million from central coffers by 2020. The UK Government’s hopes that three million apprenticeships will be created by 2020 took a further blow in mid-August, when the Department for Education published data showing that the number of apprenticeship starts fell by 141,300, to 315,900 between August 2017 and May 2018.

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The charity Scope published a survey of 2,000 working-age disabled adults, asking them about their sense of exclusion from society. The results are disturbing. Less than half – just 42% – feel that the UK is a good place for disabled people; 49% feel excluded from society; and 41% said they do not feel valued. The report – Independent. Confident. Connected. – is a jarring reminder that, despite the Equality Act of 2010 (which states that the disabled should have equal treatment) many of the 14 million people who are disabled in Britain today feel anything but equally treated. Finding work is of particular importance according to the reports, which says: “63 percent of respondents to our polling said that paid employment is, or would be, helpful or very helpful in aiding independence. Work seems to be of particular importance to younger disabled people, with paid employment being seen as helpful to three quarters of 18 – 34 year olds, compared with just four in ten of 55 – 65 year olds. We need to put to rest once and for all the myth that the majority of disabled people don’t want to work. The reverse is true: for many, work is of fundamental importance to who they are.”

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) published a consultation document which describes the changes that they want to make to the probation service. The current contracts are proving difficult to deliver for many reasons but the driver for change is that the volume of offenders being funnelled to the CRCs are significantly lower than predicted and payment is closely linked to volume. This has resulted in the prime providers making significant losses and key driver for change is the unsustainable nature of the contract.

The consultation makes it clear that the current contracts will end Q4 of 2020 (2 years early) and the new contracts will have a number of new features:

The number of CRCs will be cut from 21 to 10 and these will be coterminous with NPS areas.

Wales will see the CRC being merged with the NPS and the activity taken back into the public sector. Rehabilitation work will be tendered out to support the work of the new NPS/CRC.

In England the new CRC’s will be funded under a different formula but will retain the responsibilities they currently have. It is expected that there will be greater use of the Voluntary Sector and this may be achieved through ringfencing and separate commissioning.

There will be a stronger focus on ensuring that criminogenic factors are addressed (e.g. Homelessness, Substance mis-use etc.)

The consultation will run until 21/9/18 and 3SC is working up its response.

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Research by Populus conducted on behalf of the communications company Kin&Co into the charity sector found that 37% of respondents said the recent well-publicised scandals had deterred them from seeking charity jobs. The survey – which took information from 1,000 people – additionally discovered that only 29% of respondents said the culture in charities appealed to them. The drop in trust in the charity sector is not reflected in a collapse in ethical motivation however. According to Populus, 53% of respondents “believe they could make a positive impact on the world at a business compared with just 35% for a charity.

The importance of Corporate Social Responsibility cannot be understated. 85% of FTSE 100 businesses explicitly refer to sustainability, corporate responsibility or similar issues on the front page of their corporate websites, suggesting that all businesses, and not just those set up with an explicitly ethical purpose, recognise the benefits of a visible commitment to sustainability and ethics.”

Photo: The TabletAlberto Pezzali/NurPhoto/Sipa USA

The Government published its Civil Society Strategy – the first in 15 years, it claimed – which “proposes significant reforms across the public and private sectors to build a fairer society”, in its own words. There are several strands to this grand scheme, including:

• Unlocking £20 million from inactive charitable trusts (those which spend less than 30% of their annual income) to support community organisations over the next two years.

• Launching an ‘Innovation in Democracy’ pilot scheme in six regions across the country, looking at ways that people could take a more direct role in decisions that affect their local area.

• Establishing an independent organisation that will distribute £90 million from dormant bank accounts to get disadvantaged young people into employment.

• Creating an independent organisation to use £55 million from dormant bank accounts to tackle financial exclusion and the problem of access to affordable credit.

• Supporting charities to make their voices heard on issues that matter to them and ensuring that charitable trustees reflect the diversity of the society they serve.

• Strengthening Britain’s values of corporate responsibility, through the launch of a major new Leadership Group, formed of senior figures from the business, investment and social sectors, to put social and environmental responsibility at the heart of company decisions. Using digital technology to improve the work charities can provide to support healthy ageing, bolster online safety and better connect people in an effort to tackle loneliness.

• Improving the use of the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 to ensure that organisations can generate more social value for communities when spending public money on government contracts.

The responses to this from the Third Sector range from ‘good start, could do more’, (especially in terms of mobilising the estimated £2 billion of dormant assets identified by the Dormant Assets Commission) to outright scepticism. Peter Holbrook, chief executive of Social Enterprise UK (pictured above), said that the strategy could be “a good springboard for social enterprise,” adding: “we must turn that ambition into action”.

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Saying he would make homelessness a “thing of the past” the Housing Secretary James Brokenshire published in August the Government’s strategy to deal with rough sleeping, with a budget purportedly of £100 million. But the novelty of the announced plans rapidly came under scrutiny – and a degree of hostility – for what seems like re-jigging previously announced expenditure. Back in March this year the then Communities Secretary Sajid Javid publicised a very similar plan, pegged to the Homelessness Reduction Act which came into effect on 3 April 2018, with a target similar to Brokenshire’s, of completely eliminating homelessness by 2027 – almost a decade away and five years after the next scheduled general election. Brokenshire then announced in June that 83 councils around England with the highest numbers of rough sleepers will receive a share of £30 million to provide an additional 1,750 additional bed spaces for rough sleepers and an additional 531 dedicated homelessness workers. Making the latest announcement Brokenshire said: “half of that [£100 million] has already been committed to homelessness and rough sleeping. The other remaining half of this is money that is new to rough sleeping and homelessness, reflecting and recognising the priorities and importance of taxes.” In other words of the ‘new’ £100 million, half was already assigned to rough sleeping problems and the other half has been transferred from other budgets. The most recent count of rough sleeping numbers – from a year ago – puts the total at 4,751 in England, 15% higher year-on-year, although the charity Crisis puts the figure at 8,000.

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Charitable income per capita in Wales is approximately half that of English charities – £386 compared to £767 according to the Wales Council for Voluntary Action (WCVA). There was a small increase in overall income from £1.1bn to £1.2bn between 2014-15 and 2015-16. Wales also has few charities per person – 2.3 per 1,000 people against 3.6 per 1,000 people in Scotland, for example. About one in 22 people in the UK live in Wales; the region accounts for only £1 of every £45 generated by the voluntary sector. Despite the passage of the Social Services and Wellbeing Act in Wales in 2014, Welsh Government funding of the sector has fallen by 27% since 2010, and the value of contracts between the government and charities has dropped by almost 60%. “The third sector in Wales continues to operate at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the UK,” said WCVA Chief Executive Ruth Marks (pictured above). In June Marks wrote that “money is just one part of the equation. When times are tough there’s a tendency for the pursuit of funds to subsume all else and there’s a danger that, by focusing on income alone, charity leaders end up dealing with immediate crises rather than pursuing long-term decisions.”

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