The minister for civil society was criticised yesterday for telling charities to measure their impact when the government had failed to take into account the impact of cuts to legal aid funding.
Rob Wilson was speaking at Community Action Southwark's 2014 conference, entitled Making an Impact, yesterday about the importance of measuring impact, saying charities needed to “better demonstrate and articulate” their effectiveness.
In the questions session following his keynote speech, a member of the audience said he had been “preaching to us to measure our impact”, when the impact of cuts to legal aid funding did not take into account how it improves people’s lives and the savings it makes, before the government made the cuts. Delegates applauded her points.
In response, Wilson said legal aid in the UK was “much more generous” than anywhere else in the world and the government had been facing a 7 per cent drop in GDP and a budget deficit of £200bn.
“Every department apart from the NHS had to experience cuts, legal aids was one of them,” he said.
“Cuts have taken place, nobody can deny that, but you’ve got to ask yourself if a country like this could continue to sustain such a huge deficit year in, year out before the financial markets just run? Unfortunately we couldn’t. We had to show we had some financial discipline,” he said.
“We’ve had to make some unpalatable decisions. We don’t want to go around cutting this that and the other. That’s not what politicians went into government for. But we had to take the hard decisions that perhaps others won’t take.”
In his keynote speech at the event, Wilson said that by concentrating on impact, voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations can get better at what they do and reach more people.
He highlighted the work of the local organisation Cambridge House, which works to tackle poverty, and its programme Stand Up Southwark, which supports local 16 to 19 year olds.
“This is the sort of impact you need to better demonstrate and articulate to maximise the effectiveness and efficiency of services you deliver,” he said.
“This work needs to be led by funders, investors and commissioners alongside frontline organisations.
“We now want to move towards a world where high-quality impact measurement is the norm in the social society.”
Wilson said VCSE organisations could sometimes “find it hard to get to grips” with impact measurement.
He said the government had backed a number of programmes to embed impact measurement practices into the way social organisations work, including backing the Social Value Act, Inspiring Impact, a sector-led programme to help make impact measurement work for all types of organisations, and funding of £1.5m for the Impact Readiness Fund.
