Our weekly round-up of outlandish and interesting information collected from the corners of the charity sector.
It’s the PM here, NCVO, and I'm bloody annoyed
So this week’s Diary brings you an umbrella body special. Some brolly folly, as it were. A tramp through gamps. And so on.
And we kick off with the news, little known to many, that NCVO is largely responsible for the extra £1.7bn Britain has been told to pay out to the EU.
This gigantic bill is caused mostly by a revaluation of how everyone measures the size of their economies. News coverage has majored on the fact that prostitution and drugs are legal in some jurisdictions but not others. So the Dutch, for example, have been costing themselves money by being permissive and letting people do whatever they fancied.
But the changes in the UK economy are less to do with this funding, and more to do with revisions based on the contribution of churches and charities. Or to put it another way, it's less to do with the tarts than the vicars.
The voluntary sector falls into the catchily named non-profit institutions serving households, or NPISH, which has been revalued upwards to £38bn or so. The sector make up more than half of this, but it’s also trade unions and sports clubs and churches and so on. There’s a more detailed assessment here for those who, like Diary, have a secret nerdy streak.
The revaluation of NPISH was carried out by the ONS with support from the stats guys who write the NCVO Almanac.
Diary knows who they are but will protect their identities in case UKIP wants to send the boys round.
Yep, they dovetail perfectly
NCVO and Acevo have both talked in recent years of the importance of collaboration, joint working and partnership. And this week, they decided to show how it was done.
Both infrastructure bodies thoughtfully decided to independently assess sector regulation and the work of the Charity Commission, and separately announced it within days.
Of course, one is carrying out a review, while the other one is holding a commission, so they’re probably not very similar. Diary expects that all crossover is minimal, and that probably their work is entirely different and perfect complementary.
There are, however, a handful of individuals in the sector who are not so convinced. Indeed, one or two appear to believe that these activities are all but identical, or that at best they could potentially have been rolled into one joint commission, with the backing of both.
They suggest that perhaps now there will be some motivation to report first, which could lead to both reviews being rushed, and turning into cack-handed botch jobs.
Diary pooh-poohs this foolishness.
Communication between the two bodies is tricky, though, is has to be said. It’s not as if their offices are in the same building.
Wait. What’s that? They are in the same building? Oh well. Never mind. It’s a long way up and down those stairs.
We’re reviewing your reviewing of our reviewing
The Charity Commission must be feeling pretty thoroughly reviewed, though. After all, it’s been the subject of two NAO reviews and a Public Accounts Committee review, as well as being annually assessed by the Public Administration Select Committee. Now Acevo and the NCVO are both having a go.
The Charity Commission is itself upping quite dramatically the number of review of other organisations it’s launching itself, as well. Perhaps this is in response to all the investigations into its own activities. Perhaps there’s some kind of KPI we were previously unaware of: the Commission must spend at least twice as long investigating charities as charities spend investigating it.
How long, Diary wonders, before it launches a counter-review of NCVO and Acevo?
And the new chief executive is, er... well, it's me
Finally, there’s the announcement of the new chief executive of the PFRA. Well done to Peter Hills-Jones, who’s just got the job, moving up from head of communications, and replacing Sally de la Bedoyere.
Two things occur to Diary here. First, it seems like you need to have a lot of names to run the PFRA. And second, given that it’s the job of the head of comms to write the press release announcing the new chief exec, Hills-Jones must have found himself with a problem: how do you announce your own promotion in a press release without sounding like a total egotistical arse?
In this case he was forced to knock out an entire press release in the third person and send it out himself, despite the fact that it was all about him.
Diary is hopeful he won’t continue to talk about himself in this fashion once he starts out in the role. “Peter Hills-Jones has an appointment today. Have you sent that email to Peter Hills-Jones?” That kind of thing.
Of course, during the last couple of sentences Diary has talked about itself in the third person quite a lot too. So actually, Diary takes it all back.
Diary’s off to make a coffee now.
