APPENDIX 3
Memorandum submitted by the Charitable
Trust Corporation, Liverpool Council of Social Service (SF 11)
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 This evidence is submitted on behalf
of the Charitable Trust Corporation, Liverpool Council of Social
Service (Incorporated), by Canon N A Frayling, Rector of Liverpool,
one of the Council's Trustees.
1.2 Canon Frayling is also Chair of the
Merseyside Top-Up Fund which directs some £20,000 a year
of payroll and other giving through a group of agency charities
to relieve cases of individual hardship. The Rector is also a
Trustee of the Liverpool Queen Victoria District Nursing Association,
one of the agency charities, which makes grants in aid of sick
individuals.
1.3 All the agency charities which distribute
these funds have procedures which ensure that grants are only
made under these arrangements in cases where no support has been
forthcoming from the Social Fund.
1.4 An understanding of the desperate need
which the Social Fund fails to relieve, and which prior to 1986
the Social Security system might have relieved, can be gained
by study of the enclosed publication[2]
which describes all the cases relieved by the Top-Up Fund in the
period April to September 1999.
2. WITHDRAWING
THE SAFETY
NET
The casting of the Social Fund into its present
form following the 1986 Review was driven entirely by the need
to reduce public expenditure by capping the amounts available
through Exceptional Needs Grants to the growing number of Social
Security claimants, and by blunting the effect of take-up campaigns
organised by local authorities and welfare charities. The impact
of these measures on the lives of the poor has been extremely
severe. Time and again charity trustees read of people in desperate
need turned down for assistance from the Social Fund because they
are considered by officials too poor to repay a loan or because
a local office of the Benefits Agency has exhausted its Social
Fund allocation. The effect of these decisions has been to roll
up the safety net which once stretched beneath the poorest citizen.
3. CARE IN
THE COMMUNITY
At the time the Social Fund assumed its present
role, arrangements for loans and grants were intended to facilitate
the Care in the Community programme by making it possible for
those leaving long-term hospital care for resettlement in the
community to be able to acquire some of the basic goods needed
for independent life outside an institution. In fact, the restriction
of eligibility under the Social Fund to those in receipt of Income
Support meant that many of those desperately vulnerable people
in receipt of Invalidity Benefit were unable to access the help
they needed. The operation of the Social Fund has, therefore,
been ineffective, even in the terms of those who proposed the
present arrangements.
4. THE DILEMMA
FOR CHARITIES
These developments place the trustees of, usually
small and local, charities in a peculiarly invidious position.
If they make grants to individuals and families whose need is
unmet by the Social Fund, they acquiesce in the withdrawal of
the State from what has been, for most of the last century, one
of its keys tasks; the relief of destitution. If they do not make
grants in such cases then they tolerate exactly the immiseration
their trusts were established to prevent.
Canon N. A. Frayling
January 2001
2 Top-up Funds for the Relief of Individual Cases
of Poverty, United Trusts in Merseyside (PO Box 14, 8 Nelson
Road, Edge Hill, Liverpool L69 7AA)-Not Printed. Back
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