Examination of Witnesses (Questions 400
- 411)
THURSDAY 17 JANUARY 2008
MR SELWYN
IMAGE CBE, MR
ALEX WHINNOM
AND DR
SYLVIA SHAM
Q400 Mr Walker: Just picking
up what Selwyn said, I think some of the large national charities
need to be careful that they do not throw their weight around
too much, that they are not seen as perhaps overreaching themselves.
You mentioned there lobbying in public affairs activity. Sometimes
that can border on bullying, lecturing and hectoring, not just
politicians but people going about their everyday business trying
to do the very best for their families, for example. I think there
is danger and I think people might turn away if too much of that
happens.
Mr Image: We have a federation,
so we have a central office, if you will, but we try to go for
local ownership of projects. But sometimes there is a model that
it is best derived centrally with local implementation, because
the local ones are not necessarily sufficient but they are vital
to the ethos of the movement. It is not just about delivery but
sometimes the way you deliver as well. That is why it is a very
complex area that you have touched upon, though I agree, frankly,
with what you say.
Mr Whinnom: I know one of the
things that has been said by national charities—I have heard
it said—is that the quality of the local sector is very
varied, and I take issue with that. I have visited lots and lots
and lots of local organisations and I have yet to see one that
was not doing quality work. It is a very, very ruthless and competitive
environment to attract volunteers to want to do the job you want
to do. If people are going to come and do stuff for nothing, you
have to be good at what you do. The parts of the local sector
that survive and thrive are, I think, pretty much universally
doing a very high quality job, so I resent the idea that that
is not the case.
Q401 Paul Flynn: Mr Image,
at a time when there is an decreasing number of homeless, why
is there an increasing number of homeless charities?
Mr Image: Where did your statistic
on decreasing number of homeless come from?
Q402 Paul Flynn: The homeless
in London have decreased by 75% in the last 10 years, is one figure—which
is obvious to anyone who has lived in the city.
Mr Image: I think it depends on
how you define homelessness.
Q403 Paul Flynn: Perhaps I
can put it another way. We do not think of South Cambridgeshire
as a hell hole of deprivation. Why did you centre your activities
in South Cambridgeshire?
Mr Image: We did not set centre
activities. I happen to live in Cambridgeshire and the first community
happened to be where I lived. We have 14 others.
Q404 Paul Flynn: The first
Emmaus community?
Mr Image: The first Emmaus community.
Because I live in Cambridge.
Q405 Paul Flynn: Are you a
solution in search of a problem? We have a huge number of homeless
charities and Emmaus is a relative newcomer to this country, is
it not?
Mr Image: A homeless charity?
We are a social enterprise which believes it has an answer to
a particular form of homelessness. If people want to get their
self-respect back, you do not get it by hand-outs. We are a charity
that insists on work as a positive ingredient to "rehabilitation".
Q406 Paul Flynn: If what you
are doing is unique—and you insist, I presume, that it is
a homeless problem rather than a problem of drugs, alcoholism
or mental health, so it is a homeless problem and you have a unique
solution—should it not be applied throughout the country
by government rather than just in an area like South Cambridgeshire?
Mr Image: I think government is
probably less efficient at running what is essentially a family
business which is a local community, than the people who are currently
doing it. We are not always brilliant but we are running small
enterprises. Nationally we have a turnover now of the order of
£8 million through recycling and re-circulating things and
then the profits are given away to charity. Does government have
particular efficiency in running social enterprises? I do not
know.
Q407 Paul Flynn: You have
mentioned money. You have mentioned the money that you have saved
in the area. Do you have convincing proof that the work you are
doing, particularly with ex-prisoners in detoxing them, is uniquely
valuable? If so, why are you not explaining this to everyone else,
the rest of the country?
Mr Image: We have been. We have
been accused of being the best kept secret in the United Kingdom
ever since we started. We do not have marketing budgets. We are
a very poor organisation. It costs £2 million to set up each
little business that we do. I am not trying to say that we have
necessarily unique answers. I am just saying there are areas where
we have evolved and where communities have been taken on—because
I believe they are only small local organisations which act as
enabling community builders, if you will. I have prepared a little
note, should you wish to see it, but the community in Cambridge,
the first one, which is the oldest one, has started a food bank,
where it provides food to other social security organisations,
dealing with single parent families and people living below the
poverty line to do that. The residential detox unit came because
the administrator's wife was a Macmillan nurse. We had an increasing
problem with drugs—a huge problem always, since the beginning.
Remember the Emmaus movement is international. There are over
320 of them in 32 countries, so it is a proven model. Alcohol
has always been a huge, huge problem. One of the reasons why I
would wish to be careful about the definition of homelessness
is that, of the sort of people who come, I would say 75% of them
are alcoholics. Dealing with that and getting people back from
that, they lose their homes.
Q408 Paul Flynn: Why on earth
do you not call yourself an organisation that is dealing with
addiction, for which there is a shortfall, rather than a homeless
charity, for which there is a vast oversupply.
Mr Image: It is a fair point.
I do not know whether we are dealing with addiction or whether
we are dealing with people in need. It was founded for people
who had lost their home and who had lost their self-respect and
who had lost everything.
Paul Flynn: Thank you very much.
Q409 Chairman: I cannot see
any other questioners. Right at the end, is there anything we
have not asked you that you would like to insert into the deliberations.
You have said, in a very short space of time, some extremely interesting
things, but if there is anything else that you think we have not
covered that you would like to say to us at the end, by all means
do so.
Mr Image: I suppose the one thing
I would want to bring to the attention of the Committee is that,
certainly from our perspective, if there were new attitudes in
capital grant funding and you were able to develop measures—and
I use the words "venture capital" because if you can
establish, as we set out to establish for ourselves, a social
audit which gave a return on the investment of public monies—then
the implications for the management by the public sector are quite
considerable there. Whereas, if you behaved as venture capitalists,
taking a risk on the money that you handed out or controlled,
and knowing that within that grant was a calculation which showed
that the potential returns were large enough for you not to worry
about the occasional one that went astray, it is a difference
in attitude. It is avoiding micromanagement in that sort of area
that is perhaps a thought that might be worth pursuing.
Q410 Chairman: We take it.
Thank you very much.
Dr Sham: This is my first time
sitting here. I am not quite sure what kind of influence you can
make. I think you are very influential people. If you make a recommendation,
I think it is very important that you have the faith of the local
voluntary organisation and, also, that you have some kind of investment
for the local organisation. Because leadership/management is very
vital for the local organisation if it wants to continue to go
for the chance of tendering/commissioning, the central government
should have some kind of investment fund for the aid organisation
or voluntary organisation to have some kind of management paid
for. A lot of the grant, charity, trust or commissioning work
has no investment in management. How could you manage your organisation
without the person who really has a lot of skill in there? It
is not with only passion. You have to have somebody with the skill
in there. But you cannot pay your staff. If somebody pays £45,000
but you only pay £20,000, nobody wants to work with you.
They have got a lot of skill, they want to work with you, but
you cannot pay the money to pay their mortgage, to pay their kids'
fees. I hope some kind of influence from the community fund or
empowerment fund, you name it, has some kind of investment in
that kind of level. Thank you very much.
Q411 Chairman: I also think
we need a lot of Sylvias all over the country too, but I am not
quite sure how we produce that.
Mr Whinnom: That is almost exactly
the point I was going to make, in the sense that I think voluntary
action is not about organisations, in the end, or systems or models
at all; it is about passionate people getting up and doing something
about something, and it is often very dependent on individuals
having the skills and the connections and the relationships to
do that. As soon as you start to try to bottle it and package
it, you have a risk of losing it. There is a part of that voluntary
action "movement", as I would rather call it than "sector",
which is capable and ready and willing to deliver public sector
contracts, and you need to pick out which bits of that they are
and invest in those. It is often about investing in an individual
or a small group of individuals. They might be very local. You
cannot franchise it and replicate it around the country necessarily.
Emmaus has been able to do that because that model does work,
but you are not going to get a Wai Yin in every big city across
England because it is unique. That is its value: that it is unique.
Chairman: We could go on but we have
to end. We are really grateful to you for making all the effort
to come down and talk to us. I know it has been rather abbreviated
but it has been extremely useful. Thank you very much indeed.
I hope what we say eventually will reflect what you have told
us this morning. Thank you very much.
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