Getting Younger
Sam Younger reflects on his varied career and the challenges facing him at the Charity Commission. He shares with Clarissa Dann why the sector’s integrity and clarity of purpose must be preserved in these changing times
What was it like coming from a family of all those politicians?
It meant I was always interested in politics and had a public service background and ethos. This helped me a lot when I was at the Electoral Commission and had to be entirely impartial. I didn’t go into politics for the same reason my father left in 1959, having had eight years in opposition. He just didn’t like having a go at the government because they were the government and he was in opposition. I am much more interested in common ground which is why I would have made a hopeless barrister – I would have spent all my time in court saying ‘my opponent makes a very good point’.
So how did your career get started?
In those days we didn’t really plan careers. I fell into journalism after graduating and worked on a magazine about the Middle East. I enjoyed it and learned a lot. After a few years I was offered a contract writing about the Middle East for the BBC World Service which was the start of a 20 year career. Andrew Hind was my finance director when I was managing director there. We stayed in touch after I left in 1998 so when I came to talk to him about the Charity Commission it wasn’t that this was suddenly a voice from the past.
Why the move to the Red Cross?
I left the BBC quite suddenly as I didn’t see eye to eye with John Birt, the director general. It was quite scary because I was part of that generation that assumed ‘that’s me done through to retirement’ on receipt of a pensionable contract. So it was a bit of a shock 20 years later to be, as it were, suddenly on the street. My first instinct was ‘all I know is international broadcasting. There is only one BBC World Service – where on earth am I going to get a job?’ But I did have skills and when the director general’s role at the Red Cross came up, I applied for it and was successful.
When I got there it had just restructured to being a single national charity from being a federated organisation of all the county branches. This was enormously disruptive to the people psychologically – especially to the volunteers. It is fair to say that my first six months, and probably my first year, were all about communication and trying to restore confidence. During this we were redefining and reworking; what the Red Cross was for, why it was there, what it was going to do and not do. First aid was the only thing that people would have instinctively mentioned. Not only did it mean it was very difficult to establish what the Red Cross was and why it did what it did, but the branches were doing a whole lot of things the central organisation could not support professionally. So there needed to be a consolidation and that was part of the discomfort. A lot of volunteers saw it as: ‘I have been doing holidays for disabled children for the last 20 years, I love doing it, it has been highly appreciated and now it has gone national I am being told I can’t do it anymore’. That was very difficult. The big job was to bring the organisation together and restore its faith in itself.
How did you do that?
Relentless engagement and communication. I must have been going to branch meetings around the country two or three times a week for a year, and was constantly out of London. That morphed into running a strategy review which was part of the same thing – getting the organisation to see itself positively and coherently and having a message it could go out with. These were all activities that were based around the notion of emergency response like first aid, rather than things like holidays for disabled children – which not only could we not support professionally but it didn’t fit with what we were about.
What about the international side?
I focused on the UK because that was where the issues were. The international operations ran very well and punched way above their weight. One of the curious things at the time, which made the volunteers in the UK feel undervalued with the restructuring that was going on, was that they discovered that they were working hard as volunteers but the public perception was international disaster relief rather than their day-to-day work. All but a tiny minority were involved in service delivery inside the UK. This was always an issue for the Red Cross. It was easier to raise funds for international disasters but you couldn’t do that for UK work on the back of the international aid.
Why did you leave?
I had no positive wish to leave the Red Cross. But the opportunity to establish a new statutory organisation dealing with the whole area of electoral reform and party political funding – The Electoral Commission – was too appealing to turn down.
So what did you bring to this role from your Red Cross role?
Apart from all the normal management and strategic stuff you would expect, it was the experience of direct engagement with people whose support you need in order to achieve anything. This meant working closely with the returning officers and electoral administrators in a way the Home Office had not done. As well as the political parties, which we knew would be a tense relationship because we were there to regulate donations made to them.
And then to Shelter…
When I came out of my fixed-term contract at The Electoral Commission, at the end of 2008, there was a 20-month interlude. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to do a full-time executive role or portfolio bits and pieces. Then I was approached for the interim CEO role at Shelter. Not only was this a sector I was interested in, and knew a bit about, but it gave me the opportunity without commitment to think about whether I had the appetite to do another interim CEO role. It was absolutely riveting and I loved it.
There was quite a lot of work to do to develop the senior management and the governance and coherence of it all and I felt I’d handed something over that was in a different place from when I arrived. The industrial action had been before my time and there was a sense of picking up the pieces and re-knitting the management team. In an interim role you have to resist the temptation to set all the strategy for the next five years because the poor old incoming CEO has no scope for doing what they think is right.
Here you are at the Charity Commission. What were your thoughts before you took the job?
The charity sector is one I know and I had already operated as a regulator. There were people who said to me ‘you must be crazy going into an organisation facing 30 per cent cuts!’ My answer was ‘yes cuts are uncomfortable but you would be confronting these issues anywhere unless you hang up your boots and do nothing’. The other thing is that everyone is forced back to first principles, to think ‘what are we doing this for, why, for whom and how do we do it?’. This is the launching point for our strategy review and it is much harder to undertake this when everything is in a steady state.
I started the role six weeks before the comprehensive spending review announcement but the writing was very clearly on the wall about what the pressures were going to be. And that’s really why, from all those experiences one of the things I brought in was that if you are facing a challenge, take the time and trouble to talk to those who are your internal and external stakeholders intensively. And resist the temptation to rush into decisions about which way you are going to go.
How are you going to cut the cloth?
We will have to move away from the role of being helpmeet and hand-holder as we focus on retaining what only we can do. There are others who can take up advisory roles. We will be continuing the drive to automate as many of our routine processes as we can. To route them through the web and take cost out of them for ourselves, but also for the vast majority of charities, so it is an easier, cheaper and quicker way of doing things. This is a continuing process and we are agreed there is scope to do more and take it further. There will be small-scale IT investment where there is significant bang for the savings buck.
We are in the middle of reviewing our risk framework and it is pretty clear to all of us that there are things that we got involved in doing in the past that are not sufficiently important now. We will be saying ‘no’ to looking at a case in detail more often. This is going to be difficult and hard for the staff on the front line fielding the complaints coming in, and people will be disappointed. We need to focus the investigative capacity we have and where we can make the biggest impact.
How does this affect your public benefit work?
We have done a fair bit of work on this, it is not currently a huge focus of resource and as far as I am concerned what we need is to review public benefit once we have gone through the tribunal process. It seems to me there is no point in making decisions on exactly where public benefit is going to sit in the interim. We are getting to the end stages of analysis on the first year of charities being required to report on public benefit in their annual accounts, and that analysis will be in the public domain soon.
Do you think the Commission should be firmer about nudging merger and consolidation?
I don’t think it is for the Commission to be prescriptive on this. But we should challenge charities to think about whether they best serve their beneficiaries by setting up a new charity, remaining a charity or whether mergers and joint working are going to be better ways of achieving their objectives. I know people say there are too many charities but we cannot take a position on that. When you link it to the question of our resources, and reducing red tape about whether to raise the thresholds for charitable registration so there are more charities that don’t need to register with us or file reports, the critical mass becomes an issue.The irony of it is that not only do many of those charities themselves not want to see that threshold raised but there are thousands of charities underneath the current threshold who want to register because they want to have charity numbers and the status and reputational pluses these bring. And, in the context of our public opinion research over the first stage of the review, the public are of the same view; the message being ‘no we don’t think you should be raising the threshold but we think you should be regulating charities even if they are turning over £500, let alone £5000’.
Should charities be social enterprises and does that blur the boundaries about what charities really are?
There is a general question about what charitable status represents. If you stretch the boundaries about what is charitable activity you end up with a meaningless category. So one of the things I would be interested in seeing as part of the review of the Charities Act 2006 is whether there might be a case for there being different categories of charitable registration. What the public would generally thinks of as a charity is something where voluntary money is being put in and volunteers are doing much of the delivery. There is real importance about maintaining that integrity of people feeling ‘this is where I want to contribute my money and voluntary effort’.
Social enterprise is heading for the same aims, still about benefiting beneficiaries but they are a slightly different category. But if there is profit involved there is a danger of people saying ‘why should I give my money to this organisation if it is making a profit?’. There are an awful lot of small community organisations operating like charities, but they have models of operating like shareholdings and as soon as you get that there are questions about what a charity is.
Big Society. What do you think of it? What do you think it is?
A lot of people have been looking for definitions of it. We can all go with the advantages of locally-based activities, local volunteer effort, delivery and responsibility. But with any move in that direction we face difficulties when economic pressures are enormous and that is an inevitable tension. It is not for the Commission to champion this or that but rather the overall beneficial effect of civil society by regulating well. That is our focus.
And the Giving Green Paper?
Anything that encourages people to give to charity is something we would broadly support. The message we would have is for charities, more than government. The biggest driver of public confidence in the sector is the sense of conviction the public has about how much of what they give is going through to the end user, rather than being swallowed up in all sorts of other things. It is this that determines whether any measures to get people to give more will be successful and sustainable. We have put in a response, and some of the detailed issues we have put in return to the issue of the integrity of charity, such as the independence of trustees and not obscuring their ability to take good decisions. We have said that the green paper’s emphasis was on volunteers giving up their time to deliver services and have urged the government not to forget the trustee element of volunteering. From our point of view, as a regulator, this is particularly important because the quality of governance is what drives strategic success in delivering for beneficiaries, as well as on the requirements of charity law.
What happens next?
If I go all the way through with just over five years left, it is unlikely I would take a full-time role after that. For the last two years I have been doing weekly evening classes in Arabic but can’t see myself using it professionally! I have been a choral singer all my life and would have stayed in the Parliament Choir if it hadn’t changed its rehearsal day. When things ease up I want to go back to that. And then there’s Queen’s Park Rangers – I am a devoted season-ticket holder. Being a supporter is a real community activity – we might get promoted but if we drop four divisions, we’d still go! It’s about the team and the club, not the results.
Author: Sam Younger
Sam Younger joined the Charity Commission as chief executive in September 2010.
Sam’s previous roles include founding chair of the Electoral Commission, director general of the British Red Cross, and managing director of the BBC World Service.
After leaving the Electoral Commission he was interim chief executive of the housing charity, Shelter, and also held interim roles with the educational charity Bell Educational Trust and with the Electoral Reform Society.
Sam was appointed Commander of the British Empire in 2009.
There are no comments on this article. Be the first to comment.