Big charity test

After five years of distributing the Big Lottery Fund’s £600m annual budget, Peter Wanless now heads a charity that must raise at least £135m to match last year’s budget.

That is why, just three weeks into the job, he and his 12-year-old son plan to spend a Sunday afternoon climbing the 38 floors to the summit of London’s Gherkin skyscraper to raise cash for his new employer. “If it wasn’t enough to work for the NSPCC five days a week, then I’ll be fundraising at the weekend as well,” he laughs without a hint of trepidation.

This is his first interview since taking the post, and Wanless chuckles and smiles most of the time, but admits he was nervous about leaving the Lottery. He says the 129-year history of the NSPCC, its 2,000 staff and 11,000 volunteers can “weigh heavily if you stop to think about it”.

But Wanless describes his first days as the charity’s chief executive to be like “joining a family”. His new office is testament to this. Wanless asked the young people who interviewed him during the application process to send him ideas before he arrived.

The result is a folder packed with welcome messages, instructions and suggestions for the website, bound in a cover baring Wanless’s name in bold glitter pen. Colourful children’s artwork decorates the walls, shouting encouraging slogans such as “confidence” and “resilience”. “It was a lovely welcome,” he says, adding that someone also baked him a giant cake in NSPCC colours.

Wanless’s positivity extends to his vision for the charity’s future. Income has fallen significantly in recent years, dropping £12.9m between 2010/11 and 2011/12, but he says numbers are unimportant. “The most important thing is to make a profound difference to the lives of children.”

To make that difference, Wanless plans to focus on providing “fantastic life-changing solutions” with measurable outcomes and improving the NSPCC’s ability to communicate its value to funders. He says public awareness of child abuse is now high enough for the charity to spend more time delivering services. “This is not simply a charity that offers opinions – it delivers,” he says. “In the past, the NSPCC has had to spend a lot of time and money banging away about the nature and the scale of abuse. Well there’s less of that problem with [Jimmy] Savile and grooming gangs. As a nation, we are much more aware of the prevalence of abuse and child sex abuse.”

Wanless refers to a map that pinpoints 20 NSPCC projects across the UK. “These are cutting-edge interventions based on best practice around the world,” he says. “Not only do our initiatives have to be world-class in their design, but we have to be world-class in our ability to understand the lessons from them, and in our ability to persuade those responsible for the design of national policy frameworks and commissioning of local services of the relevance and validity of these things.”

Active change
Donors, he says, want to see the positive difference their money makes and Wanless hopes to show them what the NSPCC can do by promoting the active change the charity is delivering rather than being a public “conscience”. “You can’t just sit on the sidelines chirping away about this and that, and raising money to be a conscience on a problem,” he says. “You have to be convincing about how your authority and understanding of the perspectives of children and people delivering frontline services are enabling you to inform changes, from which the system as a whole can learn.”

Wanless says that recruiting more volunteers for ChildLine’s helpline and schools service is part of that solution. He also wants discussion about child abuse to become more normalised. “Any organisation that has an interest in marketing to and associating with young people has an opportunity, and arguably a responsibility, to think about child abuse and neglect,” says Wanless. “We just need to make that as easy as possible for them to be able to associate with.”

Once more, he reluctantly credits the Savile scandal as having helped in this area: “It’s horrible to say it’s helpful, but as a consequence of Savile, it is easier for us to get plenty of coverage.”

The NSPCC raised 90 per cent of its income from the public in 2011/12, which are the latest available figures. Only £11.1m came from the government and local authorities – down £6m on 2010/11. Despite his civil service background, Wanless is keen to maintain this distance from government, a choice that stems from his time at the Big Lottery Fund (BLF).

“I worked really hard at BLF to position us as an independent trust that was interested in outcomes, and not to be in the mindset of being a government quango,” he says. “But the truth is, BLF is a government quango. There’s nothing to stop [Cabinet Office minister] Francis Maude waking up tomorrow and deciding: I think this money from the lottery should be spent on that.”

Wanless does not want the NSPCC’s direction to be swayed by policy objectives. “Our first loyalty is to the evidence and experience of the children, not to a political party’s manifesto,” he says.

He says two major policy areas the NSPCC will focus on under his direction will be online child protection and improving legal proceedings for young victims of abuse. The NSPCC is currently consulting its young ambassadors on how the internet should be policed. “We’re asking them what their feelings are about access to child abuse images at the moment. Where do they think the line is between the benefits many of them will secure from having access to all the internet provides compared to the risks of exposure.”

On the court side, Wanless says the government’s plan to pilot pre-recorded evidence sessions so young abuse victims can avoid appearing in court is “brilliant”. “There have been people in and around the NSPCC campaigning for that since it was recommended in 1999, so well done [Justice Secretary] Chris Grayling for taking the pilot forward. We now have to make sure the pilot is structured really effectively and is doomed to success so we see it becoming mainstream practice sooner rather than later.”

Driving improvement
Wanless’s considerable experience inside the civil service may well prove useful when deciding how the NSPCC will influence government policy. He says the charity will draw the government’s attention to evidence and provide insights on important matters rather than simply demanding change.

“Having been a civil servant at the receiving end of that sort of generalised commentary, I’ve learned it’s of very limited value. ‘Charity calls for something to be better!’,” he mocks, laughing. “We won’t have all the answers, but we can illustrate where some of the dilemmas and challenges are, and the implications those have for children.”

Local government is also high on his list of target partners. “It’s really important we have effective relationships with children’s services – I don’t think that’s always been the case,” he says. “In the past, the NSPCC has been seen as slightly detached and doing its own thing. It has a privileged position compared to a director of children’s services, who has all those statutory responsibilities and urgent things to deliver.”

He says that developing partnerships with children’s services chiefs and sharing learning with them will drive improvement for children. “That sense of co-production in future design and learning from these sorts of interventions is going to be important,” he says. “I’ve had quite a lot of experience of being on that journey with the Lottery and I look forward to more of the same here. Active learning with statutory services is the most important one.”

He also wants to work with other charities to avoid duplication and so they can learn from each other’s work.

For the immediate future, however, Wanless is concentrating on his performance during the Gherkin Challenge. His strategy might provide insight into how he will lead the NSPCC. “I think we will be slow, but we will get to the top,” he says, “because Wanless junior wants his medal and I’ll be humiliated if I can’t demonstrate to my staff that I can do it.”