Where compassion meets business steel

The NSPCC's Full Stop campaign ran for 10 years and generated £250m in public donations. Its adverts, which portrayed the shocking realities of child abuse, provoked immense public outrage and support. But
the charity was struggling to get the most out of its income, and in 2008 instructed headhunters to find business leaders to apply for its chief executive vacancy.

The man who got the job was Andrew Flanagan, former chief executive of Scotland’s largest media group, then known as SMG. During a decade at the top of the media industry he bought and sold assets including The Herald newspaper group and Virgin Radio.

Flanagan left SMG in 2006. By the time he was approached by the NSPCC in 2008, he had withdrawn from the spotlight and was spending his time playing golf and managing a portfolio of non-executive positions.

"There was a sense at the NSPCC that they had grown rapidly and got to a level where the management skills of someone from the private sector could be more important to them than the skills of somebody from a charity or social care background," he explains.

"The phone rang one day saying there was a role at the NSPCC and would I be interested. My initial reaction was ‘why are you speaking to me?’"

"But the further I got through the interview process the more I realised that the skills I had were relevant. I’d worked in a regulated industry, had a lot of experience of marketing and done a lot of lobbying and working with politicians."

Refocusing the charity

So at the start of 2009, the softly spoken, steely Glaswegian set to work on refocusing the charity’s efforts. "Once you decide you’re going to have an ambition to end cruelty to children, that’s not enough," he explains.

"There are so many facets to abuse and cruelty. The difficulty is that you end up advancing on a very broad front. That’s what happened in the Full Stop years. My view when I came in was that we couldn’t do this anymore; we needed to focus on either the worst forms of abuse or the children that are most vulnerable. That way you try and pick off those most severe areas first."

Flanagan appears indifferent to the limelight. He is far less well known than his predecessor, Dame Mary Marsh, or his counterparts at the other major children’s charities. And he is reluctant to be drawn into endorsing or denouncing government policies.

As part of the NSPCC’s strategic shift, Flanagan is leading a reorganisation that involves closing a number of its local services. But as he sits in his east London office, surrounded by posters charting the
charity’s 125-year history, he bristles at the suggestion that the NSPCC is retreating from frontline provision.

"I wouldn’t say that was the case at all," he says. "It’s actually the reverse. If you look at the NSPCC in the 10 years of Full Stop, underpinning that campaign was a view – to which I subscribe up to a point – that if you are going to end cruelty to children, then you can only do that by changing the attitudes, awareness and behaviours of society.

"While we saw a substantial increase in the amount of income coming through, far more of that was spent on campaigning than it was on new services. The difficulty is that campaigning can only take you so far. You still need to have a connection to what is happening on the frontline, so we spend more on services now than we did in 2010."

He argues that the NSPCC’s previous model of provision meant that services were spread too thinly, and randomly in some cases.

"We weren’t sure whether or not we were plugging gaps in local authority services or whether our services were actually relevant to the ambition to end cruelty to children," he says.

"A lot of services have closed, but new ones have been created. We were in 140 locations before, some of which were like one man and a dog. If we’re trying to help more children we need to be in fewer places, with larger facilities."

He insists there has been a significant increase in the number of children and families receiving practical help from the charity year-on-year since he started: "But that’s from fewer locations with more focused and concentrated services." Hinting at future local closures, he adds: "We expect that to go much, much further."

Unpopular changes

Unsurprisingly, some of the changes instigated by Flanagan have proven unpopular. "If we’ve closed the centre in Shrewsbury and you’re in Shrewsbury you feel that the NSPCC has left," he explains.

"But the fact is that we have created a centre in Birmingham working with more children than we previously did on a combined basis between Birmingham and Shrewsbury. People don’t necessarily see that or care, so getting our message across over this period of transition has been a challenge."

The charity’s annual income now stands at about £150m. Flanagan has had to grapple with how to use that money to truly advance the aim of ending child cruelty, balancing local frontline provision with policy and campaigning work and with national services. He insists that all three of these elements are complementary and that none should be prioritised over the other.

"The government already spends somewhere in the region of £6bn on children’s services," he says. "So you have to question how much of a difference we’d actually make by putting all of our £150m into frontline services. It would be a flea on the back of an elephant.

"Research we published last year indicated that one in five secondary school children have suffered some form of severe abuse. That translates to one million children. But if you look at how many children there are in care or on child protection plans, it’s a fraction of that number."

That is why he believes the charity’s expansion of national services – including its helpline for adults who are concerned about a child, and ChildLine’s new online service – is equally vital to achieve the NSPCC’s overarching ambitions.

"We’ve significantly increased the amount of activity we’re doing, trying to address the hidden bit of the iceberg that doesn’t get seen by children’s services," he says.

Meanwhile, the charity is putting evidence at the heart of many of its new initiatives. Flanagan instigated a period of extensive research – with the goal of understanding the gaps in current service provision and where the organisation could make the biggest impact. Babies were one area they identified as receiving little focus from the NSPCC or other providers.

"Babies are eight times more likely to die," he says. "It is the most dangerous time of your childhood, yet when you look at services in this area, there are very little."

This finding led to the launch of the All Babies Count appeal at the end of last year. "The message for government is that we need to see a shift of service provision into the younger age group," Flanagan explains. "Our concern is that some of the talk about early years and early intervention is rhetoric, because when you look at spending, it is not on the youngest children. Recognising the current public sector expenditure levels, we’re proposing a gradual switching of funds."

As well as campaigning on the issue, the charity is trialing several evidence-based services, including a UK version of a US scheme designed to reduce non-accidental head injuries in babies by showing new parents an educational DVD on the issue.

"We identified that a service in the US had shown a 40 per cent reduction in non-accidental head injuries," Flanagan says.

"So we’ve started up that service in a dozen maternity hospitals across the UK. We’ll run this for about three years and we aim to get to 80,000 families.

"If we can prove that it works then we have a case to make to the Department of Health that this should be rolled out across the country. If we’re really going to end cruelty to children, this is the kind of thing we need to do."

ANDREW FLANAGAN CV

• Andrew Flanagan joined the NSPCC as chief executive in January 2009  
• Prior to that he held a number of part-time chairman and director roles at companies including Heritage House Group, Fleming Media, Nesta and PhonePay Plus
• Flanagan joined the Scottish media company SMG in 1994 as director of finance. He subsequently took up the post of chief executive until his departure from the company in 2006
• During his time as chief executive, SMG grew from a single ITV franchise into a major player in UK media
• Before SMG, Flanagan worked in the computer services and telecommunications industries
• From 1999 until 2005, he was also a non-executive director of the Scottish Rugby Union