The cost of leaving

When my professional ancestors started Children England, back in 1942, the nations’ children and families were experiencing the ravages, dangers and great personal sacrifices of the war. The collective of children’s charities that came together, with grant funding from the wartime coalition government, aimed to galvanise the hopes and ideas in the Beveridge Report. The bleakness of their present moment told them only how important it was to work together to create a better future, or even just the hope of one, when peace came.

I’ve tried to imagine that founding context often during the last decade as leader of the infrastructure charity they created. Not only has running Children England brought the privilege of being a custodian of their original purpose, but also being a voice and support for around 100 brilliant children’s charities who count as our members and trustees today.

You will recognise that sense of our charity’s roots in the emergence of the welfare state in the work of the ChildFair State Inquiry over the last five years, this time led by the expertise and insights of young people. Their work isn’t just cogent, feasible and principled, it does exactly what the Beveridge Report did for a bruised, demoralised and grieving nation, by offering hope and light at the end of the tunnel.

Anyone who reads the Vision for a ChildFair State will have that feeling of hope and possibility. I owe a great debt of thanks to all our young leaders for giving me that sense of hope throughout the last five years. The future will be better because they are already growing into young adults who can change our world, with a plan for how to do it.

No matter how positive their work has been for all of us, though, it just couldn’t make our charitable sums add up to survive the so-called cost-of-living crisis. Every organisation has been thrown into a profound existential challenge that lives in numbers on spreadsheets. It terrifies me especially because both our government and opposition seem oblivious to the reality of how deeply it threatens the continued existence of thousands of organisations full of talent, passion, history and purpose.

Thanks to the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, we know that 45 per cent of charities delivering public services have never had their full service costs covered. In the last year, when consumer price index inflation was 8.7 per cent, the average contract fee uplift for charities was only 2.7 per cent. Nearly all are having to reduce their staffing and service offer. A whopping 87 per cent of charities are subsiding public service contracts – with 67 per cent using donation income and 11 per cent their reserves. Unlike councils who are also using reserves to keep their children’s services going, or private firms, who have loan capital or private equity investors, a charity without reserves has to shut.

The tunnel today is dark, as it was when we started in 1942. Unlike that moment in time, there is no government awareness or concern about what we stand to lose before we reach the tunnel’s end. This is an existential crisis for the nation’s children’s charities, and Children England’s whole purpose has been to call that out and offer better alternatives. We will do that right up to our closing day. But then we’ll become another loss on the balance sheet of charitable effort, and the sector I love will still face all the same threats without its umbrella body.

The charities we were set up to represent will still be essential parts of their communities and services, but risk succumbing to the same threat as that facing the children and families they work for. The cost of living. The cost of loving. The job of standing up for them is everyone’s.

• Kathy Evans is chief executive of Children England