Charity cases

These are the top salaries at the Save the Children fund.

CEO Justin Forsyth £139,950

COO Anabel Hoult £139,950

COO / CFO & Strategic Initiatives Rachel Parr £131,970

Global Programmes Director Fergus Drake £113,300

Fundraising Director Tanya Steele £112,200

Marketing & Comms Director Sue Allchurch £111,920

Policy & Advocacy Director Brendan Cox £106,029

CFO Peter Banks £102,000

HR Director Paul Cutler £100,980

The UK average salary is £26,500.

Save the Children Fund gets £176 million – over half its income - in grants from various governments, including over £80 million from the British government. That compares to £106 million in donations from the public. In 2012 over £70 million was spent by Save the Children UK on its own staff costs. This was reduced on paper to £44 million in 2014 by the expedient of transferring some Headquarters staff from Save the Children UK to Save the Children International.

Save the Children’s HQ staff work in a plush office for which they pay a staggering £6.5 million pounds a year lease. Do they really need their HQ in ultra-expensive Central London?

How much all of this is known to the 13,000 good-hearted volunteers who work many hours for nothing to support these people. It’s not just Save the Children, of course. Many of the corporate charities are just as bad. There are more than 195,289 registered charities in the UK that raise and spend close to £80 billion a year. Together, they employ more than a million staff – more than our car, aerospace and chemical sectors .

 In England and Wales there are 1,939 active charities focused on children; 581 charities trying to find a cure for cancer; 354 charities for birds; 255 charities for animals, 81 charities for people with alcohol problems and 69 charities fighting leukaemia. All have their own executives, administrators, fundraisers, communications experts and offices, but few will admit they are doing exactly the same thing as other charities. In Ethiopia, for example, two decades ago there were 70 international charities operating there, today the figure is close to 5,000.

And while registered charities claim that almost 90p in every pound donated is spent on ‘charitable activities’, many spend at least half their income on management, strategy development, campaigning and fundraising – not what most of us would consider ‘good causes’. A 2013 parliamentary inquiry into the charity sector found there were so many charities that the Charity Commission for England and Wales was struggling to ensure that most registered charities were genuine, rather than tax avoidance schemes or political campaigning groups. The inquiry said the Commission, which receives more than 900 calls, letters and emails every day, didn’t have the staff to check whether our donations were actually going to real charitable purposes at all.

From here