What if Charities Didn’t Exist?

I hope we are all of a similar opinion that charities provide vital services for those who require assistance. I would say it is undeniable that they bring light and warmth to those in sometimes desperate need and as a society we are happy to help, volunteer or donate our time and resources to assist those in need. I was looking at some stats this week and in 2010 there were 35 foodbanks in the UK with 61,000 people using a foodbank. In 2021 there were over 1,300 foodbanks in the UK with over 2.5 million people using a foodbank. This number dropped to just under 2.2 million in 2022. I imagine this peak was to do with the Covid-19 pandemic. And I will just mention that the Conservatives have been in power for all of this time period and they can’t use the pandemic and the war in Ukraine as a fig leaf excuses as to why foodbank use proliferated between 2010 and 2019 at a 3000% increase.

You can see the figures here and these figures are only for the Trussell Trust. Foodbank use is actually wider spread than this: https://www.statista.com/statistics/382695/uk-foodbank-users/

In my opinion this should be a source of national shame. And yet I would suggest we don’t hear enough about this in the news. We’re the sixth biggest economy in the world and we can’t afford to feed our own people. Off the back of the cost of living increasing dramatically, warm banks have also proliferated. They are simply communal spaces where people can go to keep warm in the winter because they cannot afford to put their own heating on. And yet the outrage because food and warm banks exist isn’t there in the majority of the population. I feel this too. I feel desensitised by the sheer weight and multiplicity of our problems.

What if charities didn’t exist?

Obviously there would be a huge hole in the social services that a lot of people need. The sick, dying, homeless, disabled and privately educated school children would all be adversely affected. Let me take a small side route for a second and remind you that nearly all private schools in the UK are registered charities and therefore benefit from tax exemptions. Hmmmmm. So essentially it would be a bit shit for those of us in society who need a helping hand if charities didn’t exist.

In 2016 the Charities Aid Foundation produced a paper which found that the UK was the highest rate European country and the fourth in the world for charitable giving as a proportion of gross domestic product. https://www.thirdsector.co.uk/uk-ranked-fourth-world-giving-percentage-gdp-says-caf-report/fundraising/article/1381921 This means that as a population we actually give a lot of money to charity. That’s great for us. But and just go with me here, what if we just binned the charities and taxed people accordingly and had decent public services?

Now there’s a whole host of reasons why we wouldn’t do this, not least because a lot of charities are very good at targeting those in need and getting help to them directly without a lot of bureaucratic faffing around. But surely if those of us who had the means, just put a little more into the tax pot and the government then delivered some decent public services or targeted benefits for those in need, then we wouldn’t need as many charities and the stigma that comes with frequenting some of these charities.

In conclusion, the NHS is a charity. Think about that. This huge organisation that all at once is cherished and upheld by politicians as a jewel in our crown and lambasted because it has too many managers and is inefficient relies on charitable donations. This organisation which is meant to be paid for by our taxes also gets money almost by stealth to ensure it can limp on. What if we all were taxed a little more, relatively speaking, and the NHS was just funded correctly? Or am I being incredibly naïve?