For many decades there was a well understood distinction between three sectors of organisations and agencies. There is the Public or Statutory Sector which includes Local Government, Police, Health and Fire and Rescue. There is the private or business sector which is generally inhabited by organisations for whom profit is the core objective although mutuals and cooperatives provide an alternative to this simplistic analysis. Finally the ‘charitable’ sector or not for profit sector. It is this sector which led the Blair Government to conceive the term “Third Sector“. Many of those who work within the sector found the label unhelpful. Being seen as third rather than say the first sector came as a result of a Ministers whim, not a meaningful analysis. For example there are many  charities a great deal older than the public health service. Some people still use the term but for many others it has fallen away. I was one of those who disliked it. However finding another term that satisfies every example is also a challenge. Lots of third sector organisations are not charities, but simply groups of people who work together to keep an eye on the properties in the road, or organise a regular football match. To ask these groups to register as charities is unnecessary. The term Voluntary and Community Sector was adopted by many people, but confusingly this classification would place the two examples I have given as Community groups and Voluntary would be the term reserved for the larger organisations that hold funds and more often than not employ people. Over the last decade or more, a new type of organisation began to emerge. The term social enterprise can be used for charities whose trading activity is a large part of their overall work or can be used where businesses are dedicating all of their profits to good causes and not to investors. These are neither charities nor businesses, but effectively a hybrid. It is still early days to understand how this organisational landscape will settle down if indeed it will. Perhaps Change really is here to stay.

Into this complex world the current Government is attempting to create a new range of hybrids. They have developed mutuals that are really Government departments which have in effected achieved a management buy out. It remains to be seen if these agencies stand the test of time when the early impetus and contracts begin to dry up. Then there are Government agencies that have been floated off, not in the shape of businesses but in the shape of charities. The big issue here is one of control. If these are really charities then they will be truly Independent of Government in every respect. Their Trustees will be sought from the community at large (and they will face the same challenge of attracting people to serve in this way) and their funding will need to be sought and offered in a manner that means that other charities are just as eligible to apply for. Finally they will need to be regulated by the charity commission in the same way that they regulate the charities that I am involved in. The problem here is that the charity commission is an agency of the state and so there are risks of conflicts of interest being created.

Assuming that these hurdles are overcome, there will be one final issue to resolve. I illustrate this with the news that the Government plans to take English Heritage from within the Government itself and launch it as a charity. This may appear to be an innovative approach to reducing the size of Government. However it is estimated that the new charity will have an income of £90M and be the 65th largest charity in the UK. There is nothing wrong with large charities, but if a number of Government departments become charities, the risk is that the whole sector becomes skewed by the Government, who also set the terms of the charity commission and appoint the commissioners. All this is happening at a time when that same regulator of charities is being stripped of financial resources as part of the austerity measures. My view is that these developments prove emphatically that we need to find a new way of appointing our charity commissioners. They need to be appointed by the same people who charity Trustees are accountable to, that is you and I!