The charity fat cats

David Craig has an interesting TCW piece about a familiar problem - how so much of the income sucked up by major UK charities has its source in the pocket of the taxpayer.


The charity fat cats are out of control

Following my blog, a reader wondered how much of our major charities’ income actually comes from governments (aka our taxes – thus forced donations) compared with voluntary donations. I covered this in my 2015 book The Great Charity Scandal.

I’m not a bean-counter. But looking at the financial accounts of a few major anti-poverty charities when I wrote my book, I concluded that in 2014:

• Oxfam got around £137million milked from taxpayers, which was 37 per cent of its £368million income;
• Save The Children got just under £137million from taxpayers, 48 per cent of its £284million income;
• Christian Aid received £39million from our taxes, 41 per cent of its £95million income.

The whole piece is well worth reading, not only as another comment on our problem with charity funding, but a reminder of how out of control unwitting taxpayer largesse has become.


When researching my book, I found numerous charities which looked more like self-enrichment schemes than philanthropic enterprises. For example, one spent just over £43,000 on charitable activities in one year while giving consultancies owned by the charity’s founders around £90,000 of donors’ money each. Other ‘charities’ paid large amounts renting office space in the founders’ homes and/or employed members of their founders’ families. We all remember the questionable issues around the Captain Tom charity.

I believe the massive charity industry is completely out of control and that if the Charity Commission and the Scottish and Northern Irish charity regulators had any cojones, they would set a limit of, say, 10,000 charities for the whole of the UK and force more than 190,000 ‘charities’ to merge or close down.