Whose home does charity begin at?

You might think, on the face of it, that this subject/headline is a bit silly.

Obviously, (you might argue) charities are established and then raise money to help good causes, to help the needy, to help fund stuff like medical research and things like that, which would otherwise not receive proper funding.

Well that's all good then, as you were.

Except that I don't think it's quite as simple as all that - and if you're honest, nor do you.

You see Charitable status can be achieved by all manner of organisations from wildlife campaigners to village hall committees, political affiliates to think tanks. The Cup Trust charity, for example, established to 'improve the lives of children and young adults' donated just £55,000 to charitable causes out of an income of £176 million, whilst, at the same time securing £46million in 'gift aid' and its 'doners' claiming £55 million in charitable giving tax relief. Now that's just a scam, pure and simple and it is not the only one out there, but I wouldn't want to tar all charities with that same brush by any means.

However,  it seems to me that many - not all but many - charities exist mainly to provide some kind of philanthropic profile for their founder and, in many cases a pretty damn good level of remuneration for the CEO and management team, which is paid irrespective of how much 'good' is actually being delivered on the ground. The telegraph reported this week on the high levels of remuneration enjoyed by senior executives at many leading charities - salaries and bonuses that seem to increase at a rate that is well above inflation, whether or not the charity delivers higher levels of funding for good causes.

Add to this somewhat questionable scenario the fact that charities enjoy beneficial tax status and you might even begin to think that all is not what it seems and most certainly not what you have been led to believe.

This situation also creates an inequitable position on the high street and has, in my opinion, contributed significantly to the slow demise of many town centres in the UK. The traders who are trying to eke out a living as a business, with no special tax facilities are being undermined by the charities who are tax exempt and who, in addition, get most if not all of their 'product' or 'stock' for nothing in the form of donations. The poor business retailer also has to pay his staff and for the goods he sells and he doesn't have a national advertising campaign of a 'good cause' with which to entice customers into his shop.

In addition the charity doesn't seem to need to make much of a song and dance about how much it actually gave to it's chosen good cause.  They talk about 'we raised over £x million for left handed emus last year making a major contribution to the survival' etc. The fact that of the £x million raised only a small percentage actually found its way to the cause is never revealed. Nor is the CEO's yacht or skiing arrangements for the coming winter. The Telegraph opined that the UK's top 14 charities were betraying their donors and volunteers by paying the chief execs too highly.

Maybe I'm being too cynical. There are clearly some outstanding charities out there which raise fantastic money for good causes and whose contributions to things like medical research (especially cancer related work) have been amazingly successful and valuable to the whole of society.

But do we really know where all the money goes to or how it is allocated or distributed? Do we have any idea whether the donations represent value for money in terms of the donation we made? Take the BBC's Children in Need or Comic Relief: Are they really about good causes or are they more about securing high ratings for television programmes? They seem to raise tens of millions of pounds - and set new records every year regardless of our economic straights - and yet they show stuff being done in Africa that probably costs a few thousand pounds - for a new well or water treatment system or school building etc. All very worthwhile but for £37million?

And some of the tear-jerking ads for donations to help poor lost puppies (for example) seem to me to be pretty cynical - I can imagine some poor old ladies being moved to send money they can't really afford on the basis of these ads, when the charity is more about paying a CEO a great salary than poor little Rover and Scamp.

The RNLI - what I would consider to be a great and worthwhile charity, one that saves lives at sea - has a marble edifice of an office block in Poole that JP Morgan would be proud of. Just saying.

So are charities there to fund good causes or to provide a philanthropic profile for their founder or to allow a CEO to command a high salary? To some degree, I would argue that many of them are about all of the above but we're only told about the first one.

What charities are mainly about, it seems to me, is making people feel good about themselves: Actually if we have given money to a charity we feel better about ourselves regardless of whether that money is properly, effectively and efficiently used for the purpose we are led to believe it is for. And that's where our involvement and interest ends. We bung our fiver in the pot, it's a good feeling, we've helped someone somewhere who's worse off than ourselves, what's not to like? But it takes a lot of fivers to pay the £100,000 plus salary of the CEO before even a cent gets to the needy. Typically, the Mail called then 'fat cats'.

And that is an issue as far as I am concerned. I think there's at least an element of conning going on: conning volunteers and donors whose time and money is clearly not going to the needy cause but into the pockets of administrators and managers. I'm not saying that it's easy to run an organisation that supports good causes; nor am I saying that these good people shouldn't be paid for their time. What I am saying is that some of these organisations are more about lining the pockets of people than delivering aid to the needy. There should be more transparency. More information about the costs and remuneration involved when we make a donation. Why not get retired successful people to run these things? People who often want to put something back? Instead of making the charitable sector a high value career option? I'm not sure the different motivations involved in these two options stack up in the name of 'charity'.

You could argue that making people feel good about themselves by giving some money to a good cause is a good enough reason for many charities to exist. And it is true that a lot of good is done by charities. Life saving work in many cases. But some do seem to be using the 'not for profit' or '3rd sector' thing as a way of gaining a financial advantage regardless of what it actually does. Some, like the National Lottery seem to me to be taking a load off Government, relieving it of the need to properly fund stuff that it should be funding.

The Red Cross, Medecin Sans Frontieres, Macmillan, The RNIB, Blind Dogs for the Guides (!) are all brilliant charities whose work is exactly what it should be. There are many, many others, particularly working in the field of health, that are equally worthy of our support. But some, like Greenpeace, for example, are using 'free money' in the form of donations to fund highly politicised campaigns, without really telling us what they're using it for. Gorgeous George has also used charitable status to raise funds for Palestine. Not an issue for me per sé, but it is when he takes advantage of tax benefits but does not 'bother' to file its accounts. The Charity Commission is currently investigating, but I'm sure Mr Galloway is not alone in playing the system in this way.

I would, finally just mention my unease at the often aggressive behaviour of collectors, shaking buckets in font of you when you're going into a supermarket for example. I am obviously grumpy enough to ignore these tactics, but I think many people will feel intimidated by these people and feel obliged to make a donation under their pressure. That's not a good thing in my opinion.

I think the sector needs tightening up in terms of qualification for charitable status and in terms of transparency about executive remuneration and actual good work delivered on the ground.

The generosity of British people is amazing: Compared to anywhere in the world, it seems to me that we give more, sympathise more and actually deliver what we promise, to causes all over the world. That makes me proud to be British and the difference between charitable aid and the 'overseas aid' monies we give via the DfID to countries like India, China, Brazil and Argentina (hardly Bong-Bongo land) is that it is targeted at specific needs rather than (often) going straight into the back-pockets of corrupt officials.

But this generosity will wane unless we can get some proper reassurance that what we are giving is being properly used and making a difference. I think that is the challenge for the Charity Commission. I hope it is successful in weeding out the 'system-players' from the genuinely brilliant charities. At the moment some seem to be using the system for nefarious reasons and some seem to be taking the piss along the way. This has to stop.

Thanks for reading.