St John Ambulance continues to experience challenges retaining and recruiting staff and volunteers, two and a half years after facing allegations of bullying.
According to its accounts for 2022, published by Companies House this week, more than 4,000 people joined the first aid charity as volunteers in 2022, but a comparable number also decided to leave.
In 2020 and 2021, multiple current and former volunteers and employees at SJA reported a “pervading culture of bullying” and a “cult-like” atmosphere where complaints about bullying were “swept under the rug”.
The charity responded at the time by apologising to those who had been affected by bullying and allocating half a million pounds to improve the culture of the charity.
But in the latest accounts, the charity says: “A high proportion of our existing volunteers were less active than they had been pre-pandemic and a proportion had not yet re-engaged.”
On the subject of paid employees, it also says: “The pandemic made people reassess their roles and resulted in them securing opportunities elsewhere or stepping back.”
SJA says in the accounts there were a number of reasons for these challenges.
“Some of our basic processes, for example recruitment, can still be and feel incredibly clunky. For good reasons over many years we have overcomplicated processes, inadvertently creating barriers to people joining and staying with St John.”
Personal life choices and the type of opportunities available were also factors, it says, as were challenging market conditions.
“However, we are committed to putting this right in 2023 as we begin our journey to what we want to be, in time, a sector-leading volunteering experience,” it says.
The charity also says: “While specific teams continue to face challenges, generally, recruitment and retention across employees is steadily improving… The significant challenge remains in the engagement, experience and activation of existing volunteers which will remain a focus for addressing over the course of 2023, as this is critical to the delivery of our frontline services.”
In spite of these difficulties, the accounts show that the charity’s headcount was 1,684 at year’s end, up from 1,517 in 2021. It is more than the 1,647 staff the charity employed in 2020, before a programme of redundancies prompted by the pandemic.
Spending on salaries rose to £43.9m, up from £37.5m the year before, while two employees received termination payments worth almost £60,000 in total.
The accounts also show that SJA’s income rose 5 per cent during 2022 to £119.9m, up from £114m the year before, while spending increased by 13 per cent, from £106.5m to £120.2m.
The charity said this was due to it almost doubling its spending on first aid provision and youth development to £25m, as well as increasing its expenditure on first aid training activity by almost one-quarter to £36.9m.
It also spent £700,000 on additional payments to all staff with a full-time equivalent salary of less than £50,000 a year to help offset the cost-of-living crisis.
Income generated by training and other first aid work rose from £54.8m to £67.9m, while the value of legacies, grants and donations increased from £15.3m to £17.2m.
Nevertheless, the charity – which recorded a deficit of £3.7m, after reporting a surplus of £10.5m the previous year – writes in the accounts: “St John ended 2022 with a challenging financial situation and as we head into 2023, we face uncertain external headwinds, including high inflation and cost of living impacting cost base and income.
“We have continued to take the action required to manage the charity’s financial position.”
The accounts say the charity and the wider sector faced reduced donor response rates during the year due to pressures on people’s finances and nervousness around the future economic landscape.
SJA received 46 complaints about its fundraising activity – more than triple the 15 complaints received in 2021.
The charity said this could be attributed to a new way of categorising complaints and increased door-to-door activity, which had been paused for the first four months of 2021 due to Covid-19 precautions and then ran at a reduced rate.
The majority of complaints resulted in additional training of individual fundraisers, the accounts state.