The voluntary sector must reverse the practice of subsidising governments and aid agencies that are not willing to pay enough for the delivery of service contracts, the chief executive of the New Economics Foundation has urged.
In an interview on the Third Sector Podcast, Danny Sriskandarajah said: “We’ve backed ourselves into a corner where public services have been chronically underfunded and the charity sector is being looked to to provide or fill the gaps, and then not being given enough money to do so.”
Sriskandarajah, who was previously chief executive of Oxfam GB, added that “the entire sector is being punished for having too high an overhead”.
“Another word for overhead is quality assurance,” he continued. “In order to do a good-quality job, we need to have certain things in place.
“Safeguarding was an example that we talked a lot about and did a lot about at Oxfam, but it could be a whole range of other things.”
Sriskandarajah also questioned the extent to which the forthcoming covenant between the government and the voluntary sector would correctly articulate the role of civil society in the decades to come.
“In my view [civil society] is the space outside the market, outside the state, in which people come to mobilise, organise, to solve collective action issues,” he said.
“In some ways, the story of civil society in the last 20 or so years is that we’ve become instrumentalised as a delivery arm of a state that’s struggling to raise its resources.
“Or we’re trying to pick up the pieces of a market that’s ravaging our society, leaving us more unequal and more insecure.”
Sriskandarajah said he took up his role at NEF after five years at Oxfam because he “really wanted to go back to the world of policy and ideas”.
Listen to the full interview with Danny Sriskandarajah on the Third Sector Podcast.