By
David Craig, on November 3rd, 2016
Over the last few months, I’ve been helping a Scottish journalist on occasional investigations into some extremely suspect supposed charities and some mainstream charities with rather well-paid bosses.
One of the ‘funniest’ supposed charities we came across paid its three founders around £93,000 a year each while spending just over £13,000 on ‘charitable activities’. I reported this supposed charity to the Scottish charity regulator. The regulator, of course, did no investigation and took no action because the regulator couldn’t see anything suspicious in over £270,000 of donors’ money going into the bank accounts of the charity’s founders while just £13,000 was spent on real charity.
And there are thousands upon thousands of Britain’s 196,000+ charities that are operating similar scams while the pointless regulators do absolutely nothing. The Charity Commission for England and Wales, which ‘oversees’ over 130,000 charities was recently described by the chairwoman of a Parliamentary enquiry into the charities sector as being ‘utterly useless‘. I suspect she was being polite given the widescale abuses I’ve seen in Britain’s out-of-control charity industry.
However, very occasionally those of us fighting for honesty and transparency in Britain’s bloated, self-serving, money-grabbing charity industry do have some successes. One of these extremely rare successes came yesterday when the head of the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SSPCA), a Mr Stuart Earley, resigned after months of pressure from a journalist and myself over the gentleman’s extraordinary remuneration package:
Let me give you some figures:
Turnover: The SSPCA is much smaller than similar charities in Britain with a turnover of just £14.3m
SSPCA – £14.3m
RSPCA – £125.9m
PDSA – £99.2m
RSPB – £132.9m
Number of employees: Likewise, the SSPCA, with just 350 employees, is tiny compared to other similar charities:
SSPCA – 350
RSPCA – 1,466
PDSA – 1,694
RSPB – 2,195
CEO salary: However, for some reason only known to the worthless SSPCA trustees, the boss of the SSPCA pockets an awful lot more of donors’ money than bosses of similar, but much larger, charities:
SSPCA – £216,320
RSPCA – £150,000
PDSA – £160,000
RSPB – £120,000
CEO salary per employee managed: This means the SSPCA boss got over five times as much for each employee managed than the bosses of charities in a similar line of work:
SSPCA – £618
RSPCA – £102
PDSA – £94
RSPB – £55
CEO salary per £1m raised: But perhaps most ludicrously, the boss of the SSPCA got more than ten times as much for each £1m raised than the bosses of similar charities:
SSPCA – £15,127
RSPCA – £1,191
PDSA – £1,613
RSPB – £902
Here’s a picture of a pig with its snout in the trough:
Naturally, the SSPCA denied that Mr Earley’s early departure had anything to do with outrage over his hugely inflated remuneration package and issued the usual bollox statement about what tremendous work Mr ‘Leave Early’ Earley had done: “Stuart has been instrumental in the positive transformation of the Society over the past nine years and we are grateful for his stewardship, hard work and dedication.” But that didn’t really explain why Mr Earley had been allowed to bank almost £2 million during his years supposedly ‘transforming’ the SSPCA.
Today’s lesson from the Book of Giving, chapter 3 verse 7: If you want to give money to charity, only give to small local charities run by volunteers. All the big charities – Oxfam, Save the Children, the RSPCA, the RSPB, Christian Aid, the Salvation Army and tens of thousands more – will only waste your money on fancy offices, six-figure salaries and getting knighthoods and other honours for their lucky bosses.
Oh, and while Earley will no doubt get a massive pay-off from the generous donors to the SSPCA, just one tightfisted Scot bought a copy of my book THE GREAT CHARITY SCANDAL after I was quoted extensively on the resignation in both the Scotsman and the Scottish Daily Express.
Why didn’t my father teach me that the best way to get rich was to become a public-sector or charity fat-cat bureaucrat? Then I could have become a multi-millionaire like Mr Earley.
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