Melanie Phillips on NGO avoidance of scrutiny because the aid sector is seen as inherently worthy and moral:
Wealthy charities need tougher watchdogs
Melanie PhillipsFebruary 13 2018, 12:01am,
The Oxfam scandal exposes how powerful non-governmental organisations can evade scrutiny
As the Oxfam scandal grows, questions have arisen about the role of the Charity Commission. This all happened under its nose. What’s the point of a regulator, one might ask, if it doesn’t properly regulate?
In 2011, Oxfam told the commission about an internal investigation into allegations of misconduct by charity staff involved in giving aid to Haiti after the earthquake of 2010. It said this related to “inappropriate sexual behaviour, bullying, harassment and the intimidation of staff”. It also stated, however, there had been “no allegations, or evidence, of any abuse of beneficiaries” or crimes against minors.
The commission was fooled. We now know Oxfam’s own report said staff members had used beneficiaries as prostitutes, some of whom were possibly under-age. Last year, after this newspaper raised a similar issue involving Oxfam, the charity told the commission that it had dealt with 87 allegations of sexual abuse by staff in 2016-17.
Given the 2011 claims, one might have thought these fresh allegations would have set off alarm bells — even concerns that these abuses might not be confined to Oxfam’s staff. They did not. True, in its report last December, the commission noted behaviour that did not measure up to Oxfam’s “culture and values” and identified “weaknesses in how trends in safeguarding allegations were picked up”.
Nevertheless, it seemed to believe that simply telling charities they needed to buck up their attitude towards such problems was enough. This was even though it was receiving about 1,000 reports a year related to safeguarding and sexual abuse.
Its response to this was to warn charities to take safeguarding more seriously and to ensure they were providing a trusted environment. According to Michelle Russell, the commission’s director of investigations, its role is to ensure that charities are dealing properly with safeguarding issues.
But what if they are not doing so? Ms Russell says the commission has to get charities to report any abuses because its relationship with them “requires them to be full and frank in dealing with the regulator”. Yet given their overriding concern not to frighten away donors, charities have good reason not to be full and frank. So how would the commission know unless it investigated these issues itself?
Back in 2011, the commission had a reputation of being spineless and hopelessly partisan on behalf of the charities it was supposedly regulating. Its chairman William Shawcross, who was appointed in 2012 and whose term shortly expires, tried to address this.
He brought in trustees from outside the charity sector and increased the use of statutory inquiries and powers more than tenfold. Last November, the National Audit Office praised the commission for “significant improvements”.
The problem, though, is wider and deeper. Priti Patel, the former international development secretary, told the BBC: “I knew this was going on . . . I made this our own agenda, I did my research, this [sex abuse] is well documented. I raised this directly with my department at the time.”
When she tried to raise these concerns during a speech at the United Nations last September, she said, her civil servants strongly pushed back. Senior officials told her that abuse had only been carried out by UN soldiers on peacekeeping missions, and to claim otherwise was “overstepping the mark”.
Ms Patel claims there is a “culture of denial” about exploitation in the aid sector. This is undoubtedly fed by the mindset that the charitable sector is inherently worthy and moral because it is all about doing good and even heroic works for those most in need.
At the charity commission, Michelle Russell says: “The presumption is that charities will be honest. They are not out there to make a private profit but have a wider social purpose”.
This belief that aid workers exist on a higher moral plane than the rest of us is regularly trotted out to defend international aid from well-sourced claims that the money is often misspent. The defence was aired again this week by Andrew Mitchell, a predecessor of Ms Patel’s as international development secretary.
He says Oxfam told his department about the safeguarding allegations but, again, not the full story. Yet the full story about the aid to Haiti, administered while he was in post, was that much of the £10 billion raised to rebuild the island was frittered away by the charities administering it.
Bodies like Oxfam have long since moved on from the traditional idea of charity to become huge non-governmental organisations. More than a decade ago Johns Hopkins University estimated that, if the NGO sector were a country, it would be the fifth largest economy in the world with a global worth of more than $1 trillion a year.
The NGOs have become an enormously powerful fifth estate which uses the bully pulpit of conscience and emotional manipulation to lobby national governments and dominate the cultural climate.
Yet because of their charitable aura they are not held fully accountable. The Oxfam scandal has exposed this culture of impunity. As Priti Patel observes, however, this is but the tip of a sanctimonious and morally compromised iceberg which now needs to be hauled into view.
