Why I no longer give to charities whose bosses take home fat cat salaries

The consumer association’s magazine Which? is extremely useful. It is produced by a charity which receives annual tax breaks worth £2 million. So it is very surprising to learn that its chief executive is to receive a bumper pay package of £819,000 in the year to June.

The staggering remuneration of Peter Vicary-Smith, who has been running Which? since 2004, has been pumped up by bonuses and incentives. It probably makes him the highest paid boss in the charitable sector.

Mr Vicary-Smith is in many ways a typical modern charity chief executive. he is a former employee of McKinsey, a management consultant company. he worked in the private sector for several years before doing stints at Oxfam and Cancer Relief UK, and then joining Which?

Many charity bosses are no longer low-paid idealists who spend their lives working for one or two charities. They flit between the charitable and private sectors. And if they end up as chief executives of charities, they are likely to be paid amounts which some people will think obscene.

According to one survey, more than 1,000 charity chiefs are paid six-figure salaries by voluntary organisations that are dependent on donations, endowments or public funding.

At the top of the pile are people such as Mr Vicary- Smith, who work for charities which have other sources of revenue than personal donations. Other examples include Philip Sugarman, the outgoing boss of St Andrew’s healthcare, who trousered £751,000 a year, and Professor Jeremy Farrar, who runs the Wellcome Trust and takes an annual £405,000.

But there are plenty of chief executives of charities partly dependent on personal donations who are paid very large sums. Justin Forsyth, a former Labour strategist who has stepped down as chief executive of Save the Children, was paid at least £160,000 a year.

Stuart earley, the head of the Scottish SPCA (which looks after the welfare of animals north of the border) receives £216,000 a year. he has pointed out in his defence that he does not get the same perks as David Cameron, who, however, is paid only £142,000 a year.

Over in America, David Miliband, brother of ed and former Blairite shooting star, pockets an annual £407,000 as head of the International Rescue Committee, which is far more than he ever earned as a Cabinet minister. In 2015, his organisation received a share of a £3 million grant from our own lavish Department for International Development.

DOUBTLESS, all these gentlemen, and others like them, would claim that they are paid the ‘market rate’. I suspect this may be true in some instances, but not in others. In either event, most people who give to charities don’t want a sizeable chunk of their donation to end up lining some chief executive’s wallet.

Shouldn’t charity bosses be paid less than their counterparts in the private sector by virtue of the job they do? When they are trying to raise money for the poor and destitute, it can’t be right for these people to behave like fat cats.

Isn’t the problem today that too many charities regard themselves as businesses? But if a charity is just a business, the bosses in charge will expect to be paid as though they have their noses in a private sector trough. The notion of working for modest recompense for a cause that you care passionately about is considered quaintly old- fashioned. Yet there are still people in some walks of life who do not expect to be rewarded handsomely for doing good. A bishop in the Church of england will be fortunate to get £50,000 a year, and a vicar a modest £25,000, though in both cases, admittedly, they are given free housing.

The point is that because they have a ‘calling’, these clerics are prepared to put up with low pay and a pretty derisory pension, though they may sometimes grumble about it. By contrast, many charity bosses do not appear to believe that the nature of their work demands any financial hardship.

There are exceptions, of course. Perhaps the most striking is the Salvation Army, one of the biggest charities in Britain. The Sally Army’s equivalent of a chief executive is a so-called Territorial Leader, who is paid just £15,500 a year.

It is true that the organisation employs what its website calls ‘ a very limited number of specialist staff who earn more than £60,000’ a year. But ‘no one at the Salvation Army earns a wage of more than £100,000’.

Surely the reason the Sally Army has not been corrupted by ‘fat- cattery’ is that it is still motivated by a sense of Christian duty to feed the hungry in body and spirit. Unlike many large charities, it has not become business-minded.

The consequence of the transformation of some charities into businesses is plain to see. It helps to explain the abuses reported in the Mail last year, including high-pressure ‘boiler room’ tactics to raise money which even extended to targeting people with dementia or memory problems.

If a charity loses sight of its original moral imperatives, and if its senior executives are interchangeable with their counterparts in the private sector (and between various charities), we should hardly be astonished when it ends up behaving like a heartless cold caller.

MOREOVER, a large charity with tiers of executives who are removed from the people they are supposed to serve is more apt to become a politicised pressure group. For example, in 2014, Oxfam produced an advertisement criticising Government cuts that could have come straight from Labour HQ. It was chided by the Charity Commission for its appearance of bias.

Can anything be done? The Government is in a strong position to rein in the pay of charity bosses since some charities receive almost half their income from public funds. Don’t hold your breath, though. Ministers, who have done little or nothing to control the spiralling pay of quangocrats, can’t be relied on to exert pressure on overblown charity bosses.

No, a better hope is that private donors (who in this country gave £10.6 billion to charity in 2014) should exercise their judgment, shunning those organisations which overpay their senior executives, as well as those which spend too great a proportion of their income on overheads. Most of this financial information is available online.

here, Oxfam earns another black mark, as in the most recent financial year for which figures are available it spent more than a quarter of the funds it raised on running costs and staff wages. On the plus side, its chief executive was paid a not outrageous £122,538 a year, significantly less than the bosses of some similar charities.

I personally give to charities which avoid politics, don’t indulge their senior executives and keep their running costs to a minimum. Oh, and if I get an unsolicited present from a charity — a ballpoint pen, perhaps — the letter goes straight into the wastepaper basket. The admirable Sally Army is guilty of none of these sins.

By the way, I should point out that the average salary of a charity worker is thought to be around £20,000 a year, while there are many people who work in charity shops for virtually no pay. They have every reason to resent overpaid bosses.

The irony of all this, of course, is that as a value-for-money consumerist magazine, Which? should be leading the charge against charity executives who feather their nests as though they were running private companies. how sad that it should be the home of the biggest culprit of all.