Oxfam and watchdogs that failed to bark
AS yet more horrifying details of the Oxfam scandal emerge, questions pile up for the watchdogs responsible for seeing that our taxes and donations are properly spent.
Take the Charity Commission. Why was it left to newspapers to expose this shocking affair, when the somnolent regulator now admits it is receiving an astonishing 1,000 complaints of serious incidents – including sexual misconduct – a year? Or consider the Department for International Development, which shovels millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money into Oxfam (where the number of staff on six-figure salaries has doubled since 2010).
Were ministers so desperate to offload the foreign aid budget – a jaw- dropping £13.3billion last year alone – that they turned a blind eye to reports of abuse?
This paper notes that since orgies in Haiti were reported in the Press, past and present overseas aid secretaries have led the charge against the charity, with Priti Patel condemning its handling of the affair as ‘ scandalous’, while Penny Mordaunt threatens cuts in its public funding. But wouldn’t their stand be more impressive if they had acted on past complaints of sex abuse, instead of saving up their moral outrage until now?
Which brings us to the charity bosses themselves – most drawn from a cosy elite of Left-leaning quangocrats, who spend their lives flitting from one handsomely-paid public-sector job to another.
In charge of Oxfam at the time of the Haiti scandal was Dame Barbara Stocking. A former NHS director, she stands accused of allowing one of the charity’s worst offenders a ‘dignified exit’, fearing that sacking him would highlight allegations of child prostitution and harm Oxfam’s reputation.
How revealing that in her new job as head of a Cambridge women’s college, one of her latest acts has been to open its doors to transgender students, born as male but now identifying as female. What an insight into Establishment priorities!
Also typical of the breed is the current chairman of Oxfam’s trustees, Caroline Thomson. The wife of an EU-zealot Labour peer, she received an astounding £670,000 pay- off from the BBC – despite the fact that she flounced out, after failing to secure the job of director-general.
How can anyone place confidence in such a chairman, steeped in the BBC’s lax public sector mentality, to oversee the reform Oxfam desperately needs? Indeed, if the charity sector as a whole is to flourish, it must surely cast its net wider than this politically correct elite.
Meanwhile, is there any good reason why charities, enjoying vast public funding and tax reliefs, should be exempt from media Freedom of Information requests? Haven’t taxpayers every right to know how their money is spent – and misspent?