Some irritating, if understandable, sniping in the trade press at our decision to bid for LSC contracts in the trade press.  What the writer doesn’t reveal sadly is his personal connection to the issue: he ran an independent housing advice organisation we had previously funded but withdrew from after concern about the way it operated.  Indeed, when it came to looking for partners for a recent LSC bid, we decided to go with two other local providers instead.
 
But of course I can identify with his annoyance.  Having spent most of my career working in small charities – Shelter is by some margin the largest one I’ve worked in – I know how frustrating it is to be carelessly swatted aside by one of the big boys.  And usually not on purpose: only when you have worked in one of the bigger charities do you realise how much of the irritation you cause to your smaller colleagues is entirely inadvertent.
 
Getting your relationship right with smaller providers is not easy.  On the one hand, the local knowledge and innovative skills that many of them possess are extremely valuable; accordingly, we still look to partner or even fund smaller organisations.  On the other, the variability in quality of many providers and the need to be streamlined and efficient means that it is sometimes necessary to compete with local agencies to guarantee a decent service.  If you are successful in those competitions, you inevitably create bad feeling.
 
The situation might be helped if it were easier to create some rationalisation in the system.  No-one is in favour of creating a world where the larger monolithic charities can simply swallow up their smaller counterparts.  The voluntary sector has only to look at the way that the supermarket chains and out of town shopping centres have sucked the life-blood out of smaller high-street retailers to appreciate some of the risks involved.
 
But bits of the sector are over-provided and it would be helpful if we were able to find better ways of working in partnership – or even merging – than we have.  Having been involved in merger moves myself in the past (although I was not here at the time of the failed merger with Crisis), I know how often good intentions can be thwarted by legal complications or, sadly, differing personalities.  And larger charities are occasionally guilty of being too predatory or failing to appreciate some of the sensitivities involved.  But we do need to put our organisational interests aside and, if the end users are better served by partnership, merger or simply by one charity leaving the field clear for another, that is what should happen.

Another day, another series of stories confirming that the housing slump is coming and coming quickly.  This time, the British Banking Association is getting into the act, releasing figures to show a 44% drop in mortgage lending in October.  Added to that the announcement from Kensington Mortgages that they are withdrawing all their sub-prime lending products and the continuing travails of Northern Rock (today’s Guardian gleefully sticking the boot in about the possibility of the Government losing its shirt on the money it has lent) and you have the makings of a massive shock to confidence in the market.
 
But should we care?  Sure there will be losers – if there is a substantial rise in repossessions – and there will be – thousands of families will lose their homes.  But, you could say, these are people who gambled on getting rich from housing and we should pity them for losing that gamble.  And surely high house prices have been what Shelter has been railing against: a correction in the market is surely a good not a bad thing.
 
Up to a point, Lord Copper.  Leaving aside the question of how unsympathetic some might feel to people at risk of repossession (at Shelter, we don’t seek to attribute blame when people come to us: we simply get on with the job of helping them), there is some force in the argument that lower house prices would be a good thing.  After all, the very point of what the Barker report was trying to achieve was to bring house price inflation back under control.
 
But the key risk is to the supply of housing.  In his report launched yesterday, John Calcutt suggested that there was some justification for housebuilders to scale back production when the housing market was in a period of downturn.  In other words, we can’t expect developers to develop at a time when there is a danger that the houses they are building will have difficulty in finding buyers or that they may end up selling at a loss.
 
So we are caught.  Builders will only build when prices are going up.  But without building, prices will increase inexorably.  Stability is what we all need, but stability looks a long way away right now.

Interesting press this morning following last night’s event  at the RSA.  The evening  itself was relatively uncontentious: Martin Brookes’ speech calling for the creation of a new body to scrutinise the work of the voluntary sector went down reasonably well in the hall, with no voices raised in outright opposition.  In contrast, according to this morning’s Guardian (helped by a somewhat incendiary quote from Stuart Etherington), the speech “caused consternation” in the sector and “charity bosses attacked the proposals”.

I won’t spend any time here repeating what I said in my response to Martin last night: there is a summary of it on the Guardian website if you’re interested.  But what does worry me is that the debate is in danger of ignoring the analytical part of Martin’s speech in favour of focussing only on his proposed solution.  Like many others, I have my doubts about how far a new statutory scrutiny body will achieve what Martin wants and share the general concerns about how effective attempts to measure performance actually are.  I am less convinced than he that scrutiny automatically improves performance
 
But I have absolutely no doubt that the problem which he is trying to solve is a real one.  The charity sector is far too isolated from the sort of effective feedback which helps to keep us disciplined and efficient in what we do.  It is simply no good us hiding behind claims about how difficult it is to measure the emotional impact of our work or concerns about the differential impact of scrutiny on smaller charities (real though this latter is).  The fact that there are still charities – and some of them well-established and wealthy – who cannot really evidence how their work impacts on their beneficiaries shows that there is something wrong somewhere.
 
So scrutiny there must be.  Sensitive, well-designed, proportionate, legitimate and useful scrutiny.  But one question remains: who is such scrutiny to be for?  Is it for funders, so that they can know their money is being well used (that is clearly the core purpose of New Philanthropy Capital)?  Is it for Government to assure itself that we deserve our tax breaks?  Is it for us, so that we know how to improve our management?  Or is it, dare I say it, for the beneficiaries themselves, so that instead of being mere passive recipients of our generous welfare they can be the active and informed consumers of services that they deserve to be?
 
 

I have never seen the point of Second Life – I have trouble enough with my first.  But the launch of Shelter’s new fundraising initiative, a virtual city where participants can pay to build and own property, is a reminder that the web is now central to our business. 
 
That campaigning and fundraising are now increasingly web-based activities is fairly commonplace.  The fact that you can use the internet to recruit, organise and deploy campaigners or mount appeals to potential donors is well-known, even if the outcome of those efforts may not always yet be as good as doing these by conventional methods (letter-writing campaigns still tend to outperform e-mail based initiatives and no-one has yet truly come up with a top-notch web-based way of recruiting new fundraising donors).
 
But it is with our services that investment in the web is truly paying off.  The advice pages on our website (which those of you who got here via the website will have seen) are now getting over a million visitors a year looking for information about how to address their housing problems.  Ten times as many people are getting help via the web than via the rest of our services, and at a fraction of the cost.
 
But of course it’s not that simple.  For people who don’t have access to the web, people who can’t read or whose English is not good, people whose problems are more complicated or who need more than simple written advice – all these need time face to face or, at the worst, over the phone.  And that is what we have always specialised in.  But the web is for more than bloggers, Facebook networkers, E-Bay browsers, and porn-seekers – it is also for those most in need.
 
 

Finally.  After weeks of wrangling and revision, with figures shifting to and fro and armies of people in suits arguing over deferred income, dilapidations and other matters I pretend hopelessly to understand, the accounts have been signed off for another year.  A huge sigh of relief - I think I may go and have a pint to celebrate.
 
Every year at this time, the same thoughts go through my mind.  What is all this about?  What are all these people arguing about?  And – critically – why am I involved?
 
Not to say that I don’t accept that it is important.  For all my inclination to risk in our campaigning work (I am usually the one here being pulled into line rather than doing the pulling), I am very cautious financially.  My childhood memories of sitting freezing in the dark all night every time we ran out of money for the meter (oh we had it tough, I tell you) have left their mark.  And I am a trustee too - I know the importance of making sure that the financial processes are sound.
 
No – it’s more the question of the CEO’s role in all of this.  The job of a charity CEO, as I have argued before, is now an increasingly complex one.  You have to be able to manage a multi-million pound business, but understand the needs of the most disadvantaged.  You have to be good with clients and with funders, with politicians and with staff.  You have to be able to do strategy and vision (whatever that is) and understand the nuts and bolts of the operation.  You have to be able to do TV and speechifying and master the arcane details of your policy brief.  And you need to be capable of arbitrating between your in-house finance team and the external audit team when things are going wrong.
 
And of course you can’t.  Or at least I can’t.  Yes, I can do some stuff reasonably well and blag my way through a lot of the rest, but there are things I know I don’t do well and things I don’t understand.  At times it shows, of course it does.  And for all that I am reasonably well versed in the financial basics, one of those times is in detailed discussions about which year we should be taking our deferred income or how we should be assessing dilapidations for our charity shops.
 
Perhaps this is my inadequacy but perhaps too the issue is the job itself.  There may be some people who can do it all but very few, I suspect.  Perhaps what we should be doing is splitting the job.  Running an organisation is one thing.  Doing the front of house campaigning, lobbying and policy work is something else.  Although five years after I applied for the CEO post, it is a bit late to be wondering whether the job description is right…