THE TRUTH ABOUT THE LOSS OF ROYALTIES

The Princess of Wales's resignation is no great blow to a good cause. Dominic Prince knows about the drawbacks of royal patronage. He's served on a charity board with the Duchess of York

RENOWNED CHARITIES protest that they will lose much needed funds because they have lost the Queen of Hearts. They are probably right.

But amid the accusations of the Princess's cold-heartedness, the real point has been forgotten. Many charities, far from being cash-starved, have too much money.

Most charitable giving in the United Kingdom is quite simply a voluntary taxa- tion, governed by individual emotional appeal. The agenda is set not by the need for funding but by clever advertising mer- chants.

Few people think twice about which charities they give to. This is why so many — particularly those concerned with difficult human plights — queue and beg for royal patronage. Providing a royal to pity a lame or sick horse, or pat a dog, provides a far greater emotional pull than, say, an appeal for money to help the mentally ill. The dog and the horse are blame- less, a princess has a certain /More amount of glamour. A \pieeoei schizophrenic, on the other

hand, might stab you to death on the Underground or commit suicide in front of you. Neither act encourages even the kind of heart or deep of pocket to give generously. Finding the truly needy cause demands superhu- man qualities of financial analysis.

As a nation we are not discerning enough about whom we give to. Last month, the Charities Commission announced that the top 200 charities in the UK were to be 'monitored' simply because they had become too large and unwieldy, and didn't know what to do with their money. The Commission and the well- heeled 200 have finally got together to explore what the commission calls 'big money issues'. The recognition that having too much money can be as much of a strain as having too little is long overdue. Wealthy charities include the National

Trust, the BBC Children in Need Appeal, Help the Aged and the English National Opera. All those being monitored have incomes in the tens of millions of pounds per year, and charities are now very big business indeed. When funds reach these proportiolis, our contributions may simply be adding to the overwhelming bureaucra- cy that is now inevitably part of the busi- ness of charities.

For all its good intentions, the National Trust — with its charitable and tax-free sta- tus — has simply lost its way. It is now the largest charity in the UK and is hampered by an ever-increasing administration and a high-handed manner. It is no longer about preserving great- houses or beautiful tracts of land for the nation. Instead it creates a giant theme park for all England to gaze at. High-yielding holiday lets are more attractive to the Trust than local tenants on agricultural wages. The Trust has frequent- ly come into conflict with those who farm on or near its land. A Gloucestershire man who had spent £175,000 repairing a Trust property committed suicide after being evicted for non-payment of rent.

A more dramatic case of the misguided public volunteering its financial dues is the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association (GDBA) whose patron is Princess Alexan- dra. The biggest cause of blindness is dia- betes and this is now easily detected and controlled. Therefore the majority of the blind are elderly, and the number of people afflicted will decrease further as preventa- tive medicine improves.

Yet the GDBA, which embarks on a massive fund-raising exercise each year, has reserves of well over £160 Million and even its own forward planning only accounts for £79.1 million. At present, the interest on the reserves alone is enough to keep the GDBA running for three years, although perhaps not in the style to which it is accus-

tomed. And still it goes out and raises money. With many far more deserving causes it is time that someone stepped in and said, 'Please don't give generously.' Well- endowed charities contin- uing to chase contributions inevitably damage the income capacity of other more needy outfits.

The GDBA has money , to spend — and spend it does. The mansion head- ' quarters in Reading are very comfortable. In the past, the Association has

made interest-free loans amounting to hundreds of thousands of pounds to employees. More than £1.7 mil- lion is still outstanding from these. There is also an unidentified 'officer of the associa- tion' who in the last financial year bor- rowed £40,000 (again interest-free) from the GDBA.

According to former employees with whom I have spoken, the perks that come with the job are extremely generous. But of course this is not something that they like to advertise. I know. I have seen the resig- nation contract of one employee who left in 1992. He was paid a five-figure lump sum and a generous pension, but had to sign an onerous contract forbidding him from divulging anything about the workings of the GDBA — specific reference was made to the media. The money might be better invested establishing a cure for blindness. The Royal National Institute for the Blind attempts to do just that. As well as funding schools, colleges and rehabilitation units, the RNIB also produces talking books and funds welfare projects. It also supports medical research to alleviate blindness. You might think that such an undertaking would inspire generosity.

But in the fiscal year 1993-94 the RNIB had to transfer £1.4 million from reserves in order to fund its operations. And things did not improve. In the year 1994-95, the charity had an even larger deficit of £2.5 million, the shortfall once again being made up out of reserves. Last year, the GDBA gave its poor relation, the RNIB, the not overly generous sum of £85,000 to help fund a mobility unit.

GDBA is by no means a lone example of overfunding. Of the 200 charities that the Commission is monitoring, a good propor- tion are unheard of. The Tudor Trust, the Linbury Trust, the Ravenswood Founda- tion and the Freemantle Trust all have very large reserve funds.

But the Charities Commission, with a budget of £23 million, is a toothless tiger when it comes to regulation. This appears to be partly to do with its funding. It is unlikely that the employees have time to examine 180,000 sets of accounts each year and look for discrepancies, mismanage- ment or downright dishonesty.

It relies more on interested members of the public to inform it of wrong-doing. Recently, I spotted a charity that was clearly in breach of the Charities Act. I informed the Commission, they thanked me politely and confessed that they had had no idea about the abuse until it was pointed out. As far as I could see from filed accounts (of the charity in question), the creative book-keep- ing had been going on for very many years and there must be many more such cases waiting to be exposed. Pay a visit to Companies House, and most questions about limited companies can be answered in a matter of hours. Directors' pay, shareholders and profit and loss can all be ascertained very quickly.

The Charities Commission, though, is quite different. Bits of it are comput- erised, but the full accounts of charities are not. Those of an enquiring nature have to wait approximately ten days before the 'hard' file can be delivered from a warehouse in Taunton, Somerset.

Perhaps charities should be labelled like food so the public know and have a deeper understanding of what they are giving to. If there was a label saying the chairman of charity X had a chauffeur-driven Bentley, unlimited expenses and a £100,000 plus salary, then people might not feel so drawn to it.

Unfortunately, unlike company law, there is no requirement to reveal exactly who gets what from a charity. Some pru- dent outfits make the information avail- able, but on the whole there is a reluctance to do so. The Statement of Recommended Practice from the Charities Commission says that a salary of more than £40,000 should be 'noted', but there is no legal requirement.

A recent survey in the Mail on Sunday indicated that the 100 or so charities in which the Princess of Wales was involved will lose £300 million in income after her decision to bow out.

This is almost certainly an over-estimate, but in my limited knowledge of royal partic- ipation in charities a princess or a duchess certainly does help the money roll in, and I have first-hand experience of it — through the Motor Neurone Disease Association, which I co-founded after my father's death.

In 1989, after much badgering, the MNDA got its royal patron — the Duchess of York, who was drawn to it following the death of her friend Sir Robert Cooke, the Tory MP for Bristol West. Most of the money our charity gets is a direct result of the Duchess's title and work. If she occa- sionally makes us grit our teeth, then so be it. There is a trade-off between income and the royal desire to be feted and revered. She asked me to sit on the Corporate Advi- sory Council, where my experience of her since has been as follows. She is always at least half an hour late for meetings, com- plains to me about tabloid journalists and is hopelessly disorganised, so that nothing we decide gets followed up. At our last meeting she invited her bank manager and kept cracking jokes about her overdraft, which was then still a secret from the world.

But on the positive side she also got peo- ple like Robert Stigwood, the extremely wealthy Hollywood producer, to cough up a good deal of much needed loot. I sat there and watched her do it and very impressive it was too. She promised that her then estranged husband would attend a golf tournament and got pledges on the spot from big hitters who make up the council. I am told by those who know that last year she was responsible for raising £200,000 of the £2 million plus of income for the MNDA. (We had an annual income of just £2,000 when we started.) Several years ago, after one of her more disagreeable encounters with the newspa- pers, she tendered her resignation to the charity. There were some who thought she was a no-good trollop and should go, but there were others with more foresight who realised the value, of having a royal on board, however discredited the particular brand had become. She stayed.

Princess Diana has, I think, taken the easy way out by quitting such a huge num- ber of her charities at once. She seems to see them as a job-lot to be ditched en masse in a gesture of spite towards the royal family.

It is not admirable behaviour. But at least she is showing that she is choosy about patronage. About time too.