Save the Children to focus its UK work on poverty
Save the Children has announced that it will be refocusing its UK work on the single aim of ending severe and persistent child poverty in the UK.
Friday 20 June 2008
The announcement follows a review designed to identify how Save the Children can allocate its UK resources to areas where it can make the biggest impact and inspire dramatic change for children. It identified eradicating child poverty as the focus for the UK programme over the next five years at least.
This review took place against the context of increasing pressure on unrestricted resources resulting in smaller unrestricted budgets for UK activity from 2009/10 onwards.
Colette Marshall, UK Programme Director, said: “Ending child poverty has always been an important focus for Save the Children. Making it our core theme will ensure we can devote the time, commitment and resources to play our part in eradicating child poverty across the UK. We're demanding that politicians fulfil their promises in this area and eradicate child poverty by 2020 and improve educational opportunities as a key route out of poverty for children. Our campaigning will continue to be based on experience gained from our work at a local level around the UK with children living in poverty.
“This means that we will have to step back from major involvement in other areas of our work, including our work with refugee and asylum seeking children and areas of our education work. Put simply, we don’t believe that we can support the activity needed to inspire major change in these area as well as on child poverty with the resources we have available.
“In line with this focus, we will be concentrating our work in England on more intensive work with a smaller range of local authorities, in the North and in London, where the largest numbers of children living in poverty are located. As a result of this, we will be closing three regional offices in England.
“Over the next few months, we will be consulting with the partners, donors, and children we are working with on the affected projects to complete or hand over our work.
“Taken together, these changes will help ensure we are structured in an appropriate and affordable way to support our revised programme. Regrettably, however, due to these changes and our withdrawal from protection work with refugee and asylum-seeking children, we anticipate significant reductions in staffing in a number of areas.
Colette Marshall, continued: “Decisions like these are difficult for our staff who have worked hard to improve the lives of children. We will be working closely with affected staff on a formal consultation process and giving them as much information on timings and actions in the coming weeks as possible.
“Save the Children will continue to speak out whenever we see basic rights being denied to vulnerable children in the UK, including refugee and asylum seeker children.”
A three-month consultation period will start now prior to final decisions being made on how to implement these changes.
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For further information please contact Rachel Bhatia on 0207 012 6841 or out of hours on 07831 650 409
Notes to editors:
- General unrestricted funds are funds not assigned to a specific area of work.
- General unrestricted funds for the UK programmes will fall from £5 million annually to £3 million. Save the Children has been working for the last two years on a gradual transition plan to fund a higher proportion of its work in the UK from grants earmarked for that purpose rather than general funds. This will be accelerated so that general funds used for UK programmes are reduced to a level comparable with other countries where Save the Children is working, while working to increase targeted grant income for UK work.
- Overall programme expenditure for the organisation continues to rise with a 12% growth in programme expenditure from 07/08 to 08/09. Most of this growth is in restricted funding.
- Timings: The outcome of the UK review has been announced to all staff who may be affected by the changes. A three month consultation period will then follow prior to final decisions being made on how to implement these changes.
