Shelter misleading the public about its finances

If you search on Shelter’s website for Annual Report you will be given a link with that name which takes you to a page called “How we spend your money”

This states, “For every £1 you donate 79p is spent directly on helping people through advice, support and campaigning 21p is spent on fundraising.” Click here

Below this claim is a link to download the annual report for the year to March 2017.

On page 58 (digital page 29) of this, in the section headed “Other information”, the auditors state that they have to check that other information in the annual report is consistent with the audited accounts.

So it’s just as well that the 21p claim is not in the annual report, because the accounts show that it cost £11.0 million to obtain £33.2 million in donations and legacies, which is 33p in the pound.

Below the download button is a pie chart called “How we raise money”. This shows that 15% of their “money” comes from Shelter shops. This makes them seem a significant source of income for the “charity”.

However, they are careful not to call it “income”, and if they had called it “receipts” it might have begged the question of what outgoings were involved, so “money” is a cunning choice of word.

A previous article showed how the cost of shops and their 177 employees cost 92.5p for every £1 of sales: Click Here

The auditors do not let them get away with this trickery in the annual report. A pie chart of expenditure is shown alongside the one for income.

In this comparison, the shops are credited with 14% of Shelter’s “income” and debited with 12% of its expenditure. However, the percentages are put in different segments of the charts, and the credit is in the strongest colour while the debit is in the weakest colour, so the expenditure figure might still be overlooked by a casual reader, leaving him or her with the wrong impression of the contribution from the shops.

A previous article asked whether the truth did not matter to Shelter: Click Here

This included Greg Beales, the Director of Communication, claiming on TV that “people on benefits are very good tenants, landlords make as much profit from people who are on benefits as landlords make from people who aren’t on benefits”.

Beales is a former Downing Street adviser to Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, and formerly Director of Strategy and Planning for the Labour Party.

Subsequently, Polly Neate, the CEO said on TV “These so-called Section 21 evictions, or no-fault evictions, meaning no fault on behalf of the tenant, are actually the single biggest cause of homelessness in the country now.” Click Here

This was in spite of Shelter’s own web page that gives the lie to her claim: Click Here

Is it my imagination, or has the level of deceit increased since these two were appointed in August/September last year?