Fourwillies
Words cannot express adequately what rot that is.
In your opinion. But you're approaching the argument from the following assumptions:
The state must do everything to help everyone;
The taxpayer should pay for this;
Any mechanism (ie charities) which extends the reach of the state in to people's lives is, by definition, a good thing.
If you work on those assumptions then what I wrote is 'rot'. But I don't work on the assumption that it's the job of the government to do absolutely everything. The last decade and a half have seen the extension of government in to more and more parts of our lives and a huge increase in unaffordable expenditure. Perhaps one of the locations where money is being wasted is in government contracts to charities.
How do you think the state would go about providing the services they currently purchase from specialist charities??? They would have to buy in the expertise, from the existing charity!
Of course they wouldn't. The roles the state needs to fulfil can be handled by state employees, who are trained and managed by the state.
The cost would be astronomic, not to mention the drain on manpower for the charity, to take on headcount, superannuated staff, all to provide a service they can tender and contract for cheaply using existing third sector.
'Cheaply'. That's a relative term if ever I saw one. To obtain taxpayers' money, the government has to obtain in through complex tax laws, process it through HMRC, push it through the sieve of bureaucracy up to the treasury, who then dole it back out to central government departments and local councils. How is that 'cheap'?
And As for "taking up time bidding for contracts" (my précis) that's simply not true, as the relationship between the charities and local govt is often such a close one that the tenders are written with the charities in mind. That's just good supplier relations and happens in a commercial setting too I might add.
Or 'rigging the market', as it's also known.