(part 2) to think that Camila Batmanghelidgh must be lying when she says she has done nothing wrong in her spending of Kids' Company Funding?

[LuluJakey1]

She is like Jimmy Saville in that what she has been doing has been under all of all our noses and we have refused to speak up about it or believe it.

It is not just the luvvies who have been up close and personal with her- involved with the charity and CB at a very close level, some even Trustees. It is also the employees and the parents of children, the children themselves, the volunteers. We are not talking about a hidden mis-use of funding. We are talking aout a whole culture of open waste and self-indulgence.

I know it is from The Daily Mail but it is actually an interview with het.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3199527/My-heart-clear-says-Kids-Company-boss-Batmanghelidjh-admits-charity-paid-school-fees-employees-children-denies-wrongdoing.html

£5000 a month rent on an Art Deco House with private swimming pool - which houses a member of staff, and the swimming pool is used by CB but hot by any children- they are 'not allowed' (her words)

£40,000 chauffeur- now a specialist worker (according to CB). also has private school and therapist funding for his 2 children.

Staff( how many?) have their children sent to private schools because the job is stressful and it is part of a 'staff well-being package'

The Chauffeur's sister is also employed - now as a 'brilliant accountant', last summer as 'the woman who does my sewing' (mind you that would be a full-time job in itself, but it does imply the charity pays for those vile outfits much as I suspected)

25 young people given £769,000 a year funding - £31,000 a year each, to do nothing. They are CB's specially selected young people- many of whom have received funding for many years. She describes them as 'like a family, hanging round the house'. She deals with their funding herself.

Yet STILL CB complains staff should not have spoken up about any of this and implies those who have will suffer for it.

In my view this woman and her behaviours are corrupt, dishonest and immoral.

Are my views unreasonable? I feel this could be jus the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is yet to emerge and prosecutions will be very likely.

I think there should be a down- to the -bone, in-depth investigation of every aspect of the work of this charity and of CB. Not simply any concerns that have now been raised but a complete trawl of the spending, the practices and the behaviours of CB herself.

Many charities legitimately run private companies. Charity law prevents too much of your income to come from sales of goods or services sold at a profit, as they are not part of the charity's purpose.
So, for example, the National Trust will set up a private company which runs the shops and the tearooms like a commercial enterprise and makes a profit. At the end of the year, those profits are donated to the charity - so the income is charitable donation rather than commercial profit.

Deferred income is not normally odd. If you are given £1m pounds to provide a service for 2 years, you often get the full cash in advance, but it is 'spread' over 2 years to match the spending. You would therefore have £500k of deferred income at the end of year 1.

Sounds like i am defending KC - not so, just trying to explain some things are not part of the catastrophe.

caroldecker
I have no concern with the deferred income : the RHS does the same with its life membership subscriptions for example.

its the scale of it that is a concern.
It was the single largest income transaction
and if it had been reversed, the Charity was £3m in the red and thus not a going concern.

The utter lack of reserves in a 19 year old charity is shocking

the small scale of the trading company compared with the trading style operations in the annual report is an alarm bell

as is the regularly very late publication of accounts
and the high turnover of finance staff

PS : To assist in preventing the Academy derailing a topic that all those who know me are aware I have VERY strong views upon

lets all concentrate on the lack of oversight given by
Companies House
and
The Charities Commission
and request that as part of Big Society they are brought up to date and properly funded

as doing so would deal with malpractice in Academies and Free schools at the same time

Slightly different numbers in this Bristol article and interesting Q&A

Interesting description of the KC work on this job description - implies 18000 people receiving direct support with teachers and other family members included in the 36000? And suggests intention was for two PRUs in Bristol

More on Bristol, though I'm not sure that giving young people somewhere to go every day for two years counts as sterling success in helping them overcome issues

talkin agree the accounts are a shocker, and agree the size is huge, because the had spent the cash quicker than they should have done - they actually had negative reserves.

"needs-tested living allowance" = packets of cash, presumably?

Christine
Esther left a highly paid and secure job at Bristol City Council as Head of Pupil Referral Services to take up the role - something she initially had no intention of doing. Camila (Batmanghelidjh) who founded Kids Company worked on me for months.

Quote from that article : so she poached the person who was responsible for the whole city and put her in charge of one small segment - in the middle of public sector cuts ...

I know... I feel sorry for the staff at the Bristol end, actually - a few seem to have come from solid careers and have now been left high and dry by the closure (which they only heard about on the news, according to some other reports, and owed August's wages)

Mrs J the figure of 213 appears to be a little generous. About half of them don't appear to have been active clients of KC. The number of actual 'kids' (under 18s) using that KC centre appears to have been 28. If that proportion of actual kids to alleged clients is the same across Bristol then the 600 they were claiming to help was actually under 80.

Can someone who knows about this sort of thing say whether it's scaremongering to say that children will be living under bridges as a result of the closure of KC, or whether that's a genuine worry following the closure of day time drop in services?

All I can say is that I had dealings with Kids Company in Bristol on a few occasions and I was very impressed - they completely turned around one care case where a young mother would have lost her child without their intervention.

It would be an enormous shame if the good work they have done becomes utterly overshadowed by all this.

the fundamental problem is that charities should not be relied upon to do this work. If governments are demanding sound financial management - which is fair enough - then they should be providing the services and the infrastructure etc.

I am particularly concerned by this narrative that KC have exaggerated levels of need and vulnerability for children. They have not. I have lived in both Brixton and Bristol. Access to necessary services, particularly mental health services appears to be virtually non existent.

So according to Bristol City Council they were waiting for KC to hand over the details of their learners on 5th August with the contract due to end.

Presumably the KC PRU would have been closed for the holidays at that point and then the children would have been in the care of Bristol CC in Sept.

Have I got that right, because if so the handover should have been done and dusted by the end of term surely.

'Access to necessary services, particularly mental health services appears to be virtually non existent.'

I think that's the case across the country isn't it?

Hi Spero and I'm slightly awed to have you on this thread
BUT
the good work you saw was not £23 million worth.

Some of the work they did was probably utterly excellent
but
it was swirling in a morass of cash handouts to older people and woo woo ideas about turning kids around.

You are utterly right that some London boroughs found KC the ideal cover to cut their services : heads will hopefully roll for such but more likely take up new jobs elsewhere

but the utter lack of accountability and transparency has resulted in far fewer kids being helped with that £23 m than could have been the case

which is an unforgivable lapse of oversight
and an even greater reason for enforced transparency codes

I don't think that anyone is doubting that there is significant need and vulnerability, particularly in CAHMS. I continue to take their figures with a pinch of salt, however, as I just haven't seen the facts to back up their assertions. My impression is that the Bristol end of the operation was more robust, though I will never agree with a charity handing out a "need based living allowance" to young (and not so young) people as the way to substantively address their issues.

Express article about the need to ofsted the under - 16 provision. It's not clear whether children were spending enough time at KC to be "full time" and thus needing to be inspected. I think this the one time ofsted has been too lenient!

I think everyone accepts that CAMHS is massively overstretched and underfunded, everywhere. God knows it's affected my family.

And it's a bloody scandal.

Funnily enough, there is a charity in my neck of the woods that aims to give counselling to 'troubled teenagers', has been run for some time by a CEO who talks the talk but is unable to present any evidence of outcomes, and which promotes its badly written funding applications via the media. And they keep getting grants.

I'd rather the money went into CAMHS.

Liney that is the criminal thing about it, CAMHS has been cut to the bone, now only to work with the highest threshold of mental health ( so short sighted all the preventative stuff no longer able to do). CAMHS are fire fighting daily. In statutory mental health services everything is evidence based and outcomed. At the same time as slashing the public sector services, money is handed out willy nilly to snake oil merchants because it fits some in vogue political pet theory ' the big society'. These are young peoples lives they are playing with.

Spero - what the level of need is, is not the point here. The point is that CB (representing KC) has exaggerated the numbers of children they work with who have very high levels of need- at least that is how it is looking based on the figure KC has actually been able to produce and on what Bristol Council are saying.

The tens and tens of thousands CB has spoken about appear from the data they have given to the investigation to be actually low hundreds having any support. Yet they have been funded by up to 23 million a year.

I agree completely that the government have systematically deconstructed public services in this country. It suits them for private companies to have taken over the roles- the government have no responsibility then for the most vulnerable and the private agencies are run by their rich pals who benefit -either with financial largesse or public status and honours - from the work- House of Lords etc which brings its own financial largesse.

However, that does not detract from the mess CB has created at KC with her profligate spending, lack of accountability and the myths she has created. aout herself and the work of KC ad the lies she has told.

What is so worrying is the likelihood of more and more 'charismatic' bullshit-peddling egotists scamming vast sums of taxpayers money and spunking them on ridiculous pet theories that don't work and are harmful. Being 'wonderful' shouldn't exempt you from having to provide proper accounting, facts and figures, and being open to inspection. On one of the other threads there was some mention made of equally fucking dodgy outfits in the world of addictions/alcoholism.

I think part of the problem is that the poor, the mentally ill, the disadvantaged, are seen as disposable and even as lab rats for arrogant 'philanthropists' who want raw material on which to practice their batshit theories - and the government, in general, is happy to go 'Oh just take them away and do what you can, dear, as long as you don't bother us with the details.'