This has pissed me off, opinions on charity versus government funding please.

[hmmmcars]

You may or may not be aware that West Sussex County Council are proposing 100% cuts to all housing related support next April. This includes women's refuges, homeless shelters, homelessness prevention work, any support that vulnerable people who live in the community get and so on. Ludicrous!
Aside from this being immoral and shortsighted and the NHS, prisons and other services having to pick up the cost of the aftermath my friend has said to me "well maybe it's charities that should be running these services anyway" I'm outraged! Do other people think this ? Surely when a government "can't afford" to support the vulnerable people in one of the richest countries in the world it is failing.

I have no words. YADNBU

This is already the model in many countries. Having assessed one of the sectors you mention it actually works better in some areas where it isn't local authority run and funded. I was so surprised at the level of housing and especially sorted accommodation available to people in vulnerable groups and how quickly it could be organised Vs a LA authority set up like there is in my home area.

Counties not countries

This has been happening all over the Country for a few years now. Its part of the austerity measures which this Government insisted the Country needed. So austerity means shitting on the vulnerable.
Yes charities exist to help but they shouldn't have to shoulder the whole burden!
And you are right the impact on the NHS, police and prison service has been huge.

And who is going to fund the charities?

And make sure they are running services professionally and safely?

If it saves money, great, but the money is unlikely to trickle down to the vulnerable.

I used to work for a charity that provided all of the above...but via a contract from the LA. Charity funding paid for some of it but we would never have coped on that alone.

It's hard to get charity money for housing too, people like fluffy stuff... kids and animals.

Housing can feel too much like a 'bottomless pit' for the likes of family foundations. And lots don't want to take on statutory responsibilities.

This whole thing needs a rethink, imo.

I actually think you ideally need to have both.

There are two ways you can allocate money, you can have rigid rules based on simple criteria that give some people too little money and others too much, or you can have a human being assess the circumstances of each case, resulting in the correct amount of money, but huge overheads for performing the assessments.

In the second case the payments need to be discretionary because if the recipient had legal room to argue with the assessment, the admin cost would rapidly head towards infinity.

If you cover most situations well with a rules-based approach, and supplement that with a discretionary top-up you get a better result than you could get with either approach alone.

Government is best for rules-based help, while charities are the best for discretionary support.