RELATE is going into administration

[MereDintofPandiculation]

AIBU to be worried about this? I think I'm not. Over the last years we've become used to charities taking on services that one might have been expected would be provided by the state (foodbanks, hospices for example). It's worrying when the charities begin to fail

It’s just sound economics. Relationships with conflict increase the pressure on other state services (e.g. police, NHS, education, the welfare state). This is especially the case when the relationships involve children. Improving those relationships or helping them end with less conflict lowers other state costs.

Reasonable experience from our local branch - both in the admin and the counsellor we saw. I felt heard, with my position recognised.

Someone asked up thread - our fees were means tested and we're not in London.

It's hardly a surprise really with all the coats increases. It simply isn't a charity that people think I must donate like you might for kids/animal welfare/hospices etc.

Asking people to pay according to their income means it is a service run in an unviable manner from the start.

I didn’t realise relate was a charity. I thought it was just a private company offering counselling. I paid a high price per session and thought they were shit. Like properly unprofessional to the extent I cancelled the rest of the sessions.

It's in the article. I'd call getting to the stage where you can't prepare your staff for redundancy, tell them in a professional way or leave any money to pay redundancy packages is indeed fucking them over and not taking steps to mitigate financial issues before it got to that stage.

I think Relate have done their own damage to their reputation and the people who use their services.

You’ll write off a whole organisation because of a bad experience with one person?

Maybe it doesn’t matter if Relate goes, but the article suggests the charity sector as a whole is struggling. Do you not think that matters?

Because relationship breakdown is one of the drivers of poverty, and keeping a relationship going will reduce the likelihood of needing benefits.

The staff will get statutory redundancy pay which is what most people get when made redundant. There is zero story there.

How do you mitigate against government enforced public sector cuts? It's common knowledge that government funded charities are struggling and whilst Relate's services are important, it is not hard to see why scarce funds are being diverted into more urgent areas.

You are just looking for everything negative about the charity without seeing the true picture thereby damaging the reputation of charity. Again!

Yep

I referred specifically to Relate, not ALL charity and I have a 24 year career in public sector and yes, they could have mitigated. You're cherry picking to support your own crusade, so I'll leave you to it.

I used relate once. The counsellor was horrific and they didn't care. Can't say I'm sad to see them go.

Our local NHS funding body has cut funding offered, which means the NHS contract for talking therapy will likely go to a for profit provider instead of staying with the local trust. The NHS trust which did this previously sub contracted with two local charities to provide some of the work, and the CEO of one of these was on saying this will basically put them out of business. This is the end result of Cameron and Osbourne and the whole 'big society' bullshit they were pedaling. How they can show their faces in public is beyond me.

they were rubbish with me, the “counselor” tried to push her views about making “rich” people pay more on me, she provided no help and was kidding herself if she thought one partner only attending could ever effect any change. No advice is better than bad advice

Its not surprising, the whole charity sector is at risk.

Also tried relate and it was shit. I refused to go back. Cost a fortune too.

Terrible experience with Relate too both as a couple and individual, never went back after the first couple of sessions. Dire advice.

Relate was awful for us. Super expensive. We made the mistake of going for a while in the hope it would help. It was humiliating, destroyed all that was good in our relationship and we've never had sex since.

Some of these reactions are a bit…reactionary. The counselling might not have worked for you, but the charity has surely been working successfully for decades and seen thousands of people in that time?

Anyway, I think all the local Relates are surviving according to the article?

Sorry @MyMotherSaidINeverShould didn’t see your post - it sounds as if things went badly wrong for you.

Another one who went through Relate counselling and found it unhelpful at best.

I'm not sure OP. I run a small charity and I find the sector bloated and hugely inefficient. I'm sad to see good organisations go to the wall - and I see the same happening in my local area - but I also allow for the possibility that in some cases the organisation doesn't meet current need or work very efficiently.

It's a worry they've collapsed if it's to do with poor governance and an even bigger worry if charities collapsing is a wider 'sign of the times'. But the extraordinary percentage of people (not just on this thread) who have found them absolutely useless (including me) does make you wonder if actually they just weren't very good at what they do, in which case the sector is probably better off without them taking up space and funding.

On the other hand, relationship breakdowns are great for the economy in that the two must then run and pay for separate households and many duplicate day to day items.

I don’t want the state anywhere near relationships.

Non-profits that are largely reliant on earned income are not a new or unusual thing- there have always been those organisations that have a social mission (and hence are structured as non-profits) but which are almost entirely reliant on LA commissioning and fees from service users. It seems here that the issue is that public funding has been cut and they don't make enough from private clients- whether that is because they weren't providing value for money/ lost tenders to other providers or whether those services have been cut altogether isn't clear. I imagine the centralisation initiative was a response to multi-borough commissioning where smaller NGOs tended to lose out to larger ones that could do "one contract, multiple boroughs/counties". It's difficult- commissioned services have v clear outcomes that service providers need to meet because the money is designated for that specific demographic. A service can be "good" but still not achieve contracted outcomes and therefore lose funding- Sure Start is a classic case where in many cases they failed to attract the demographic they were being paid to target- hence they lost funding.

If my sister's experience was indicative of the quality of the wider organisation it's no great loss. The counsellor she and her husband had blatantly took his side on everything, including his terrible attitude towards his stepdaughter. He loved it. It made everything worse.

Interested to hear that people think Relate gave poor advice regarding abusive relationships, because I had the same experience. I went over 35 years ago with my husband after I had ( of course mistakenly) returned to him after he had hit me. I know times were different then and marital abuse was often swept under the carpet, seen as something shameful to admit to experiencing and not talked about openly, but the counsellor said that if I wanted a happy marriage I should never mention it again, there are always 2 sides to a story and I should trust him completely when he said he would never do it again.
Of course shortly afterwards he did do it again and I summoned up the courage to leave with my children.

Never used them but only ever heard horror stories on MN of people getting absolutely awful outdated dangerous advice.

I didn't think of them as a British institution at all - how strange. Perhaps they felt official if they used to be called the Marriage Guidance Service? (I didn't know this). That almost sounds like a kind of secular version of something you'd have traditionally got from a church, and it sounds government funded.

Sure Start attracting too many middle class families was a myth dreamt up by the media and policitians who disagreed with it in principle so wanted it shut down.