Cuts in Charities

The Evening Standard has a report on the massive scale of cuts facing charities in the UK.  This includes both central and local government cuts (although local government is often just passing on central government cuts in reality).  What strikes me about this is that the figures don't come from Central Government, but from the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO). 

Building up charities was supposed to be what the David Cameron's "Big Society" idea was all about.  Based on the rather dubious premise that the worst people to deliver public services were public servants, we were told that a vast upswelling of charities and volunteers would take the place of all the public employees being made redundant.  Why then isn't the government trying to assess the extent of the charitable sector, and how far it is taking on the challenge?

Some might say this shows that David Cameron was simply using the "Big Society" rhetoric to cover up an ideologically motivated programme to shrink the state.  I take the more charitable view that the Prime Minister has been taken in by his own speeches, and he really thought the "Big Society" would happen.  The fact that he has made no effort to monitor whether it was happening, and that his cuts programme is undermining the whole concept, is simply evidence that the government is incompetent as well as nasty.