One of Britain’s most high-profile children’s campaigners, Camila Batmanghelidjh, has launched a blistering attack on politicians and austerity, as she announced she is to step down after nearly 20 years at the head of the Kids Company charity.
The charity she founded, which specialises in therapeutic support for severely abused and traumatised children, is likely to halve in size, making £14m of cuts and sacking hundreds of staff in an attempt to survive a serious financial crisis.
On Thursday night, she said: “Some ugly games are being played. The facts are that the vulnerable children of this country remain largely unprotected. There’s no point in shooting the messenger if the message is uncomfortable. I am being silenced.”
Kids Company predicted that the proposed restructuring, which it said was triggered after the government signalled that it was to end £5m annual funding, will leave thousands of vulnerable youngsters without support.
The charity has been negotiating for weeks with the Cabinet Office over a one-off grant of around £3m to enable it to restructure. If there is no grant the charity could call in the receivers within weeks.
The charity has expanded rapidly in recent years to cope with what it says are huge rises in demand, particularly from troubled children who have been turned away from mainstream health, education and care services.
Kids Company’s HQ is currently in temporary accommodation on an upper floor of an investment bank in the City of London. According to Batmanghelidjh, the charity “nearly went bust” recently but was given a temporary lifeline when well-known artists including Antony Gormley, Tracy Emin and Anish Kapoor donated works to raise money for it.
Batmanghelidjh warned that without a regular source of state funding, Kids Company would be reliant on fundraising. “We are doing the most serious work [funded] by cupcake sales and cocktail parties,” she told the Guardian, “and I don’t think that is right or sustainable.”
As a result, the charity would struggle to meet the needs of its children in future. She said: “We will be able to offer them food, hopefully, and at least give them the dignity of being a compassionate witness to their experience. But we are not going to be able to sort out their problems because we do not have the resources.”
Batmanghelidjh, a trained psychotherapist, will step down as chief executive in the next few months but continue to carry out clinical work with Kids Company clients and act as the charity’s figurehead.
David Cameron has been a prominent supporter of Batmanghelidjh, but it is understood that the price of further government help was the departure of her and the charity’s chairman, broadcaster Alan Yentob.
Kids Company believes its close relations with the government soured last autumn, after its See the Child campaign criticised the UK’s child protection system as not fit for purpose. According to one source, Whitehall made it clear the campaign had failed to show the government “enough respect”.
The charity also believes it lost support from City donors after an article about it appeared earlier this year in the rightwing Spectator magazine, alleging that it was poorly managed and could not demonstrate the social impact of its work. The charity says it has independent audits to prove its effectiveness.
Three Kids Company directors quit earlier this year, amid what Batmanghelidjh said were “conditions of extreme stress” at the charity, caused by funding difficulties.
On Friday Batmanghelidjh told Radio 4’s Today programme that official sources were briefing the media against the charity in an attempt to discredit her. Asked about claims that funds had not been properly accounted for and the effectiveness of the charities services was in doubt, she replied: “That’s a red herring, it’s not true. We have had audits in the last 19 years. All of them have been clear. We have raised £150m worth of money where we have had to process it and evaluate it.”
Laying the blame at the feet of the government, she added: “This is briefing to avoid the real issues which is that we repeatedly challenged governments because they are not protecting children robustly … They are attempting to discredit me so that my message is weakened.”
In a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian, Batmanghelidjh warned that growing inequality was fuelling a distorted “emotional economy” for young people in the UK that would lead to riots and conflict between haves and have nots.
“At some point, the two shall meet,” she said, “and when you get a very violated individual meeting a very well-cared for individual, the violated individual’s rage will bring down the well-cared for individual. That’s what people haven’t understood yet.”
Although increasing numbers of children were suffering abuse, politicians had repeatedly shown they lacked the “moral fibre” to invest properly in child protection, she said.
“If when I look back on my 30 years of work with vulnerable children on the streets, what I would say is there is a lack of political leadership in relation to maltreated children and vulnerable children in this country,” she added. “Until there is genuine political leadership on this issue the system will remain failing.”
The prime minister courted what he called the “visionary” Kids Company during his mission to detoxify the Tory party while in opposition, and cited it in his infamous “hug a hoodie” speech in 2006 as an exemplar of the type of public service he wanted to see – one which concentrated on “emotional quality” rather than hitting bureaucratic targets.
Batmanghelidjh was subsequently co-opted on to his ill-fated Big Society project in 2010. In 2012, Cameron personally intervened, like Gordon Brown five years before him, to ensure Kids Company continued to receive a government grant at a time when many other charities’ grants were cut.
But Batmanghelidjh says Cameron lost his nerve in latter years: “He lacked courage. When they [the media] started spinning it into ‘hug a hoodie’ he needed to stand up for his belief and say to the nation: ‘I stand by what I said, because it really matters.’ This crystallises the whole issue, which is they [politicians] put their finger out and whichever way the wind blows that’s the way they blow.”
Iranian-born Batmanghelidjh founded Kids Company nearly 20 years ago. It provides care, support and education for around 36,000 highly vulnerable young people and adults in London, Bristol and Liverpool. Many have experienced sexual abuse, violence, addiction, mental illness and family instability.
The charity believes its intensive therapeutic model for working with maltreated youngsters should be adopted by mainstream children’s care services, but its high upfront costs and often unconventional approach has scared off many potential local authority funders.
Although Batmanghelidjh has attracted tens of millions from charity donors over the years, she said she had been worn down by the stress of having to constantly raise funds. She said: “I have just got to a point now where I am saying: ‘I don’t play this game any more.’ The scale of what is arriving at our door is too profoundly disturbing for us to be able to address it through unpredictable morsels of funding. It is not just right.
“If I went under a bus right now, Kids Company would not have any money, and I worry about that.”
For some years Kids Company has received a £5m annual government grant, equivalent to a fifth of its annual income. But Batmanghelidjh said ministers had cut the grant from 2015-16. She said: “Consequently we will start the year not knowing where our money is coming from and that’s too high a risk to sustain when you have got disturbed children and young people.”
She criticised politicians for failing to prioritise investment in child protection. “I don’t accept that there is not enough money to do the job,” she said. “There’s enough money for high-speed rail. There is enough money for arms. There is enough money for the glory of the Olympics. But there is just not enough money for child protection and that is wrong.”
The charity is well-known for its celebrity supporters and donors, who have included Coldplay, Damien Hirst, the comedian Michael McIntyre, JK Rowling and Emma Thompson. But more than half of its £23m income in 2013 came from central and local government and charitable trusts and foundations.
Kids Company’s last set of accounts lodged with the charities commission, for 2013, recorded a 23% increase in spending on frontline services as government funding cuts and the impact of the recession left children without support.
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