All For Charity?

One thing that has recently started to get my goat is the number of plastic collection bags that are pushed through the letterbox that claim to be collecting old clothes for charity. Now it might make me seem like a miserable old sod, complaining about raising money for good causes, but I am beginning to doubt whether any of this is actually doing any good at all – other than for the bank balances of those operating the schemes.

It’s actually quite hard to trace what happens to old clothes once donated but, as the old saying goes: “Where there’s muck, there’s brass”; and it’s not just the occasional designer jacket that is worth something. Worn to death old rags have value and there is even a shop which has opened in Falkirk which will offer 50p per Kilo for old clothes. This is a legitimate business and nothing to do with charity but that figure is worth remembering.

There seem to be a few categories of door-to-door “charity” collections. Some of them look perfectly legitimate and are well known charity organisations that run their own shops and do good work within the community. Then there are others that appear to be a legitimate charity but which I have never heard of. They seem to be made up of titles that use a worthy cause word (“children”, “aged”, “animals” etc) combined with a qualifier (“in the community”, “National”, “Scottish”) and often including some sort of disease (“heart”, “kidney”, “cancer” and so on). It is always possible that these are new charities that someone has set up, “Scottish Kids with Cancer” or similar, but I doubt it.

There is also another type that I noticed on a plastic bag left at my mother-in-law's house. This bag had the names and logos of several well known charities printed in large letters on the front. On closer inspection it is revealed (in tiny print) that this is actually a private limited company that collects old clothes and makes a donation to the named charities. I can’t see that they are doing anything illegal with this but the amount that they would donate was £85 per tonne of clothes collected. That works out at 8.5p per Kilo: now remember that figure from the shop in Falkirk that was buying used clothes as a commercial venture at 50p per Kilo and it makes it clear that the amount of money going to the charity is pretty minimal. Whilst what they are doing is not exactly illegal, I do think that it is immoral: using the good names of charities to line their own pockets.

I think there is a place for charity collection of old clothes and I am quite happy for established local charities to do this (provided they actually benefit from the scheme) and I will go on donating items to the likes of the local hospice or Red Cross and, in particular, the Salvation Army clothes collections; but I think it is about time that anyone presenting themselves as a charity collection should have to state what percentage of a donation actually does any good.