The Fence They Would Not Pay For

What the day actually costs

Take the arithmetic at face value. Twenty consultants, actuaries, solicitors, whatever the trade, at a notional day rate somewhere between £800 and £2,000. Call it £25,000 of billable capacity stood down for eight hours. The fence, painted competently by two decorators, would have cost the charity perhaps £600 including materials.

Defenders of the practice will say the day rate is a fiction, and they are partly right. The consultant who loses Tuesday does not lose the work, she compresses it into the following fortnight. The real cost to the firm is well below the notional figure. But that concession cuts both ways. If the hours are not truly lost, the firm is not truly sacrificing anything, and the moral weight it claims for the day evaporates along with the cost.

What does not shrink is the quality gap. Anyone who has run one of these days will tell you privately about the sections repainted the following week, the plants put in the wrong bed, the shelving that came down within a fortnight. Bad painting is cosmetic, and a charity can live with cosmetic. The trouble starts where the work touches something with a trade requirement behind it: anything electrical, anything carrying water, anything load-bearing, anything that ought to end with a certificate.

Then the charity is not facing a tidy-up. It is paying a tradesman to undo the free work before he can begin the real work, which comes to more than the quote it never sought. The fence it was given for nothing turns out to have a price after all, and the invoice lands in a quarter where nobody budgeted for it.

The decorator nobody counted

Here is the part that goes unexamined, because the people examining it do not know any decorators.

A community centre with a fence that needs painting is a customer. Not a large one, but a real one, and in a small trade a run of £600 jobs is the difference between a viable year and an unviable one. When twenty amateurs arrive with free labour, that customer disappears. The work still gets done, so the need never surfaces as demand, and the local painter never gets the call.

Multiply that across every corporate volunteering day in the country and you have a quiet, sustained suppression of demand for precisely the trades that can least afford it. Painting, grounds maintenance, light carpentry, cleaning, groundwork. The transfer runs from blue-collar self-employment to white-collar reputation, and the people making it record it as generosity.

They are not hostile to tradespeople. They simply do not think of them, because tradespeople are not in the room, not on the distribution list, and nowhere in the impact reporting.

The tax system agrees with me

If a company writes a cheque to a registered charity, it deducts the donation against corporation tax. If an employee gives through payroll, the relief lands at their marginal rate. If a member of the public gives, Gift Aid tops the gift up.

If a company sends forty people to weed a garden, it gets nothing, because the Revenue does not recognise donated time as a gift at all. HMRC has formed a view on the relative worth of the cheque and the paintbrush, and it is the same view the charity would give you if anybody asked.

The charity pays to host it

There is a further cost, and it falls on the recipient. Someone has to write the risk assessment, supervise the amateurs, source the materials, arrange the toilets, and stop an enthusiastic senior manager pruning something that took four years to establish. Small charities run on two and a half staff and a rota of volunteers who already know where the paint goes. Absorbing twenty visitors is a project, and for the day itself it is frequently a net loss.

They take it anyway. The relationship is the asset. The day is the price of the relationship.

Nobody has read the policy

Which brings us to the question no general counsel has been asked and every one of them should be. Who is on cover when the solicitor comes off the ladder?

Employers' liability responds to employees injured in the course of employment, and a day organised, scheduled and paid for by the employer is arguably exactly that. Arguably. The charity's public liability covers visitors and, generally, its registered volunteers, subject to whatever the schedule says about the activity being undertaken. Neither policy was drafted with twenty untrained professionals and a set of borrowed power tools in mind.

The exclusions that matter are the ones these days walk straight into. Working at height. Power tools. Anything structural. All of it attempted by people with no competence in it, no method statement, and no supervision beyond a charity manager who is not qualified to supervise it either. A grazed hand is a first aid entry. A fall that ends a career is a claim, and the striking feature of that claim is that it lands in the gap between two insurers, each with a decent argument that it belongs to the other.

The litigation would be slow, expensive and public. It would also be unnecessary, because the tradesman who was displaced carries his own cover as a condition of doing the work, priced by an underwriter who knows what the job involves. And where the amateur work touched the building itself, the charity may find its own insurance and its trustees' compliance position quietly compromised by work nobody certified.

None of this is exotic. It is the first thing anyone would check before authorising the activity. It goes unchecked because the day is booked as charity rather than as operations, so it never reaches a desk where competence and cover are somebody's responsibility.

So the charity is not merely getting less than it should. It is accepting a disrupted day, a probable repair bill and an uninsured risk it cannot price, in exchange for a future donation it cannot rely on. It does this because a fundraiser who turns down a corporate does not remain a fundraiser for long. That is not a poor bargain freely struck. It is the only bargain on the table.

Only one party wants the fence

Once you accept that the charity would prefer the money, the trade would prefer the job, and the Revenue prefers the cheque, one participant is left who prefers the fence. The firm.

And the firm is getting real value. Cohesion between grades that would otherwise never share a working day. A retention story. A recruitment story. Photographs. The internal goodwill that engagement surveys pick up. This is not nothing, and it is not fraudulent. It is procurement. The firm is buying team-building and reputation out of an HR and marketing budget, and the charity is supplying the venue.

Which is why the substitution argument, put naively, fails. Cancel the volunteering day and the firm does not post a £25,000 donation. It books an away-day at a go-kart track, or it does nothing at all. The cheque was never the alternative on offer.

That is a fair defence of the activity. It is not a defence of the description.

The lie is in the labelling

An internal spend, publicised as external generosity, carrying a cost borne by people nobody counted. That is the transaction. Stated honestly it would read: we held a team day, we held it somewhere useful, and we part-funded it from marketing. Nobody would object to that. It would also generate no press release, which tells you why it is never phrased that way.

The mask is not decorative. It is load-bearing. Calling the day "giving back" is exactly what stops anyone testing whether giving cash would have given back more. Once the activity sits under charity in the accounts, the comparison is closed, and the annual report claims credit for money the firm spent on itself.

There is a simple test available to any firm that disputes this. Offer the charity a straight choice: twenty pairs of hands for a day, or the cash equivalent, unrestricted, no photographs. Then abide by the answer.

No firm runs that test. The reason they do not run it is the reason it needs running.

The honest version

None of this argues for corporate indifference. It argues for three separate things, each named as what it is.

Buy the team day commercially. If the objective is cohesion, purchase it from an operator whose trade it is. Team-building providers, outdoor centres, cookery schools and escape rooms are overwhelmingly small businesses running on thin margins, for whom a booking of forty is a meaningful week. The money reaches small enterprise directly rather than reaching it by displacing a decorator.

Donate cash, and donate it unrestricted. The charity knows whether the binding constraint is the fence, the boiler, or a support worker's salary. It is almost never the fence. Restricted giving exists so the donor can choose the photograph.

Give the skill, not the labour. This is where comparative advantage actually lands. An actuary's highest marginal product for a charity is not a paintbrush. It is a trustee seat, a financial model behind the reserves policy, an audit of where the money actually goes, a pricing review for the trading arm, a proper look at the covenant on the building. That work is scarce, expensive to buy, and beyond the charity's reach at any price it could pay. It also undercuts nobody, because no charity was ever going to purchase it commercially.

The honest obstacle is matching. Far more organisations need a fence painted than need their reserves policy stress-tested, and brokering skilled work takes an intermediary that largely does not exist. That is an argument for building the brokerage. It is not an argument for concluding that the most a room full of qualified professionals can offer their community is unskilled labour they are bad at.

How it stops

Not because it is inefficient. Everyone in the chain is behaving rationally. The HR lead is measured on engagement, the marketing lead on content, the charity's fundraiser on corporate relationships that might one day yield real money. Nobody's objectives include whether the charity got what it needed.

It stops when the labelling stops working. When a volunteering day appears in an annual report and someone wants to know what the charity would have chosen, what the local trade lost, which budget line the spend came out of, and who was on cover. Four questions. None of them hostile. All of them currently unasked.

Until then the fence will keep being painted, badly, by people who would have been better employed doing almost anything else, and the man who should have painted it will keep wondering why the phone stopped ringing.