Asleep At The Helm

News in The Guardian today about the charity the British Heart Foundation, which is reported to be shedding 150 of its shops across the UK as its net profits crashed out from £18.8m to £3.6m in the 2024-25 financial year. They blame an increasingly hostile retail environment and competition from online retailing for the losses and will be shedding hundreds of staff and volunteers in the proposed reshuffle. Never mind the fact that its CEO, Charmaine Griffiths, was awarded a £35,000 pay rise, more than most workers in the UK actually earn in a year; taking her remuneration to £268,239 for this current financial year or the fact that the charity's wage and pension bill amounted to £136m last year, with 180 of its staff being paid £60,000 or more per year.

This picture of highly paid senior executives is played out across the entire charity sector in the UK. If these people were as good at their jobs as their salaries would appear to indicate, surely they would have predicted both the impact of the changing retail environment and its costs, and formulated a plan going forward to mitigate the effects of both; or so you would think. But no, as is the norm in the corporate world, mediocrity is a luxury afforded only to the highly paid, whose performance appears not to be as closely monitored and scrutinised as those at the bottom of the pile, who are considered insignificant and disposable enough to be made redundant without second thought: mere economic units on the company balance sheet, despite their absolute centrality to the running and profitability of the business, and without whom there would be no business from which to pay the over-inflated executive salaries of those that purport to have oversight of the business. Charity begins at home as they say...