Should we start regulating charity adverts on TV to protect the vulnerable? - Neil McNicholas

The warnings currently accompanying TV adverts promoting gambling would suggest such concerns continue. Why is there no similar concern for those who are unable to resist the constant call on their support for charities?

Seven years ago David Alan Cross wrote on the focusondisability website: “Charities should be forced to sign up to a fundraising preference service allowing vulnerable people to block appeals for donations, according to a report commissioned after the suicide of Olive Cook.” Olive was a 92-yr-old prolific poppy seller who had been hounded by organisations asking for money – 3,000 mail requests from charities in just one year.

The recommendations of the report applied only to charities making phone calls or appeals by mail, but what about the endless stream of TV appeals – and especially in the weeks leading up to Christmas? I recently sacrificed a couple of afternoons and evenings to monitor the situation and it is truly horrendous and must create a very real dilemma for vulnerable people unable to resist such calls on their charity.

A plethora of charities asking for donations. To the nearest round figure it is a suggested minimum total of £300 a month.

Nobody is going to pay that you might say, but sadly there are a lot of vulnerable people watching their televisions who are simply unable to say ‘no’ to calls on their generosity and charity, perhaps unable to choose between what they see as equally worthy causes, and so they try to help them all (even when they themselves may not be able to afford to eat and heat).

And it doesn’t seem to bother those who programme the screening of all these appeals that they will follow one to help homeless children with another to adopt a leopard, or to save a child’s sight or save a penguin.

Are they not aware of the conflict of interests that they are setting up in people’s minds – and a rather crass one at that?

As a measure of the relentless pressure they are creating, in just one commercial break of seven adverts, four of them were appeals for money – two of them from the same charity.

Having said all of that, I’m not entirely sure what the answer might be. We can’t really regulate people’s generosity, nor should we, but it ought to be possible to regulate the screen time allocated to individual charities so that people can decide objectively what causes they wish to support and to do so without the current and constant tsunami of appeals pressuring them into giving. At the same time, as a Catholic priest I wouldn’t want to advocate a course of action that might reduce essential support for charities.

Just as the government is attemptingto put restrictions and regulations in place to try to lessen the temptations placed in the way of those addicted to gambling, is there not a similar way of trying to protect vulnerable people from the compulsion to support every charity that comes their way even when it can leave them without the means to support themselves in their own needs?

Every charity’s appeal suggests a minimum monthly amount (£2, £3, £5, etc.) which in and of itself might seem reasonable. However, if someone signs up to several charities, and agrees to give that amount every month, it can soon start to add up.

Rev Neil McNicholas is a parish priest in Yarm.