Categories
Thoughts

Digging Deeper into The Transplant Trust

This article is a follow-up to a previous entry entitled ‘The Transplant Trust (formerly Transplants in Mind) – What Happened?’. I would recommend reading the previous article before reading this one.

After writing my previous entry on the fate of The Transplant Trust, I received several interesting comments and consequently undertook some additional research the charity’s fate, trying hard to pin down precisely what happened between the 2008/2009 and 2009/2010 financial years (running April-March of those respective years), that resulted in the calamitous fall of a charity that had hitherto been running for almost 20 years.

An addendum to my previous article noted a report by Third Sector on court action that was levied against The Transplant Trust in order to recover an unpaid £3650 PR bill for National Transplant Week (NTW) in 2009.

My previous assumption, based on this entry at the Charities Commission website, is that the charity had ceased operation by March of 2009, but the aforementioned Third Sector report refers to the NTW held in July of 2009. Clearly the charity was still running at this point, and its purported closure date appears to have been specified simply to coincide with the end of the 08/09 financial year. More digging was clearly needed, and after an extremely helpful and informative call to the Charities Commission, I can relate the following:

Two charitable entities under the name ‘The Transplant Trust’ exist. These are distinct, seperate organisations that have been founded with individual mandates and governance. Specifically:

1001374 – The Transplant Trust, was registered as a Charitable Trust in 1990, and it is this organisation which ceased operation in March 2009. Their activities are listed as:

Supporting research into clinical aspects of transplantation. Tissue engineering of chondrocytes and bone marrow stem cells were two main areas supported during this financial year.

1095611 – The Transplant Trust, was registered as a Membership Organisation (run under a constitution) in 2003, and according to the Charities Commission is still registered. Their activities are listed as:

THE RELIEF OF SICKNESS AND DISTRESS BY THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE SUPPLY OF HUMAN ORGANS FOR TRANSPLANTATION THROUGH THE PROMOTION OF HUMAN ORGAN AND TISSUE DONATION AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF PUBLIC EDUCATION, IN PARTICULAR THROUGH THE PROVISION OF RESEARCH AND THE PUBLICATION OF THAT RESEARCH. RAISING AWARENESS BY RUNNING NATIONAL TRANSPLANT WEEK, THE DONOR BUS AND DONOR DAYS.

It is clear that these two entities were both the same overall organisation, with the former apparently having a more clinical research focus. The one set of public accounts still available for this charity for the 05/06 financial year which notes a turnover that just surpasses £26,000. The accounts for a charity are only published publicly in the event their gross turnover exceeds £25,000, and so it would seem this was the only year on record where this criteria was met. Any other accounts held below this threshold, while not public, should still be obtainable via a Freedom of Information request to the Charities Commission, and so I provide the results here for information:

The Transplant Trust (1001374) Annual Report & Accounts for 2003-2004

The Transplant Trust (1001374) Annual Report & Accounts for 2004-2005

The Transplant Trust (1001374) Annual Report & Accounts for 2005-2006

The Transplant Trust (1001374) Accounts for 2006-2007

The Transplant Trust (1001374) Accounts to March 2008

The Transplant Trust (1001374) November 2008

Arguably the most revealing result from this request was a letter to the Charities Commission in February 2009 that declares the cessation of The Transplant Trust (1001374) and to transfer its assets to ‘Transplants in Mind[sic] 1095611’.

Looking at these accounts we can see the steady decrease of turnover and activity supporting the ‘clinical aspects of transplantation’, as specified in its founding mandate, since the formal creation of the second Transplant Trust member organisation in 2003. It’s interesting that it is this which has officially ceased, and not the second, more public face of the charity with which all of its supporters will be familiar. To clarify, I refer to the part which had the website, the donor bus, and which ran and received government funding for National Transplant Week. One charity had a turnover that didn’t exceed £25k, and the second (the Membership Organisation), had a turnover of more than £150k.

As far as the Charities Commission is concerned, this organisation still technically exists, albeit with Accounts and Annual Returns that are heavily over due for the 2008-2009 financial year, although I have recently noticed that an Annual Return (but not accounts) has been returned for the 2009-2010 year as of 26th January 2011. I enclose a screenshot of the Charity Commission entry for The Transplant Trust (1095611) as I see it today:

Here we see a huge leap in income to £285k (up from £107k in 2008), albeit with £296k of spending putting the charity further into deficit. As these figures are somewhat incongruent to the known activity of the charity since 2009, I can only speculate that this figure is a combination of the financial years 08/09 and 09/10. Although why it would be presented in this way is not evident.

The question of ‘What Happened?’ is still as mystifying as it was, however I am penning this update primarily because several weeks ago I sent another Freedom of Information request to the Department of Health, who, to remind you, provided significant amounts of public funding to support The Transplant Trust’s activities, including National Transplant Week.

My request, and the responses to which, were as follows:

Request 1: The amount and type of funding provided to the charity since its creation (c. 1991), summarised by year up to and including the charity’s last year of operation. 

Response 1: Organisation name – Transplants in Mind – for a  project called National Transplant week.

Financial year:

2004/05: £20,000.

2005/06: £10,000.

Reference Document 2003/552

For a second project called – Donor Day – they received 3-years grant as follows:

2005/06: £25,000.

2006/07: £30,000.

2007/08: £35,000.

In 2008/09 we funded £84,000 to Transplant Trust to promote National Transplant Week 2009 and identify the most appropriate and effective medium to reach the under 25s demographic and implement an initiative to target this group to increase the number of people on the Organ Donation Register.  In 2009/2010 we funded £7,500 to publish a Transplant book written about the experiences of those waiting for a transplant.

Request 2: All documentation, including memos, emails, and other communications as appropriate that discuss or otherwise investigate the closure of the charity in 2009.

Response 2: DH had no dealings with the charity re their closure, but please see correspondence annexed below where, on hearing that Transplant Trust was facing financial difficulty, we wrote to John Wallwork asking for confirmation that DH funding was not going to be used for redundancy payments. I also attach the charity’s funding report that they sent to DH giving a breakdown of their proposals, and two award letters to Time for the Funding of National Transplant Week from 2000/2001.

Note that we have redacted the names and direct contact details of officials who are not Senior Civil Servants or otherwise persons in the public domain, in accordance with s40(2) of the FOIA, which relates to the personal data of living individuals whose release would be in breach of the Data Protection Principles as set out under the Data Protection Act.

Request 3: Information on the intended future distribution of the funds that would have otherwise been granted to the charity had it continued in operation. i.e. Has or will this been re-apportioned to a similar charity/project in future.

Response 3: We hold no recorded information which would address your question about ‘the intended future distribution of the funds that would have otherwise been granted to the charity had it continued in operation. i.e. Has or will this been re-apportioned to a similar charity/project in future.’

The department within the Department of Health that deals with Freedom of Information requests is deserving of serious criticism. My request was handled so incredibly badly that as of today I still have not received the specific items of documentation that relate to my original request. In their first response they referenced documents but did not provide them, even when they explicitly state that they had been included. I have asked for the charity’s funding report which they noted in ‘Response 2’ more than once, but my requests are seemly dealt with people of surpassing incompetence and illiteracy. My original request to their department was made on the 3rd December 2010, and they have far exceeded the 20 working days allocated by law to respond to such requests.

When I pointed out that the documents they referenced had not been included, they insisted on treating this as a new Freedom of Information request, thereby giving them another 20 working days to correct their error. That would be bad enough had their eventual response not once again omitted the information requested. Eventually I was sent this PDF document, which is a mish-mash of referenced material with no good explanation of what is included. The DoH then insisted this was the entirety of the information they held, despite that clearly not being the case. I have again appealed to them for records pertaining to the funding given over the course of the time period requested, and again I’ve been given yet another FOI reference number. It seems to me that this constant generation of new reference numbers is simply a way of fudging their response statistics. They can respond to a singular FOI request poorly, close it, and if anyone has any follow-up queries about the paucity of information provided, they merely open up a new reference and respond to that within their 20 days. By opening and closing multiple references for what is ultimately ONE request, I imagine it would be very easy to make it look like the department was responding to 100% of all requests on time.

So I apologise if the information above is not as detailed as it might be, and I will update this article should the DoH manage to grind together enough braincells to comprehend which documents they still need to send me.

In any case, some scraps of this information were useful. I was particularly interested in the nature of the £7500 provided for the publication of a ‘Transplant book’. I can only assume it refers to this website and while there is a scant mention of The Transplant Trust, there is nothing that mentions them as a source of funding for its publication. I will enquire directly to the author and update this article with any information.

A Stumbling Summary

The situation remains rather unclear. The aspect of the charity dealing with research was wound up in early 2009 with any remaining assests transferred to the second charity at that time. The second charity has been missing in action since mid-2009. It has no website, it no longer accepts donations, its Just Giving membership has expired, and yet still technically appears to exist. The recent Annual Return that now appears on the CC website merely adds to the intrigue.

The donor bus, noted in my previous article, is allegedly still run by Ray Pearson, the ex-Donor Bus Manager of the Transplant Trust, under the name ‘Brightside of Life charity’. This is not a charity that is registered with the Charities Commission (which it would be obligated to do if it had a turnover of greater than £5000), and it has no significant online presence that makes mention of the bus’ activities. As far as I can work out the donor bus is also not part of any other larger charity connected to transplantation. If the closure letter referenced above is to be believed, the bus along with any other assets should still technically remain the property of the remaining Transplant Trust charity.

Many questions still need to be answered. What is actually going on? Will the charity attempt to rise from the ashes and overcome its continued financial woe? Will their website be restored to operation? Will there be a public statement as to the fate of the charity? And most critically, who is organising National Transplant Week in 2011?

I will continue to post any information that becomes available, and comments remain welcome.

Categories
Humour Thoughts

Boris Johnson’s Arms Race

Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was quoted today as saying he did not want to make use of water cannons [as a way of dispersing student tuition fee protesters], as he ‘did not want to engage in an arms race’.

Boris, what do you think they’re going to do? Turn up to protests armed with retaliatory super-soakers?

Oh the humanity.

Won’t somebody please think of the children?

Categories
Thoughts

Change that works for you

Don’t worry, I’m not about to start espousing the merits of the ConLib government. Today I’d like to talk about change in the monetary sense.

Cor, money.

I’ve become mildly obsessed with paying for small items with very specific amounts of change. I’d normally hand over a few pound coins for whatever I was buying and get a fistful of coppers in return. Many people, as in the photo above, collect this useless amount of cash in a jar to eventually be taken to a bank or a lazy money counting machine that charges you a fee to convert it back into usable cash. I too did this and have a heavy tin of coins at home that serves as an excellent paperweight and/or projectile weapon as the situation dictates.

Recently though I’ve been getting rid of my change in a slightly more creative way – I’ve been overpaying. Occasionally you may have been asked by the cashier, when trying to use a £20 note to buy something worth £1.10, if you’ve ‘got the 10p’. The reason being fairly obvious that if you overpay by the 10p you can receive larger denomination of change in return (in this example, a tenner, a fiver, and four pound coins).

I’ve been taking that to the next level by overpaying pretty much every time if I have the coins to do it whether I’m asked to or not. My regular coffee costs £1.73 – a very inconvenient amount – and so on several occasions I’ve handed over £2.23 in payment in order to get a nice shiny 50p back, and suddenly instead of having a load of pennies I didn’t want I’m back to a nice usable silver coin.

Not only does doing this making me feel stupidly clever somehow, I also find myself getting downright annoyed if I don’t have the change to make this possible. I console myself with the knowledge that if I can’t do it this time I’ll definitely have enough coin flexibility so that I can do it next time. The other fringe benefit to this eccentric practice is seeing how many cashiers comprehend what it is you’re trying to do when you give them too much money. Thankfully many deftly ring it into the till and hand back correct change, some almost hand it back before doing a double-take and realising my intent, and others stare at me blankly and say ‘You’ve given me too much money’, prompting me to explain my overpaying logic.

Not for the first time, I think I’m a bit odd.

Categories
Facebook Internet Thoughts

NSPCC Facebook Cartoon Profile ‘Campaign’

As I type this my view of Facebook is slowly mutating into pictures of 80s cartoon characters. There’s nothing wrong with that in principle, because I as much as anyone regard 80s kids TV as the pinnacle of creative genius never to be seen again.

But when the 5th or 6th person changed their profile picture, I had to ask, what the hell is going on?

It turns out that a ‘campaign from the NSPCC’ is encouraging people to change their profile pictures between the 4th and 6th of December 2010 to ‘raise awareness’ for the charity.

I have 2 immediate problems with this:

1)     This is not an official NSPCC campaign, it wasn’t hard to check.
2)     Just how does changing your profile picture to a cartoon character accomplish anything at all?

Now I won’t do down the work of the charity, which, like most charities, is very laudable, necessary, and worthy of support. The NSPCC is however a very large, national charity and it’s not a reach to assume that vast majority are aware of its existence. A campaign which makes you vaguely aware of their continued presence in the world doesn’t seem very worthy. So what is going on?

Around the World with Willy Fogg was the best anyway
Around the World with Willy Fogg was the best anyway

It’s not hard to work out. Facebook is chock-full of needless ‘groups’ that are the social networking equivalent of the old emails which said ‘FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW OR A KITTEN WILL DIE’, and similar. Those emails were also annoying, full of inaccurate information (if purporting to be about a real thing) and invariably a waste of time. Such emails, some from 10 years ago, occasionally re-circulate when some impressionable person sends it off to hundreds of people, who then send it on in the same manner, and so on.

Facebook groups are equally pointless. Their sole intent is to get a critical mass of people who ‘Like’ the group, and there are millions of such groups where people state their support of things such as ‘NO TUITION FEES’ or ‘CHARLIE BROOKER FOR PM’ and even ’10 MILLION PEOPLE AGAINST THE NEW FACEBOOK LAYOUT’.

All such groups are meaningless. Very often once they’ve acquired a huge number of people pointlessly ‘Liking’ the group, and thus becoming susceptible to updates from that group in their news feeds, it’ll start sending out massive spamming adverts to those hundreds of thousands of people, and no doubt making a tidy profit in the process. The original intent of the group is long gone, even if it genuinely existed in the first place.

What frustrates me more is the general susceptibility of the average person, who both assumes the initiative is genuine (for no reason other than a charity’s name is attached), and then believes that following the instructions in some way does that charity some good. If you really want to help a charity the best thing you can actually do when you come across some kind of garbled nonsense like this is to donate some money to them. They will find it much more effective than the questionable ‘awareness raising’ your cartoon picture is doing. If you were looking for a way to satisfy your need to feel like you’re doing some selfless good, reaching into your pocket is a great deal more meaningful.

Don’t be a sheep and mindlessly pass these things on. Do a little research, ascertain the credibility of something you’re being asked to repeat, and consider whether it’s actually a worthwhile thing to do. Don’t get caught up in yet another viral hoax that is nothing but self-serving to its creator. Come on people, none of this is even hard.

Categories
Thoughts

Virgin Active(ly) misleading you on price

If you’ve ever been into a chain gym, like Virgin Active, David Lloyd, Bannatynes, The Village, etc. what I’m about to say will seem familiar to you.

I could do with a gym membership again, it’s marathon training time and during winter sometimes its impossible to run due to snow or ice, so a warm treadmill inside is a welcome alternative. To that end I foolishly wandered into the doors of my very local Virgin Active and enquired about membership.

I won’t prevaricate; these places are a rip-off. For membership you’re paying way over the odds and you’ll regret ever going in there for one reason or another, but what you probably don’t realise is just what an insidious bunch of conniving bastards these people are.

Ask yourself, why aren’t prices advertised on any of the websites for these big brands? Why do they all want you to hand over some contact details in an online enquiry? Why, if you ring, do they refuse all mention of price and try everything to get you in the door?

Many of you already know the answer; it’s because there is no fixed price for membership. The salesmen, and that is what they are, rival second-hand car dealers in the bullshit stakes. The price they eventually quote is based on how much of a sucker they think you are. They determine that during the visit they pressure you to make, where they show you all the equipment, the facilities, the pool, the toilets that gently caress your buttocks, etc. They’re waiting for you to say ‘Gee Stan, that sounds really useful!’, and every time you show appreciation, the price will increase.

Ignore all insistence from them that the prices and deals fluctuate so rapidly they couldn’t possibly post their prices anywhere public – this is a lie, and today I even saw proof of it.

But I digress. I’m there, sat opposite ‘Chris’, a terribly friendly person, while he asks me what I need the gym for. There was no way I was going to give him any encouragement, so I indifferently said I was looking for the occasional use of a treadmill and nothing more. We took the tour anyway. Did I want to use the pool? No, I’m crap at swimming. What about the weight equipment? Nope, I don’t need it. Fitness classes? No mate, I’m here for a treadmill, remember?

With my dead eyes betraying no emotion we quickly head back to the omnipresent health bar while he disappears briefly to ‘check something’. He comes back with a printed breakdown of membership prices. But wait! Printed prices? Well surely I’m wrong then, the prices must be fixed if they’re PRINTED ON PAPER.

No sir, if they had less than half a dozen price permutations printed up I’d be surprised. They merely choose one that corresponds to your impressionability quotient.

I think I did fairly well. The piece of paper has 4 different prices on it, which I’ll recreate here but naturally in no way is this a benchmark or a basis for what the price might be anywhere else in the UK, or indeed to anyone else walking into this very branch on the same day:

Full Flexi: £67.00
Peak-access, on a 1-month rolling contract.

Diamond: £59.95
Peak-access, 12 month contract.

Joint Diamond: £55.95
Peak-access, 12 month contract (and presumably for couples)

Off-peak: £55.00
(9-4pm only)

Like I said, a rip-off. On the same sheet Chris then scrawls ‘3 month – £64.00’, which he assures me is a 3 month contract that flips over to the 1 month contract thereafter, but at the same price. Still with me? Alright.

I think I did well because Chris ignores the line that says ‘Diamond’, crosses out the ‘Joint’ part of the ‘Joint Diamond’ line, and then circles the price that says £55.95, indicating that this is the price that me, the single person, would pay.

Also on this piece of paper is a line that says ‘Joining Fee: £40’. Chris crosses (haha) this out and writes ‘£20’ instead. Blimey, I really *must* have done well. The page also states ‘Freeze Fee: £7 flexi/£5 Diamond‘. A frozen membership is the feature some gyms offer if you know you’re not going to use your membership on a certain month. Instead of paying full whack, you just pay the freeze but obviously you can’t use the facilities. Sounds fair doesn’t it?

I point out the advantage of the freeze feature to Chris, who says ‘Oh you can’t do that within the first 12 months’. Hang on Chris, given the contract shifts to a rolling 1-month deal after that (where if you weren’t using the gym you could just cancel for free, presumably?!), when would this ‘freeze’ feature apply? Similarly, if you’re on a ‘Flexi’ deal which is touted as a 1 month rolling contract anyway, how could a Freeze Fee possibly apply there? The only thing I can think of is that paying this fee is cheaper than quitting only to re-join again and pay the joining fee within 6 months (as after this point you wouldn’t have saved anything on the £40 joining fee), but who is going to do that?

I ask a few questions and push for a further discount but it doesn’t get me anywhere, so I thank Chris for his time and leave. Before I go though I’m reminded that if I want the £20 joining fee I must tell them today because it’s for TODAY ONLY and a TIME LIMITED OFFER that will probably NEVER COME AGAIN. Mmmhmm.

I toddle off home and start looking at Virgin Active reviews online (they average 1.6/5 on reviewcentre.com, for reasons I’ll come to shortly) and my eye is caught by two other local gyms in my area, one of which is £25 a month (price advertised online!) with pretty similar facilities. Looks tempting.

This image has absolutely nothing to do with the content of this article. Nice though isn't it?

While I’m sitting there musing my options, my mobile rings. By jove, it’s Chris from Virgin Active ringing to inform me of a super deal ‘that’s just been released by Head Office’. Wow Chris, I’m shitting myself at the prospect of this deal, what on earth could it be?! Oh it’s good, it’s very good. I’m being offered the first month FREE with the only thing to pay being the £20 joining fee, and he assures me it’s for a one-month contract so I’d be under no obligation thereafter. A £67 monthly membership for only £20?! How can I resist?

Except I do, and tell Chris no thanks, but I make a point of thanking him for thinking of me and I assure him that I appreciate it. Chris responds as if I’ve just taken a dump in his lunchbox, but moodily says ‘no problem’ and rings off. He called no more than 45 minutes after I left the gym. Evidently he was nervous because I didn’t cave at the time, and was then annoyed when I wasn’t tempted by the deal he’d made up on the spot.

Now, interestingly PruHealth (private health insurers, similar to Bupa), offer reduced rate gym membership to their ‘Vitality Partners’, which includes Virgin Active. I’d been reading up on their site earlier that day and could see they offer around 25% off membership if you have an insurance plan with them. Given the membership fees I’ve noted above, I worked out that I could take out a private insurance plan AND a gym membership for around £5 more a month than the gym would be alone, so on that basis it’s clearly better to go through PruHealth, right? Wrong.

I mentioned this to Chris during our meeting but was obviously quite vague about my knowledge and asked for more details. He basically shat (to use the most appropriate word) all over his ‘Vitality Partner’ and said that PruHealth members ‘weren’t real members’ and that the Pru had recently whacked up their prices so much so that a lot of people were leaving and coming to them separately. Talk about fostering corporate business relationships there Chris. I was given no information on the expected discount, and was basically told to not do it. Nice.

A further note regarding Virgin Active, purely in the interests of full disclosure. In researching them and trying in vain to get a comparison on membership prices, I saw an awful lot of people complaining on forums about the difficulty in getting out of their 12-month Diamond memberships. Apparently the verbal assurance that after 12 months it switches to a ‘rolling 1 month’ arrangement did not materialise in the fine print. Consequently many people have found their 12 month membership renewed for another 12 months without their consent, only to be told they had no recourse and could not cancel. Some people (and if you wish to search online, you will find plenty of anecdotal evidence on this) were offered deals to pay-off their remaining term at 50% of the regular rate, but during that time were not allowed to use any of the gym facilities. Paying 50% for nothing on a contract extension you didn’t want? Good lord.

So, to summarise: There is no fixed price, it’s a rip-off even if you insist you’ll never turn up or use any of the equipment. Be wary about contract terms. Never agree to anything on the day. Get the contract in your hand, take it home, and read it carefully. The trouble is, everything about this process involves pressure, and even knowing every trick and deceit used against me I too felt some level of desire to sign up on the spot. Your average consumer has no chance against such an onslaught, and like so many things in this world, it’s just plain wrong. A reputable organisation wouldn’t need misdirection and deceit to sell their service; it should stand alone on its own merit without the need for tactical selling bordering, in my humble view, on fraud.

One final thought. A counter-argument I’ve seen against the whole ‘My membership prices don’t match those of other members’ insisted that membership prices change daily, and so any variation is simply members taking advantage of different offers on different days.

I wonder why, then, while I was sitting there at the Health Bar, I observed a young lady being sold her gym membership, concluded by the salesperson with the words, ‘So, how would you like to pay your £75 today?’.

Get out, girl, get out while you still can.