Decisions about which services the state should provide, and whether it can afford to do so, lie at the heart of politics and depend on ideology and the level of taxation that governments deem appropriate. Politicians of all stripes accept that the public purse is not bottomless, and that hard decisions must be made about how to allocate resources. Once the decisions are made, however, some social needs are inevitably left out and some publicly funded services are usually capable of improvement. This is the home territory of many charities; they try, with varying success, to fill in the gaps in provision, and they pioneer improvement in delivery methods and press for increases in funding.

Many well-known organisations fall into this bracket, including, for example, Macmillan Cancer Support, the MS Society, Missing People and Crisis; behind them stand hundreds of smaller charities, few of them household names, that provide help for the homeless or refugees, run foodbanks or provide supplementary health services. They receive little or no public funding, and if they did not exist it is arguable whether the state would consider their services so essential that it would step in and provide them instead. But many such charities are a lifeline to those who use them, and this chapter looks at the work of four of them. Some of the case study charities presented in this chapter were winners or shortlisted in the Charity Awards run by Civil Society Media.

The question of supplementary services was addressed by Lord Beveridge in the middle of the 20th century: