Welfare states in Europe and around the world are experiencing growing numbers of people with limited or unclear rights to public welfare within their borders. These are refugees, undocumented migrants, EU-migrants and other groups of displaced or deprived people seeking a better life. In Sweden, this situation is trying the highly held principles of social and human rights, as charities are becoming an increasingly important complement to rights-based public welfare services. This article will show how eight different City Missions in Sweden are seeing a new role for themselves in an emerging social landscape. The findings will be analysed in terms of social and human rights, using the classic theories of T. H. Marshall as well as more recent research.

The boundaries between state and charitable activities within the NHS are set out in regulations but are also enacted, blurred, and contested through local practices. This article reports research on NHS Charities– charitable funds set up within NHS organizations to enhance statutory provision – in Scotland. We analysed financial accounts and conducted qualitative interviews with staff in 12 of the 14 NHS Charities in Scotland, where they are generally known as endowments. Our findings suggest that Scotland’s endowments are relatively wealthy in charitable terms, but that this wealth is unevenly distributed when population size and socio-economic deprivation are considered. We also identify two diverging organisational approaches to decisions, including those about appropriate and inappropriate fundraising. We argue that these approaches cohere with contrasting ‘state’ and ‘charitable’ institutional logics, which in turn imply different attitudes to potential inequalities, and to relationships with local publics.

There has recently been public discussion of the rewards available to senior staff in English and Welsh charities. However, that discussion is usually based on examples of individual salaries, or on unrepresentative and small subsets of the charity population. To provide a robust and informed basis for debate, we have conducted analyses of evidence on the payment of high salaries (defined as the numbers of people paid above £60,000 p.a., a reporting threshold used by the Charity Commission) in: (a) a representative sample of c.10,000 English and Welsh charities, and (b) surveys of individuals regarding comparative salary levels in different sectors of the economy. Overall, survey data show that the proportion of staff in receipt of high salaries is lower than average in the third sector than in other sectors. Information from charity annual accounts is used to demonstrate which charities are more likely than others to pay such salaries, and to relate the likelihood of paying high salaries to charity characteristics (income, location and subsector). We show that the distribution of high pay in the charitable sector is largely a function of the size and complexity of organisations, and is generally unrelated to subsector or income mix.

Anglican religious communities are currently experiencing decline. Member numbers are decreasing as their average age increases, recruitment of young people is virtually impossible and it is not uncommon to find a small and dwindling group of elderly religious inhabiting premises designed for a time when committing oneself to life as a member of a religious order was much more fashionable. There are several underlying reasons: young people are offered a wider and more diverse array of possible occupations; employment with a specific employer is no longer undertaken for life, but people tend to move from one job to another and from one sector to another; women in particular have more choices than previously and for those with a religious vocation the priesthood is a more exciting alternative; and, bearing in mind that many Anglican religious communities incline to the Anglo-Catholic end of the spectrum, the Ordinariate beckons.

Recent debates within social and political theory, and within the public sphere more generally, reveal growing concern with issues of ‘trust’. While forms of voluntary association frequently are cited as prime examples of trust relations, they rarely provide a focus for such debates. In this paper we examine current developments within the voluntary sector in Britain, arguing that the relation of voluntary organisations to questions of trust is increasingly problematic. In particular a tension exists between trust relations based on principles of voluntarism and linked to shared values, and relations of confidence that are mediated by institutional and contractual forms. After surveying recent theoretical accounts of trust and confidence, we consider the relevance of these debates to the British voluntary sector. We then draw on a range of quantitative and qualitative research on the voluntary sector to examine how trust and confidence are negotiated with a number of key constituencies: the general public; government and institutional funders; business; and users or beneficiaries. Our argument is that, while resources of trust are linked to their core values, voluntary organisations are increasingly governed by formal measures designed to promote confidence.