Maybe let’s be honest about the impact of lockdown on charities, and what the chancellor’s announcement today of £750m for the sector really means.

TLDR - I’m still sure it’s nowhere near enough, we can mitigate most of the worst, and we’re wasting our time with this govt.

We’ve been saying lockdown will cost charities £4bn. We ought to be honest and say that number was calculated on the back of a fag packet. No one had any idea. At the time I said I thought it was too low. I’m still sure that’s right.

It's too low mostly because it only covered 12 weeks, when in fact the impact will cover 6-9 months. It's also too low because it doesn’t account for inflation or GDP growth and it doesn’t take into account investments. I still think the total lost income will be closer to £10bn.

Having said all that, furlough does help a lot. We’ve avoided saying this because we’ve been campaigning for help and you don’t want to send mixed messages. But being honest, for many of the worst hit charities, furlough works.

The worst hit charities are those which relied on shops or face to face service delivery. Leisure trusts, community centres, and the whole arts sector. Those guys will have to close their doors, mothball the whole operation, furlough everyone, and come back in six months.

The loss of charity shops has cost the sector £2bn in income but only £400m in funds available for charitable application. It’s because of shops that thousands of Barnardo’s and Oxfam workers have been furloughed.

I initially feared charities contracting with the public sector would be worst hit. So many are so fragile. But govt has been good at paying its bills. Some parts of the social care sector may benefit, in the long run, because they get the same income but no restrictive targets.

One thing we’re learning in general, actually, is that there was no need for all those targets attached to contracts and grants. So many grants have been unrestricted in the last few weeks, and that’s at least one good thing to come from it.

Elsewhere, though, charities have faced an invidious choice. Send your staff home, help no one, and stay in business, or carry on working, get no support, and go under.

In most cases, the former is what charities will have to do. Workers will be furloughed, services will be cut, and vulnerable people will be set adrift. The impact will be very different in different parts of the sector.

As we said above, charities that lost most income have tended also to lose most demand for their services. Some charities - international and environmental spring to mind - may struggle to find ways to deliver. But some facing falling income are more needed than ever.

For me, this is the ridiculous thing. Economically it makes no sense to do this. For government to step in and back charities to carry on delivering would cost very little, because they’ve already committed to pay for the staff. They’re just paying them not to work.

When we take out the charities for whom furlough kind of works, and look at just those whose services are still needed, we're probably back to a £4bn shortfall. Plus whatever is the value of all that extra need. Unquantifiable. Billions more, probably.

At some point government is going to have to deliver most of the services that charitable money would have delivered. Or they’re going to have to pay more to deal with the consequences. Having already paid for the experts to sit at home.

It’s pretty clear that the people at the heart of government just don’t really get this. Fundamentally they don’t believe that charities deliver much of value. They just don’t trust charities.

Why not? Well, I can only speculate. I haven’t got good information. But two things occur to me.

First, politics and worldview. If those in power believe the UK is primarily an economy, and human life is fundamentally transactional, charities are always going to struggle.

Charities are fundamentally very left wing institutions. We’re instinctively redistributive. We spent a lot of time campaigning for greater state intervention - high benefits, more protection for renters, asylum seekers, you name it.

The sector campaigned on this under Labour, too, but Labour minded less. It was more minded to grant that stuff. Labour govts were even accused of setting up charities as sock puppets.

So we’re supposed to be non-party political, but we’re far from politically neutral.

(As an aside, I don’t think cutting back on social safety nets and support for poor and vulnerable people makes economic sense - quite ignoring the rights and wrongs of it. Having a country full of unhappy, underemployed, unproductive people is very bad for growth.)

Second - and this is on the sector, I’m afraid - we’ve just had five years of relentless bad press, focused on the country’s hundred largest charities.

The big charities did little to rebut it. Most hid and hoped it would move on to someone else.

The answer I got, when I asked why no one was fighting, was always that it didn’t seem to be affecting donations.

Well no, maybe not. But it was affecting the thinking of Tory politicians. It weakened the sector’s standing in Whitehall.

In the face of concerted lobbying from across government to help charities, they were always going to have to write a cheque in the end. But they wrote pretty much the smallest one they could get away with.

And that’s where we are, I'm afraid.