Really interesting interview - Iain Dale with Camila Batmanghelidjh of former Kids Company. Transcribed from here for my own personal observations.
Initial thoughts, she's verbose and every time I have come across someone who employs that as a communication style, it's never been for a good reason. Read her words carefully and ask yourself what did she actually say? Towards the end, she attempts to link herself in with the CSA investigations but steers well clear of actually saying that. This mess would then become about something bigger and not about Kids Company or her any more. Her body language is totally interesting if you're watching the interview. What she nearly says but changes at the last minute is also worth noting. I'm not a fan of hers and that's putting it mildly but still, proper fascinating.
(My words are in brackets and italics)
ID: Before we get on to some of the more difficult questions...I mean...you've been the centre of a malestrom over the past few days. How have you come through this personally, it must have been a terrible experience for you?
CB: I've actually personally been very calm and ...er.. serene (that's not what your breathing tells me) because I never went up with the media to come down with it but when I've got upset, it's been because of the children and young people and that's the only time I get tearful (shakes her head no a couple of times)... the rest of the time, I'm very level because what I think we're being exposed to, is a sort of massive...erm...public hatred, kind of driven by the media in many ways...er...
(It's the media's fault)
ID: Why, why d'you think that is because the media has been extremely supportive of you in particular and indeed Kids Company over the years. So why d'you think the media, if it has turned against you, why d'you think it has?
(Now it's Miles Goslett's fault)
CB: I think they've been fed misinformation actually... It all started with Miles Goslett...er... a reporter, who has never visited Kids Company, never met me, I actually offered for him to come and visit and speak to me. He claimed...err...that there was a lady, who hadn't been thanked for her donation to Kids Company and that we hadn't reported properly back on her donation. Both of which were lies. Not only I have copies of that lady's thank you letters, she was given a whole page in our news letter. (He said a lot more than that actually)
ID: She gave you two hundred thousand pounds...
CB: Yes...and the Charities Commission approved her report. So this is how this whole situation started because Miles made it out that we were ungrateful and that we didn't report properly..er.. which, both of which were entirely untrue.
ID: Now, he's written a little bit of a history of all this on the Spectator website which I know you haven't seen. I'm going to read you out a paragraph from the this because he says he's...er..met people who've worked for you and he's quoting two of them and..uh..umm...you're not going to like what I'm going to read out but ...I...er...because it's so...it's symptomatic of the accusations that are against you, I'm reading it out because I want you to respond to it and say why it's wrong.
CB: You can be completely open and transparent with me and ask me any questions you want to.
(Giving him permission is similar to resorting to telling people who you are - could be considered disingenous)
ID: Right, well, this is from...apparently, well course there's no name so someone who apparently worked at Kids Company and they say "Camila is basically pretty impossible to work with and she's given the charity sector a bad name. People need to realise that Kids Company is her personal empire. I'm not aware of her having anything else in her life. I'm not aware of her having any friends with whom she can just go and have a cup of copy...coffee. That is not healthy. The charity is her and she is the charity." Is there any aspect of that that's true?
CB: I...no..it isn't, because the organisation has 600...had...650 staff about 10'000 volunteers...er... some 500 clinical students did their work experience with us. It had a board of trustees so it's a massive organisation and it can't possibly run, just on my personal personality.
(she didn't address what Iain asked her)
ID: You were the figure head, I mean, we all knew you partly because of your character, the way that you dress everyone's fascinated (CB is smiling)...err...by you and what you've done and do you think that part of the problem has been that Kids Company is a bit like a company that grows too quickly? The chief executive is brilliant at manufacturing widgets but once it gets into sort of reading the balance sheets and all of that...then they start to struggle. Is that's what's happened to you?
CB: No. It's interesting you say that because I think that's one of the prejudices because I don't...err...wear a suit and I don't carry a brief case, I haven't sort of bought into the corporate packaging. People assume (Which people? What did they actually say?) and especially because I'm a woman and I work with children..people assume (Which people?) that then, I don't understand figures and I can't ...err..organise systems but actually, if you really think about it, I organise with my team and we raised a hundred and sixty three million point four ...so that requires quite a lot of work...er...and last year it came from seventy-seven thousand different sources including one pound coins, so administatively we must be pretty good to be able to get that amount of money in.
(Iain isn't impressed so CB is self-congratulatory)
ID: Well...you, you say that but you will have seen the front page of the Guardian this morning I presume...
CB: No, I haven't seen any of the papers...
ID: Well...er...Kids Company chiefs ignored cash warnings, Finance bosses told charity's trustees to build up funds or risk catastrophe...umm...it says here that you were warned by your auditors for five successive years that you should build up reserves because you didn't have enough money to continue for more that three months, and yet you ignored all of those warnings.
(Is she going to say no again?)
CB: ...n..n..it is true, it's absolutely true, (phew!) that we had those discussions with the auditors and we too wanted reserves...er...and in fact that's why we continously spoke to Government. The problem with Kids Company and the reason we've had these difficulties is that children and young people are self-refering off the street. So they hear about our provision on the street and they make their way to Kids Company. So, in the last 19 years, because children have asked for help directly, no local authority was prepared to pay for them so we haven't had one pence from a local authority...
ID: No but you've had a lot from central government haven't you?
CB: ...let me finish....or a mental health trust. So what ended up happening is that we ended up with really large numbers (How many exactly because no one seems to know?) of very disturbed children and young people ...it was.. we were overwhelmed by it and since the Blair government, we'd been talking to the government about the fact that we can't cope with this sort of case load and repeated central governments gave us a grant of about 20% and they kept saying, next year we'll sort you out completely, we'll find a funding stream for you, so that you don't have to be so hand-to-mouth. Most recently, just before the summer...er...during the summer...er... I spoke to Oliver Letwin who then said that he was going to find us a..a..about 20 million because I had warned everyone that we would not be able to fund raise any more because we'd been Charity of the Year for practically every bank....we'd basically run out of....people that we could go to... we've been going for 19 years...
(she seems to express that fact not as an achievement but as if she's trying to elicit a particular response from Iain and BAM he's all over it)
ID: That's a really odd thing to say because people who are successful in fundraising...umm... continue in that way normally. To say you'd run out of new people...um... success breeds success and you were successful in raising a huge amount of money so I'm slightly at a loss to understand why you think it would suddenly have come to an end.
CB: Because the scale...er...had become impossible, driven by children and young people pouring in through the doors. ( pouring in?) You know most charities...er..large charities, survive by having contracts. So for example the local authority may give them work to do and then they pay the charity. We couldn't do that because the kids were coming...o...from the street and using the service so no one was paying and it's exactly the problem Childline had and it couldn't survive on its own so the NSPCC had to absorb it.
(Aligning with Childline - good move)
ID: Of this 163 million pounds that you've raised, what proportion of that came from the tax payer?
CB: Umm...g...err...in any given year....we had...umm...err...g...sort of...about 4 million...err...a year, so the proportions.......were....most recently, 4 million from central government...about 19 to 20 million...err....raised...err....by us.
(This is her most nervous answer, on figures, that she says she is good at, even though she doesn't wear a suit or carry a briefcase)
ID: Cus...I mean you have grown very very quickly in the last few years haven't you, well, you've more or less doubled in size in the last four or five years? That must have put pressures on your administration and I'm slightly at a loss to understand why you, you don't...in any interview I've seen you do...you don't acknowledge those pressures, you don't say well yeah we may have got a few things wrong. You're, you're sort of straight down the line saying no, no, no we..our administration is fine. Alan Yentob I saw last night on chanel 4 news, a quite extraordinary interview i thought...erm.. said no, no, there is absolutely no problem. Well I'm sorry an organisation does not close its doors, does not effectively go bust, when there aren't any problems and...
CB: ...No there was a problem...
ID: ...it's up to the chief executive or the board of trustees to sort those problems out or identify them.
CB: There was a problem and I've said, there was a problem. Where I acknowledge that there was a problem is that we didn't raise enough funds. Where I disagree with the narrative out there, is the suggestion, that we had financial mismanagement....because, actually, in 19 years, we passed every audit clear, we had two additional audits by central government which we passed clear as well but all the audits, said we didn't have enough cash flow because we were so....constantly...we started the year not knowing where our money was coming from and we had to raise it month by month as we went along and that's why we went to central government to say please we can't manage...
ID: But you had five years to sort this out. The problems were identified in 2010 about the lack of reserves and you ignored those warnings for five years, that's...
CB: No we didn't ignore them...
ID: Well...
CB: We went...no, we didn't ignore them...
ID: Why didn't you build up any reserves then?
CB: No but we couldn't, this is the point. Everyone is having the conversation just about the...m...the financials. What they're not having the conversation about is the clinical, which is, we had too many...d...very disturbed children.....d'you know I ended up, having to hire my own Psychiatrists...err...Psychiatric Nurses, Occupational Therapists, Child Protection Officers because we couldn't get the cases that we had, into Social Services, or Child Mental Health because locally those agencies were not coping. Our...one of our biggest provisions is in a borough where the local social work department has just failed OFsted, so we were holding, too many serious cases and we kept going back to central government and saying we shouldn't be having kids who are jumping off bridges, who are cutting themselves, who are being sexually and physically abused we shouldn't as a charity be holding cases like that.
ID: Well, Camila we'll both catch our breath because we've got to go to the news and travel...err...we'll hear more from Camlla Batmanghelidjh in just a second. I'm Iain Dale at breakfast LBC news time at 9:31.
9:36 here on LBC, we're in the company of Camila Batmanghelidjh from Kids Company ...erm...Amanda in Brixton has emailed to say "I donated to Kids Company last year and I did get a receipt" So...it's very interesting looking at the tweets and texts that are coming in, there are no shades of grey here. There are either people who think that it's entirely your fault or there...or other people think you're a complete saint, there's no...sort of...middle ground on this...umm...Can I ask you Camila where did the 3 million pounds go that the government sent to you last week?
CB: Ok, so the government claim, that they didn't know, that we were going to use part of it, as a salary. That is not true. I have in my possession, an email exchange between us and the government, where they were fully aware, that we were waiting for their money to come, for the salary to be paid. In fact this three million, was part of a repackaging...err....sort of...err...grant....so that we would have to shrink Kids Company in order to make it sustainable as an organisation, so it's very disingenous to claim that they didn't know.
ID: Why haven't you released those emails?
CB: err...I now have actually...
ID: No you haven't...
CB: Yeah, I released...err...one of them last night because I think this is the sort of culture of this debate at the moment is one where the government....doesn't ar.... the cabinate office cus it's not all of government by the way...even within...in...the machinery of government....they're fighting...err...over this issue with different people having different agendas. One set want to support Kids Company and make sure that it survives and another set want to make sure (small laugh it sounds like) that it disappears.
ID: You see I...this is again...I think people find...struggle with this because going... if you go back to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown...ime...Gordon Brown was a massive supporter of yours, David Cameron has been a massive supporter, Ian Duncan Smith. I think people struggle with the fact that there are...so you say...people within government who want to see Kids Company disappear. Why would they do that? Why would they think that?
CB: I don't really know...err... why, but I think that what I do know is that I really had some major challenges...er...with...erm... over the fact that I kept telling them that the child protection situation in this country was really problematic. I had..err...err...quite a few arguments with Michael Gove..err..with...umm....Tim Loughton...over...
ID: He's the former children's minister...yeah
CB: ...err...yeah....before...the...the...it became evident that there was very serious problems of child sexual abuse...
ID: Neither of them are...well...Tim Loughton isn't a government minister any more, Michael Gove is now at the Justice Department so they can't be having any influence on what's happening now...
CB: Well they are actually...umm....Tim Loughton keeps coming out publically and saying that he didn't want us to get a grant when he was in the Department of Education and this is so disingenous again because he was having cups of tea with me...err....in my office. Never did he suggest, that there was any problem whatsoever with the way we were functioning ...err...I don't have in our possession a single letter from government that says, we misreported, we didn't do things properly...err..we should change anything so to hear from them...er....and to hear from civil servants that have never come to Kids Company, never met us, that they recommended that we didn't get the money, it's like you suddenly think what are you dealing with...these people have never been there.
ID: Erm...let me put something to you that you said to Victoria Derbyshire yesterday. You said ..."I am being supressed because I know about sexual abuse claims against senior people"
CB: No I didn't say...
ID: No that...that's a direct quote...
CB: No...what I'm...what I said is...generally, I believe that there is a supression of people who are speaking up about child protection. The government's closed, the college of social work. It was....
ID: No no this was something specific that you said...you said..."I am being supressed because I know about sexual abuse claims against senior people." IE, to do with the child sex inquiry.
CB: No what I'm trying....yes I do know about....err...umm..sss...I have been communicated with by child protection police officers who are investigating....and who have been investigating....er...very well known people...
ID: No but your alegation was that the government are trying to supress you...
CB: No...no...I ...that's the....q.....I'm just about to explain it to you....I...I said that in the wider context that there is a suppression of people who are speaking up about child protection..err....and I personally have spoken up about child protection issues....err...related to now...and I've been approached by police officers...err... in relation to historic child sexual abuse cases.
ID: ....but, but the implication here is that you believe that people within government whether it's one or two politicians or senior civil servants are trying to keep you quiet because of what you know about historic child sexual abuse cases.
CB: No, I think they're trying generally to get rid of people who are challenging them about child sexual abuse issues...
ID: Why is that?
CB:...because I think there is a big problem in this country in relation to massive scale child sexual abuse, childhood maltreatment across the country, current and there is very serious concerns in relation to well known people in the past and and that is not my business to discuss, the inquiry will do that.
ID: No...no but but your direct allegation therefore is that there are people in...in current government whether politicians or senior civil servants who have an interest in keeping this quiet and by keeping you quiet they can keep that quiet.
(aaand she uses the word stuff - I used to use that word a lot when I knew jack shit)
CB: I think they..they...do have an interest in keeping historic sexual abuse allegations quiet, you don't need my personal evidence, it's all unfolding isn't it...err... senior ministers were abusing children. Civil servants....some civil servants were involved in surpressing the evidence and what I'm saying is even now I'm aware of police officers who have evidence in relation to this stuff having their investigations not addressed appropriately and I've been in discussion with that group of people as well.
ID: Now what about the allegations that have been made in the last 24 hours against your organisation for...i think...surpressing is probably over doing it but not acting on allegations of sexual abuse that went on within Kids Company.
CB: First of all I need to really correct this...err... the challenge, that has been brought to us...is not...is not...about sexual abuse within Kids Company. It's really, really important to differentiate that. The police...
ID: Well the Newsnight allegation last night you were sitting in the studio watching the film as I was watching it on TV
CB: ....I'm trying to explain to you what it was. What has been brought to our attention is that allegedly, there had been some sexual activity between two young adults...err..and we had that information. The sexual activity allegedly, did not take place at Kids Company...but we had that information and we didn't report it. As it transpires, we didn't have that information so actually this allegation and the way it's been constructed is so untrue.
ID: But..but the allegation was th...th...that the girl involved....who I think was aged 16 or 17 she, she apparently says she did report it to Kids Company staff and it wasn't acted upon. You're saying that she didn't.
CB: The...I can't go into detail but what I can tell you is that...err...from the information we were given this individual wasn't even a Kids Company per....err...student or individual.
ID: Where do we go from here? I mean I heard you say recently that you wanted to have an opportunity to restart Kids Company which I can understand just from the point of view of the children that now are left in limbo. If a philanthropist came up and said Camila I completely believe in you I think that you've been traduced I think this is completely unfair, here's 5 million pounds to restart. Would you?
CB: Yea....My concern is not Kids Company, or myself, my concern is that we shut the door, to a lot of children and young people and destitute families who saw Kids Company as their home and their family environment. What people don't realise is that unfortunately, a very destructive...err..media game and a series of unfair and inaccurate briefings lead to the destruction of what in effect was a home for a lot of kids and what I'm trying to do is to try and see whether we can recreate that community which was very very important to those children and young people.
(Sounds to me like it was Camila's family, Camila's home and now Camila hasn't got anything else)
ID: I said to someone last night that I was going to interview you today and they said to me...err...well can you put this question to her...they said she doesn't...she seems to blame everyone else here for whats gone wrong here and doesn't seem to think that she's done anything wrong at all. Do you think you've done anything wrong at all?
(Her answer sounds like when you're at an interview and they ask you what you're bad at and you pick something positive to say as a negative like 'Oh sometimes I can be too conscientious and can stay too late at the office')
CB: I think I've....genuinely...i think I absolutely fell short of being able to raise the right amount of money. I also didn't manage to get the machinery of government to come to the table appropriately and it's very telling that it took us to close for all these local authorities and the cabinate office, to eventually come together to decide what to do about these destitute and devastated children. It would have been good if they'd come before, which is what I really needed. I found it very difficult to see for example the leader of one local authority criticise us in the media, when I know that just one of the families, we've been referring over 20 times for child protection to this particular borough and they wouldn't take..err... the case and this is the sort of experience that we have had which has made it so difficult for us. We were completely overwhelmed by the scale of the problem arriving at our door and I failed to fundraise for it this last year and I failed to be able to get...err...government and local authorities to absorb the seriousness of the concerns that we were carrying.
ID: And just finally, if you can't...er...restart Kids Company, what does your future hold, have you thought about it?
(If I was her, I'd say it's all about the kids again.....oh wait...)
CB: Er..no...because...m...my entire concern has actually been...err...the children. Literally what I am worried about is that there are groups of them, who won't have enough to eat next week. (Can they come to your house? You seem to be eating ok) So I'm just right now, trying to concentrate on finding the money for that and that's why it's so important to clear up these allegations of financial mismanagment which are so untrue because that has implications about whether I will be able to raise the money to then be able to meet these childrens needs.
ID: Well if there are any philanthropists listening we'll put them in touch with you...
CB: Thank you very much.
ID: Camila Batmanghelidjh thank you so much for taking so much time with us here on LBC
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