SIMON BAIN

The failure of Kids Company, the South London charity which ran through £47million of taxpayer cash in seven years, stands in stark contrast to the 35-year success of another charity with a mission to the young unemployed.

Scottish Business in the Community is majority funded by business, it works in partnership with public agencies, and it has developed tried and tested programmes for bringing together employers, schools and the vulnerable unemployed such as ex-offenders.

For Jane Wood, SBC’s chief executive for six years, and surely the only ex-model to advise the government on child poverty and sit on the CBI council, the KidsCo scandal is an important lesson.

“My board would not have vetted such a project,” Mrs Wood says. “The sad issue around the charity in London highlights the importance of charities being really sustainable, their partnerships and their funding models and their governance.”

Earlier this month SBC members voted for a merger with Business in the Community, its bigger English counterpart, to help deliver a “national action plan for responsible business”.

Mrs Wood says: “We want to create an infrastructure to engage bigger businesses in Scotland, many of whom are headquartered down south. We want to pull that investment up to Scotland.”

This week she unveiled an agreement with Children in Scotland to work with one of those companies, catering giant Brakes, on “an innovative and sector-leading project in 2016 to address the major social issue of food poverty and its links with wellbeing, learning and attainment”.

Focusing initially on two areas with significant levels of child poverty – Ibrox in Glasgow and Irvine in North Ayrshire – the project will enable schools and communities to access free meals at weekends and holiday times.

Mrs Wood said: “As the leading voice on responsible business in Scotland, SBC is determined to unlock the education, employment and enterprise potential of our disadvantaged communities.”

On September 18 last year, referendum day, mother of four Mrs Wood claimed that business “shares the nation's responsibility to tackle poverty, improve education and employability, and harness the potential of the workforce”. A stronger role for business in addressing social, environmental and economic issues was “fundamental to Scotland's success”, she said.

As public affairs chief for Boots it was Mrs Wood, married to East Lothian artist Christopher Wood, who persuaded the English corporation to invest £3.6m in Lanarkshire regeneration after its damaging factory closure at Airdrie 10 years ago. That led to her involvement with regeneration initiatives Fusion Assets and Retail Rocks, Edinburgh Chamber, Essential Edinburgh, which she chaired, and SBC, where after six years on the board she took over as interim chief executive in 2009.

Six years on, she has led SBC’s evolution from a member-led body focused on a handful of schemes to a significant player and broker in the ‘responsible business’ movement.

She now becomes external affairs director for BIC across the UK, and its managing director in Scotland.

“We don’t want CSR (corporate social responsibility) to sit separately, we want it integrated into a business to be measurable and quantifiable, so it can show its customers it has a competitive edge. I think the title CSR is dead – responsible business is here.

Mrs Wood cites the VW crisis as a warning. “Business are vulnerable, consumers are savvy now and so informed, we have access to so much information with social media, businesses have less places to hide.”

She respects the Scottish government’s commitment to social justice. But she questions whether its ‘business pledge’ launched at the start of 2015, where companies sign up to commitments led by paying the Living Wage, will fully engage companies in the responsible business agenda.

“It doesn’t reflect business’s wish to engage with society or what businesses are doing...what really worries me is government is not capturing the business activities out there and the automatic ones that are integrated into their business model. It doesn’t know what that looks like as an economic figure.....we need to know what they are doing at the moment, where they are doing it, where it fits into their model, and how the government can play a role in increasing that in pursuit of the fairer, wealthier Scotland agenda.”

Last year the Wood Commission concluded that education was failing half of Scotland’s young people, and made comprehensive recommendations for engaging employers with schools.

“I wonder whether the dissemination and implementation of that report has had the impact that was expected,” Mrs Wood says. “The monies around it were deployed into local authorities to use for activities in schools and to a certain extent business engagement.”

She suggests putting more resources behind a UK-wide initiative with a proven track record. Business Class, run by Business in the Community and SBC, commits companies to a three-year working partnership with schools, helping teachers cope with the extra demands of engagement.

“One of the reasons it’s hard for schools and local authorities to achieve the objectives of the Wood report is that schools and teachers are so pressurised and have so little resource and businesses are watching their bottom line. Quite often schools are inundated with offers of support from either the third sector or businesses – and they can’t manage it.” The initiative creates bespoke programmes for clusters of schools, which businesses know they can deliver, teachers can accept, and schools can validate and measure.

“Why do we have to reinvent the wheel?” Mrs Wood says. “Investment has gone into this and it’s been running for six years with huge engagement from big businesses and from SMEs as well.”