With great difficulty. I met with colleagues from True Patriot Love a year or so back and they asked a very similar question at that stage. It is difficult. Within the U.K. I think there are over 2,000 service charities. Some are very small, local; others very large—Help for Heroes, Royal British Legion, Combat Stress, etc.
One of the programs that we have run over the last three years is a strategic partnership program, where we have funded a group of service charities, the larger ones—so that's Royal British Legion, Combat Stress—but also with SSAFA, Help for Heroes, and one or two others. The idea of part of that program is creating an opportunity for central government, from the department and the Ministry of Defence, to have open, honest discussions with the service charities. We're all trying to achieve the same thing, we just may attack it a slightly different way. So we all know our starting point in that respect, but we also use that relationship for them to, if you like, cascade and take the views of the other agencies and the other charities out there.
Now I've stood on many a platform at conferences, etc., with service charities and have made the point that this whole system works best when you have the statutory and the service charities working like that. I don't think you can see my hands, but working very closely together, and not overlapping because that's a waste of resource. I've certainly said publicly that one of the challenges for the service charities is, wherever possible, to avoid that overlap.
That overlap does happen. It is inevitable. There are—and this isn't a criticism—a number of very small service charities that have been set up to provide a service, to provide, again, a particular need that they see locally, and that's to be supported. I think the more that they can start to work with some of the bigger charities, or recognize what the other charities are doing and complement them, the better. I think the important thing—I think this is an early stage and the service charities recognize that as well.
We have something over here called COBSEO, the Confederation of Service Charities. That's an umbrella body that has been created to help bring together the service charities as one. I think we have some way to go before we can really start to get them to move in a far more coordinated way. That will always be a challenge. But as I say, what we have achieved, I would suggest, over the last four or five years is a transparency and honesty with the service charities so that we can have a very good conversation about what we can do, and more importantly, what we can't do. Then we work with those services charities to say, “We can take it to this level; what is it that you can bring to the game to add to that?” So it's not replicating statutory services, because that's wrong, that's what the statutory services are there for and we must provide it. It's what is it in relation to veterans and their families we can do that will provide that added value? I think this where the programs, where we worked with Big White Wall, Combat Stress, Royal British Legion, have brought that added value—for a very small budget, I would suggest.