More clients are being reached the charity says

Children’s charity NSPCC has spent £5.8m on restructuring during which staff numbers have dropped by 5%.

The restructuring has enabled the charity to reach 80% more children it says in its annual report.

Staff numbers fell by 88 to 1,732 with redundancies costing £1.8m. Anumber of service delivery centres were closed as part of the restructuring.

Adverse media coverage on charity fundraising made the organisation reappraise its approach, it admitted, meaning it didn’t invest as much in fundraising against previous years.

As such fundraising costs fell from £20.4m to £19.2m while expenditure on helping children fell from £98.2m to £91m.

Its annual report stated: “Our goal is always to do the most for children with the resources available to us and in 2016/17 we have reached approximately 80 per cent more children with marginally less income than we raised last year.

“These restructuring actions necessary to support the delivery of our strategic objectives has meant that we have incurred £5.8m of one-off costs this year related to restructuring and the write down of property and equipment.

“These actions have however ensured that we are able to plan for the achievement of our objectives in the longer term.

"Our plans for the future have been set in the context of a challenging economic climate and a difficult time for the charity sector as a whole.

“Following intense media and government scrutiny over fundraising practices we suspended some of our marketing activities in 2015/16 and this continued into the first part of 2016/17 as we ensured that everything we or our partners do meets the expectation of our supporters and the public at large.

“This resulted in reduced expenditure on TV advertising and volumes of mailings to our supporters.”