It’s astonishing what we take for granted. Back in early 2010, the most the Evening Standard had ever raised in a campaign was £250,000. That was considered a pretty good result back then for the paper’s traditional annual Christmas drive, which typically solicited funds for a chosen charity. Today, a Standard campaign that raises anything short of £1 million can seem like a failure.
The game changer was the Evening Standard Dispossessed Fund, which I launched in 2010 under new proprietor Evgeny Lebedev and then editor Geordie Greig. Our exposé of inequality in London began with the heart-wrenching story of a young teenager who had been saving for months to raise the £19 fee he needed to apply to university and it resulted in dozens of £19 cheques being sent in by readers — and a place opening up at a London university.
Our initial five-day series of articles included the revelation of secret mass paupers’ graves for babies from impoverished families — a scandal that implicated almost every London council — with our reporting hailed by Prince William as “a call to arms”. When, months later, we launched the Dispossessed Fund, setting a £1 million goal, it struck such a chord with readers that we raced to that total in 20 days and went on to raise an extraordinary £4 million. Later that year I published a book, Calling London — How a City’s Dispossessed Found a Voice, in which I told the story of our initiative and predicted this was just the beginning of a whole new way of doing campaigns at the Standard — and, just as importantly, engaging with the underbelly of London.
Thirteen years later and many things have changed at the Standard — including six new editors and acting editors and surviving a potentially existential shock to circulation due to Covid — but one of the things that has remained constant is our commitment to bold and high-profile campaigning journalism.
We have, inter alia, tackled literacy (2011), joblessness (2012 and 2021), gangs (2013), estate-based violence (2015), food insecurity (2016 and 2020), knife crime (2018), the opioid crisis (2018), cannabis drugs policy (2019), school exclusions (2019), school hunger (2022) and the cost of living crisis (2022 and our current 2023 Winter Survival Appeal in partnership with Comic Relief), as well as being first out of the blocks in response to the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire and the 2022 Ukraine war.
We have brought good news for families struggling under the weight of poverty, violence and exclusion. But there is still a huge amount of work to be done
Our unique partnership with the London Community Foundation, who manage the Dispossessed Fund, has allowed us to give out millions in grants to charities across the capital working to help lift people out of poverty. For the Grenfell Tower tragedy, we raised more than £7.4 million, attracting more donations than the Red Cross, showing the high esteem in which the Dispossessed Fund is held.
In total, including several additional Christmas campaigns that I have not mentioned, we have raised a phenomenal £58 million, an average of £4.46 million a year. The high point was the £10 million we raised for The Felix Project, London’s largest surplus food distributor, in our 2020 Food For London Now campaign which sought to alleviate food poverty for Londoners during the Covid epidemic.
But it isn’t just about fundraising. In important ways, we have changed the way our capital city is governed. In 2018, we criticised the Mayor, Sadiq Khan, for his lack of leadership, in particular for failing to set up a centralised violence reduction unit based on the public health model, which had been so effective in Glasgow. The Mayor said such a unit was not necessary and would not work in London, but weeks after our campaign launched, the Mayor did a dramatic U-turn and announced that he was setting up a centralised violence reduction unit based on the Glasgow model. This led to a more joined-up approach to tackling youth violence in London.
In 2022, we again had an impact on the lives of thousands of Londoners when our 2022 School Hunger Special Investigation highlighted the plight of 800,000 children in poverty in England whose parents are on Universal Credit but not eligible for free school meals because their parents earned above the risible Government threshold of £7,400 a year. We called for these children to be supported as well and months later the Mayor, in a much-lauded £130 million scheme, agreed to give all primary school children in London free school meals for one year. It meant that 100,000 children in poverty in London who previously did not get free school meals would now get them — a game changer.
Our campaigns have also led to critical policy changes, not least in drug management. In a notable win for our 2018 investigative campaign, The Opioid Timebomb, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency agreed to completely rethink and change drug packaging law. Five words — “Contains opioid. Can cause addiction” — were put in place on opioid products as a direct result of our investigation, bringing us in line with US addiction warnings and potentially saving thousands of people from unknowingly becoming addicted to opioids. Until our campaign, none of the five strongest opioids had an explicit addiction warning on the packaging. All the pharmaceutical companies involved agreed to commit to this change.
We also had the Government approach us on several occasions to contribute funds to our campaigns. This included Save London Lives in 2018 where we funded 66 grassroots organisations tackling serious youth violence and where the Home Office approached us unsolicited and gave us £800,000 to help fund the amazing work these groups were doing.
Many press awards have followed, making us one of the most lauded campaigning newspapers in the UK. We have punched above our weight, winning Campaign of the Year three times, the Hugh Cudlipp Award for campaigning and investigative journalism twice, the Paul Foot Award for investigative or campaigning journalism and more than a dozen other criminal justice and civic awards.
More importantly, we have brought good news for families struggling under the weight of poverty, violence and exclusion. There is still a huge amount of work to be done. Back in 2010 when we began this phase of intensive campaigning, I reported that around 44 per cent of the capital’s children lived below the poverty line. Today the child poverty rate in London is slightly down at 42 per cent, but still higher than the 31 per cent rate in the rest of Britain. More innovative campaigning beckons.
