On the face of it, I am horrified to learn that the Samaritans, a life-saving charity, is closing at least half of its 200 branches around the UK and Ireland. 22,000 volunteers take calls from people going through mental health crises, at a rate of one call every ten seconds. It is impossible to know just how many lives have been saved since the charity was set up in 1953, but if I say that Samaritans has had over 134 million calls, you can imagine it’s quite a few. What kind of effects would closing so many branches have on both the services and those who provide them?
I’ve never used Samaritans, although I got close once or twice, but my own crises were dealt with by NHS psychiatry and, for some years, the excellent charity Off The Record. But I know people who do volunteer for Samaritans and a good few folk who have used the charity and are still here to tell the tale. Having been affected by suicide at various times throughout my life, any suggestion that the Samaritans work could be diminished horrifies me.
Hopefully, it’s all been thought through and Samaritans will carry on as it has done for the last 72 years but my concerns about the service extend beyond those at the end of their tether. It’s about those who volunteer, too. While people volunteer to literally save lives and ease people through their crises, they also do so because it benefits them and their own mental well-being and sense of worth. They do not necessarily want to work in a call centre or even from home. What worked in 1953 works perfectly well in 2025, they say. It ain’t broke, so why fix it?
The CEO Julie Bentley – is it just me that feels uneasy when a major charity has a CEO who earns a significant six-figure salary? – told volunteers that much of its fundraising income was going into “maintaining bricks and mortar, rather than being used to improve our services”. Well, yes, Bricks and mortar that volunteers work in, literally saving people’s lives. Isn’t that the whole point? The branches are a safe space for volunteers. Call centres and working from home, which I know does work for many people and should be encouraged for those who wish to do so in all circumstances and not just charities, does not work for everyone.
Charities, lest we forget, exist only because society does not believe something is worth having paid for collectively by taxation. That’s why charities exist, to stop people starving to death or killing themselves, to give but two examples. And many charities are seeing their incomes falling, Samaritans among them. That, I guess, is why the suits at the top see the need to make what they will refer to as “difficult decisions“, which always means in all circumstances making things worse for everyone except the suits at the top.
I do not have a similar experience of volunteering, but if my work for a food bank meant working from home, by telephone or whatever, I probably wouldn’t want to do it. My food bank, with colleagues some of whom are now friends, is my safe space, somewhere we support and give comfort to each other, as well as helping people on the front line of poverty. It’s different and yet, strangely, much the same. It’s all about people. And people, whether it’s those we are helping or those who work with me, they all matter, I value them all.
The proposed changes to Samaritans are literally life and death changes. So they’d better get it right. Bentley employs a worrying amount of business-speak in this Guardian article, saying things like, “changing needs”, “thinking differently about the way our services need to work” and “we are engaging with our volunteers“. Frankly, these are terms I would expect to hear from some poxy networking group and not a charity that helps our society civilised. But I suppose I digress.
Whatever the suits at Samaritans demand, it should surely be those seeking help and those providing it who come first in this equation? One need that is not changing is the need to help people deal with their mental health crises, Anything else is just noise.
