Sir Stephen Bubb, former chief executive of the charity leaders network Acevo, has a long track record of advocacy for charities to play a bigger part in the provision of public services.

Although its never good to rush these things, its taken us almost one and a half millennia to work out exactly what charities are for. And we still arent sure.

We are a sector that delivers, campaigns, balances both, concluded Sir Stephen Bubb, who was thinking great thoughts about the future of charities after he surveyed their history in a lecture on 3 July at Oxford University. But, he conceded, their role in relation to government was still not settled.

Bubb, until recently leader of charity chief executives body Acevo, is essaying a way forward for the voluntary sector in his new capacity at the Charity Futures programme he has established. His lecture was an attempt to encapsulate the sectors story so far.

Starting in the year 597, when St Augustine founded The Kings School in Canterbury still a charity today Bubb demonstrated that charities have always delivered public services and campaigned for change.

Critics of charities latter-day engagement in the justice and penal systems should note that they were running prisons from the 12th century, he said. Critics of their political campaigning should note their decisive part in great social reform movements like the abolition of slavery.

Some of the best modern charities managed to combine both roles, he argued, citing the way the former Royal National Institute for Deaf People, now Action on Hearing Loss, had in the late 1990s campaigned forcefully and successfully for the provision of digital hearing aids on the NHS while continuing to work in partnership with state services.

While this showed it was a false dilemma to suggest that charities needed to choose between providing services and lobbying to change them, Bubb admitted that the sector had never fully recovered its sure-footedness in the former arena since the birth of the welfare state 70 years ago.

Charities have always delivered public services and campaigned for change

That singular advance of the state in service provision had given rise to the idea of subsidiarity that charities should do only those things the state did not, and where they developed innovative and proven ways of delivering services, those should become state services.

Bubb has a long track record of advocacy for charities to play a bigger part in the provision of public services. So his case against subsidiarity and for a return to what he called our good old English fashion, quoting the Duke of Wellington on the 19th century voluntary sectors clear dual role of service delivery and robust campaigning, needs to be seen in that light.

But other voices are also urging charities to make more of what they do and to be more confident of the effect they have.

In a survey by FTI Consulting for Pro Bono Economics, which enlists volunteer economists to work with charities, 81% of 1,100 members of the public said they would prioritise donations to charities that could demonstrate their economic impact.

Pro Bono said the finding showed the critical importance of being able to show and quanitify value in the post-truth era.

Julia Grant, chief executive of Pro Bono, said that by their own admission, many charities would struggle to demonstrate their impact on society in terms of hard evidence, but building the capacity to prove the importance of their work is crucial to their future stability and sustainability.

It goes almost without saying that Bubb was already on the case in his lecture. Charities spent 1,578 every second improving lives and supporting communities, he calculated. And that included animal charities rescuing 800 stray cats every week.

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Charities can deliver services and campaign robustly - The Guardian