The CEO of a Headway charity in the West Midlands

The CEO of a local Headway charity in the West Midlands told us about the delays in payments her Headway charity has experienced with the local authority and local ICB.

In 2024, the Headway charity received confirmation of funding for a brain injury survivor to attend their services under a Continuing Healthcare package funded by a local ICB.

Despite sending repeated invoices for this package to the ICB’s finance team, and chasing them with emails and phone calls, the ICB did not send through any payment for over six months. The charity used its reserves to fund the survivor’s hours with them, so that he could continue to attend.

Eventually, the local Headway had to involve the survivor’s social worker and tell them that it would not be possible for the survivor to continue to attend Headway services unless they received payment. This was a terrible position to be in – both for the survivor and the charity – but was a last-resort attempt to extract payment from an unresponsive and then defensive ICB.

Payment was eventually received, but not without months of chasing on the part of the local Headway’s finance officer and the CEO. The survivor is still attending Headway services, which are essential to their wellbeing.

A further example from the same charity is of a survivor funded by a local authority, who received funding to attend both one-to-one services and day centre services. He stopped attending one-to-one services but continued to attend the day centre service.

However, when the survivor stopped attending the one-to-one service, the local authority stopped providing any funding at all for him, even though he was still attending the day centre service.

The local Headway is still in dispute with the local authority to retrieve this funding – after four months spent chasing it with no response. Again, the charity has eaten into its reserves in order to ensure that the survivor can continue to attend services – but this is not sustainable.

The charity’s finance officer now has to carve out time in her weekly schedule specifically to chase unpaid invoices from local authorities and ICBs. In addition, a week before payments are due, she diarises time to chase and prompt, knowing that payments will be late if she doesn’t do this. And despite the time and effort put into this, there is often no response unless the CEO is involved.

These are just two examples of the many delayed and disputed payments that local Headway charities across the UK are having to spend time and money trying to resolve. Time and money that could be spent providing services for brain injury survivors.

Other smaller Headway charities do not have the time to chase payments, and do not have the reserves to fund services while experiencing payment delays and disputes. Local authorities and ICBs need to provide prompt and accurate payment – or many local Headway charities will not be able to survive, and brain injury survivors will need to be supported by more costly, and often inappropriate, state services.