The charity sector is “lost” unless it understands how and why the UK’s political and economic systems are “deeply flawed”, the former chief executive of Oxfam GB has warned.

Speaking at the think tank NPC’s annual conference in London yesterday, Danny Sriskandarajah – who is now chief executive of the think tank New Economics Foundation – urged charities to improve their understanding of the country’s systemic socioeconomic challenges.

Sriskandarajah said: “I think we are inheritors of a deeply flawed political system, and unless we understand how and why it's flawed and our role within it, we are lost. 

“We are also inheritors of a deeply broken economic system, and unless we understand how and why it's broken and our role within it, we will not achieve the change we desire.”

He said he worried that too many UK charities were becoming complacent and not “walking the talk” with regards to tackling the country’s socio-economic challenges.

Sriskandarajah said that civil society also needs to better “understand what changes we might need to make within our own sector, within our own system”.

“If civil society doesn’t act, it risks becoming a sector that does a lot of little things here and there without a sense of what we’re trying to achieve,” he said.

Sriskandarajah said he was concerned about the sector’s lack of engagement with economic policy specifically, saying: “Those of us in civil society have assumed that we do what we do alongside economic life, and the economy will be fine. 

“Unless we understand how deeply problematic the wider economic system is, we're lost because all we're doing is playing our little part in a system that's driving inequality.”

Sriskandarajah said: “But if we really are to deliver more power to the people, to rescue these deeply flawed systems, to reinvent them, then we need to be intentional about it. 

“We need to be thoughtful about it. We need to join up and we need to think about walking the talk, so that all we do lives up to those values we claim to stand for.”