My friend Tom White, who has died aged 93, was director of social services at Coventry city council in the 1970s and 80s, before becoming chief executive of the National Children’s Home (NCH), where he spent more than a decade until his retirement.
When Tom first arrived at the NCH in 1985 it was running 128 projects on a budget of just over £22m; by 1996, it had changed its name to NCH Action for Children, and its spending had increased to £70m across 270 programmes, with the number of children it helped having increased fivefold.
