CHARITY shops are being hit by a double whammy of doorstep bag collections and people choosing to sell on their own items.

David Cryer, chairman of the Charity Retail Association and head of retail for Oxford hospice charity Helen & Douglas House, has called on generous people to think of their local charity shops when they are having a clear-out.

He said: “People are getting lots of bags through their doors from commercial collectors.

“Some of them are genuine collectors for charity, but the percentage charities get is very small.

“The other half are completely bogus and are taking the stock and running away with it.”

He said the best way of making sure donations made the most profit for a good cause was to drop items off at a charity shop.

Mr Cryer said a worldwide increase in the price of secondhand clothing had seen a dramatic rise in the number of commercial organisations profiting from the trade.

And with the recession biting, he said that people were donating fewer items of designer clothing and instead selling them on places like Internet website eBay.

He said: “At Helen & Douglas House, we have maintained the quantity of donations very well, but some of the quality isn’t there.

“The designer brands are the ones we really get the best value for, and it seems people are themselves selling their own high-value goods and giving more run-of-the-mill clothing to charity shops. Do people really want to buy a secondhand Primark T-shirt for £1 when it was probably only £1.50 in the first place?”

Helen & Douglas House’s 35 charity shops bring in about £500,000 a year and Mr Cryer said that figure needed to continue to grow to support the hospice’s growing overheads.

Davina Wilkinson, manager at the Abingdon Sue Ryder shop, said she had noticed a drop in the value of items donated.

She said: “When I started in Abingdon eight or nine years ago, we used to get antique items before the advent of eBay, and now we’re very lucky if we get anything like that through the door, so it has had an impact on us.

“We can get £200 to £300 for a good piece of furniture. We would have to sell an awful lot of tops to match that.”

She said the charity now had drop-off points in places like banks and building societies where people could leave donations and be sure the intended charity received them.