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Rising to debate on the thorny issue of governance

Finance | Tania Mason | 1 Dec 2007

There are few things about the voluntary sector guaranteed to raise a laugh, but the debate at the acevo annual conference is becoming a sure ticket.

This year was no exception, though the motion itself – ‘No longer semi-detached? – trustee boards are becoming powerful forces for better governance’ (draw breath now) – seemed almost designed to send delegates into a soporific trance rather than create a buzz of anticipation.

Charity Commission chief executive Andrew Hind kicked off the argument in favour of the motion with characteristic aplomb, suggesting that the ‘trustees’ of the first-ever charity, King’s School, in 597 AD, could not possibly have been semi-detached or they would never have bothered setting it up.

Trustees have been “the cement that has held the sector together throughout history”, Hind said. To this day, 85 per cent of registered charities have no full-time staff and are run collectively by more than 800,000 very dedicated trustees. “Hardly a sector where trustees are semi-detached,” he reasoned.

Now more than ever, he went on, there is evidence that boards are trying to improve their performance: the vast majority of the 200,000 calls to Charity Commission Direct are from trustees, more charities than ever before are getting their annual accounts in on time, and more than 1,000 trustees have joined Charity Trustee Networks since its launch a few months ago. All of which adds up to proof that the sector has every reason to be proud of its efforts at improving governance, Hind declared.

Anyone hearing BTCV chair Rupert Evenett’s opening comments in response might have been forgiven for thinking he too was in favour of the motion, as he admitted he agreed with Hind on lots of points. But then he knuckled down to the business at hand and said that actually, being semi-detached was part of a trustee’s job – they were meant to be strategic, and critical friends, and influencers rather than managers. “Being properly semi-detached is part of the solution, not part of the problem,” he concluded. To which the lady sitting next to me mumbled: “Couldn’t really follow his argument.” Quite.

Professional intellectual Nick Seddon came next with lots of big words which, when translated, meant that the sector was being forced to become more businesslike and better at governance because it was delivering more public services and thus coming under greater scrutiny. But it soon became obvious that Seddon would rather have been taking part in acevo’s 2005 debate about whether boards should be paid, as he strayed off into soundbites such as “Voluntarism is the nucleus of this nebulous sector” and “If you have to pay for diversity, is diversity only for charities with money?”. I liked this one, too: “The idea of payment is an answer searching for a question.” Not strictly the question at hand, perhaps, but a question nonetheless.

But it was the sarcasm-soaked address from Thames Reach chief executive Jeremy Swain what stole the show. “I’d invite you all to hang on to the fact that the motion is not that ‘boards are doing quite well’,” he warmed up, “but that they are ‘powerful forces for better governance’. Let’s look at some of the figures from Rodney Brooke’s new report on third sector governance then. Forty per cent of charities think their boards are effective at developing and reviewing strategy! Great – but what else are they there to do?

“Thirty two per cent give their trustees a tour of their projects as part of their induction – wow! And here’s the best yet – 61 per cent give them copies of governance documents! We really are powerful forces for change, aren’t we?”

Making sure we have trustees we can be semi-detached from is a challenge in itself, Swain continued, drawing on nfpSynergy’s latest study which told us that 90 per cent of charities have between one and five vacancies on their boards. Other research shows that 33 per cent of the public think trustees are paid. “I can hear Stephen Bubb now – he’s thinking ‘that’s a good target!’.”

He went on to invoke a football analogy, relating a chant that supporters of his beloved West Ham throw out at their team: ‘You don’t know what you’re doing’, and said he sometimes imagines he can hear that same line levelled at charities from outside the sector. “The thing is, we don’t want to be playing in the Vauxhall Conference any more – we want to be in the Premiership.”

Then, in a calculated change of tone, Swain went for the heartstrings. “Don’t be charmed by these very charming people, what they are saying is pure sophistry,” he told the audience. “When the level of governance creates dysfunction among our organisations, it affects our beneficiaries.”

Andrew Hind, though, wasn’t having any of it. In his reply, he reminded delegates that the UK voluntary sector is considered the best in the world, a reputation that could not possibly have been achieved “by a bunch of no-hopers”.

Nick Seddon strayed slightly off-piste again, pointing out that the acevo survey hadn’t bothered to ask chairs whether they thought their CEOs were fit for purpose, “and you also have to ask yourself whether this study is representative of the entire sector”. To which the lady next to me ventured drily: “He’s just lost it now”.

But Jeremy Swain had the last word: “This is about being aspirational...if you vote for this you are failing everybody in the sector.”

It worked – the motion was only narrowly defeated, but defeated nonetheless

Directory: Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (ACEVO) | Charity Commission | Charity Trustee Networks (CTN)
Who's Who: Jeremy Swain | Nick Seddon | Tania Mason | Andrew Hind CB