The Charity Commission is the independent regulator for charities in England and Wales. Its overall mission is to ensure that charities work effectively amongst society for the benefit of the public.
The Charity Commission promotes legal compliance through publications and casework. It has strong legal powers to investigate and deal with fraud and dishonesty in charities, including the powers to protect and freeze charity assets, if a formal investigation establishes serous mismanagement or abuse. Whilst the Commission is not a prosecuting authority, it is authorised to work with the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, and other authorities.
Its role includes securing compliance with charity law, and dealing with abuse and poor practice; enabling charities to work better; promoting sound governance and accountability, and improving public confidence and trust in charities.
Most charities in England and Wales must register with the Commission and it also maintains the public Register of Charities.
Charities with annual incomes over £10,000 must, by law, send the Charity Commission their accounts and reports every year, within ten months of the end of their year-end. These are publicly available online. Charities that fail to meet these requirements are highlighted online.
The Commission is chaired by Dame Suzi Leather who joined in 2006 and was reinstated for a second term in the summer of 2009.
The Charity Commission is investigating the Royal Institution following reports that it has leased office space to a company run by its chairman without the regulator's permission.
HM Treasury has agreed to defer for a year the implementation of the international accounting standard that threatened to see donations to NHS charities lumped in to general NHS balance sheets.
Health minister Phil Hope told the House of Commons yesterday that charitable donations made to hospital fundraising campaigns will never become part of general NHS budgets.
Julian Smith examines the tax consequences for your charity should the Charity Commission decide it doesn't adequately meet the public benefit test.
The Charity Commission and OSCR are to host an event in London early next month to launch the findings from a series of SORP roundtable events and examine the consultation on the Future of UK GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles).
The Affinity Trust, formerly TACT UK, is appointing an independent pay committee to determine how much its board members should be paid, while at the same time applying for charitable status. The Trust, which supports people with learning disabilities in care homes and in the community, used to be an industrial and provident society (IPS), meaning it was exempt from registering with the Charity Commission.
St Anselm School, one of three charities that has failed the Charity Commission’s initial public benefit assessments, expects “a game of ping pong” with the Commission over the next nine months. Today, Highfield Priory School, St Anselm’s School Trust and Penylan House Jewish Retirement and Nursing Home will be responding to the Charity Commission’s public benefit report from July which said the charities did not provide enough opportunity for those who couldn’t afford their fees and gave them 12 months to come up with an action plan.
The First-tier Tribunal (Charity) has overturned the Charity Commission’s decision to remove Nagendram Seevaratnam from his trustee position at the South London-based temple Sivayogam. In its second case, the Tribunal (presided over by Alison McKenna, pictured) found that none of the Commission’s seven grounds for dismissing Seevaratnam were sufficient to justify the decision.
Charities that opt to become a Charitable Incorporated Organisation will follow the same accounting requirements as other unincorporated charities, after most respondents to a consultation on the detail of the new legal form supported this approach.
Two pieces of research released by the Charity Commission and NCVO on the same day last week appear to give conflicting results about the sector’s confidence in the recession. According to the Charity Commission’s third Economic Survey of Charities, 71 per cent of the 1,001 charities polled said they felt optimistic about the outlook for the next six months.
In the first of a series of articles, Vibeka Mair examines the reaction from existing social investment retailers to the proposed new Social Investment Wholesale Bank. On 15 July, more than two years after the Commission on Unclaimed Assets made a strong case for a big chunk of the money lying in dormant bank accounts to find its way into the voluntary sector, the government launched a consultation on a proposed Social Investment Wholesale Bank (SIWB).
The Charity Commission has fired off a letter to all MPs and peers to remind them that it was parliament that created the public benefit requirement and not the Commission, in the wake of the recent media backlash against the failure of two independent schools to pass the public benefit test. The letter, from the Commission’s chair Dame Suzi Leather (pictured) and chief executive Andrew Hind, begins: “You may have seen some media coverage recently regarding the Charity Commission’s public benefit assessments of 12 charities including some independent schools.
Dame Suzi Leather will serve a second term as Charity Commission chair, charities minister Angela Smith has announced. Smith said: “Dame Suzi has led the Charity Commission through the most radical changes in charity law in modern times and has earned respect for her independence and strength in her decision making. I am very pleased that she has accepted a further three year term.”
Nearly a thousand charities in the UK shut between 2007 and 2008, according to a Charity Commission report published in March. In May, Russam GMS surveyed over 450 interim managers who work at a senior level in the UK charity sector to understand how the sector was faring in the recession. Of the respondents, 76 per cent reported that income levels have fallen in charities across the UK since the start of the financial crisis, 20 per cent claimed they were stable and just 4 per cent said they had increased. It is clear that a major challenge facing many UK charities is how to cope in light of reduced donations and tougher competition for funding, find new income streams and improve operational efficiencies to save costs. Another challenge highlighted by over half of interim managers was that key business projects have been put on hold, 20 per cent claimed that recruitment efforts have been frozen, 15 per cent said IT investment had been put on the back burner and 10 per cent said that marketing plans had been shelved. On top of that, 74 per cent of interims also said that job cuts had already been made in the organisations in which they worked.
The Aldridge Foundation, which was set up by former Capita chief executive Rod Aldridge, has filed its accounts late with the Charity Commission every year since its launch in 2005.
The Charity Commission is resisting pressure from public sector auditors to consolidate charities' accounts into the group accounts of public bodies, where the public bodies are the corporate trustee of a charity or appoint its trustees.
The proposal to pass regulatory duties for collective investment schemes for charities from the Charity Commission to the Financial Services Authority may lead to increased fees, an investment adviser has warned.
Mike Greensmith advocates getting a clear picture of the detail – and asking all the right questions – to steer you through a recession
The Charity Commission has opened an inquiry into a charity where two of the perpetrators of the London bombings - Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shezad Tanweer - were once trustees.
At least 124 more mosques have registered as charities since the Charity Commission's Faith and Social Cohesion Unit began to focus on Muslim groups, despite its female outreach officers encountering hostility in some quarters.
Charities may avoid being red flagged for late accounts submission on the Charity Commission's online register by uploading any pdf, regardless of whether it is their accounts document or not.
English charities which are subsidiaries of foreign organisations must make their own decisions, explains Stephen Lloyd. The recent Charity Commission enquiry into the World Children’s Fund has highlighted the question of relationships between English charities and their overseas’ “relations”. Those relations can be either a parent or a subsidiary.
The Charity Commission has threatened George Galloway MP with High Court action for ignoring repeated requests to discuss its inquiry into the Viva Palestina appeal.
The Charity Commission is looking on the bright side with its upcoming staff survey.
The Charity Commission has published three more example annual reports, covering parochial church councils, fee-charging schools and grant-giving trusts, as guidance on reporting public benefit. “The examples are not templates”, said Andrew Hind (pictured), the Commission’s chief executive, “but we hope they will prove a useful tool for trustees as they report on their public benefit for the first time in the next set of annual accounts published after 31 March 2009.
The Charity Tribunal has asked for further evidence to help it decide whether the Charity Commission was wrong to prevent two Catholic charities from being allowed to discriminate against gay people when choosing prospective parents for adoption.
The Charity Commission responds to an insomniac chair, wracked with worry about trading while insolvent
The new charity being formed by the merger of Age Concern England and Help the Aged is drawing up a “new, wide-ranging strategy for engaging with older people” to replace Heyday, Age Concern’s troubled membership arm. ACE will shut Heyday down after a Charity Commission review found its governance to be severely lacking.
Nearly half of all mosques in England and Wales are confident to use the Charity Commission for advice and support, according to the first mosque survey carried out on behalf of the regulator's Faith and Social Cohesion Unit.
