News

New fines as street fundraising rulebook comes into effect

Fundraising | Celina Ribeiro | 20 Aug 2012

Street fundraising organisations will be subject to fines for breaching the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association’s rulebook from today.

The rulebook, which was launched last August and originally due to come into effect in early spring this year contains a number of beefed up and new penalties for new rules governing how face-to-face fundraising is practised.

One hundred-point - or £100 – penalties now apply to fundraisers not making solicitation statements and organisations failing to run their solicitation statements past the PFRA for compliance checks. Fundraisers which leave bags unattended on public highways are now also liable for the 100-point fine.

A further lot of £100 fines relates to protecting fundraising organisations’ turf and staff: the maximum penalty now applies to fundraising organisations which poach other organisations’ employees (previously this attracted a 50-point fine) and those which work on sites already booked by another organisation.

The rulebook was first developed at the request of the Institute of Fundraising to provide greater guidance on how charities and agencies fundraising on behalf of charities can comply with the Institute’s code of practice on face-to-face fundraising. The PFRA, however, delayed the introduction of the rulebook’s fine system until after the Institute finished its review of all its codes, which was announced earlier this year.  

The system works by fine points being attributed to fundraising organisations when a breach of the rulebook is confirmed, with breaches ranging in value from 20 to 100 points. Each point is worth a £1 fine, but the fine will only come into effect when an organisation accrued 1,000 points within a financial year; all points are cleared at the end of each year.  

Sally de la Bedoyere, the new chief executive of the PFRA, said that the rulebook was a “prime example” of what sector bodies can achieve when they work together.  

“For a form of fundraising that is so regularly in the limelight, it is vitally important that fundraisers work to the highest possible standards in order to maintain the confidence of the public, media, and central and local government,” she said.

At the PFRA’s annual general meeting this year, the organisation revealed that its own mystery shopping of street fundraising had shown that standards have been slipping over recent years. Following an expose in the Telegraph about poor practice by some fundraisers at the agency Tag, the Institute of Fundraising announced a charity-only summit to discuss the future of the fundraising mechanism.

Director of policy and communications at the Institute of Fundraising, Ceri Edwards, said: “Every contribution to professional standards in fundraising is welcome and we look forward to working with the PFRA to make sure face-to-face fundraising remains a sustainable long-term option for charity fundraisers."

Directory: Institute of Fundraising | Public Fundraising Regulatory Association (PFRA)