Acevo and NCVO have warned the government against extending the Freedom of Information Act to charities.
In December the Cabinet Office minister, Matthew Hancock, told the Telegraph that he was in favour extending FoI to charities. But yesterday, in an opinion piece for the Sunday Telegraph, Sir Stephen Bubb, chief executive of Acevo, warned the measure was “a blunderbuss” that would “do nothing for transparency” and “ultimately harm good causes”.
“Charities are already regulated by the Charity Commission. Do they need more rules?” he said. “Do we really want our charity leaders and volunteers spending their time fielding all manner of FoI requests, let alone having to appoint the staff to do it?”
Bubb called into question the practicality of a vicar “facing demands that she answers to requests for information on the consumption of communion wine” and a local cricket club forced to “disclose how much beer was consumed at their annual dinner”.
A review of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 was ordered last year after the Supreme Court overrode ministers in demanding the publication of Prince Charles’ ‘spider letters’.
A five-strong Independent Commission on Freedom of Information was established in July, to consider a raft of new measures. Oral evidence sessions will be held on 20 and 25 January and it will publish a report shorly afterwards.
The Commission proposed extending the Act to charities in the wake of the Kids Company collapse, after it emerged the charity received £46m of public money since 2001.
This morning an NCVO spokeswoman said the organisation welcomed proposals for greater transparency. But she said there were “more effective, efficient and proportionate ways to create it than by extending the FoI Act to service providers directly”.
“Businesses and charities running public services should be required to collect the data necessary to monitor their performance, and this information should be made openly available or subject to FoI via the contracting authority. The government's approach to opening up data on public service contracts is encouraging but there is still further to go,” she said.
If changes to the Act are approved, they could come into effect from early next year.
Last week the charity sector think tank NPC said on its blog that an extension of the Act to charities was “right in principle”.
“If charities receive a lot of taxpayers’ cash, they should be open to formal scrutiny,” it said.
But it also called for the addition of a “sensible threshold before this kicks in”.
“It is reasonable to subject a charity to FoI requests if they control millions in public contracts, but not if their public income is limited to a few thousand pounds from a local authority,” it said.
“A bigger question turns on what happens to private sector bodies who also win big government contracts to deliver services. If more is demanded of charities then the same must apply to their counterparts in other sectors. This is about greater transparency, not holding charities to a higher standard. What’s good for ActionAid must also be good for A4e.”
