The Charity Commission is in crisis, Peter Kyle, newly elected MP for Hove and Portslade and former deputy chief executive of Acevo, told delegates at this year's Labour Party conference yesterday.
Speaking at an event run by the Charities Aid Foundation called Testing Testing: Hear what MPs and the Public Really Think about Charity, Kyle said that the challenges that face the charity sector at the moment are "extraordinary" and can seem "insurmountable" at times.
He said that charities are under attack from all sides and that there is a disappointing lack of voices standing up for the sector.
Kyle said that the Charity Commission is currently suffering a crisis and that this is partly due to lack of funding, but that it is also now suffering a moral and purpose challenge as well.
"It doesn't even know what it is there for anymore,” he said. “Particularly in recent weeks when you see its failure to regulate some of the government's challenges within the sector and its failure to regulate the fundraising practices some charities have been doing. And the failure to stand up for the sector it is there to regulate. I think there is a real challenge there, if anyone is there fighting your corner it should be the Charity Commission. And I just don't see that it is."
He also spoke about how the charity sector is one of the only sectors where if an issue arises at one charity, it is taken to be representative of the whole sector.
Talking on the collapse of Kids Company he said: "Kids Company, which was fundamentally a very limited and very specific governance challenge, actually came to symbolise a broader challenge which I think was really unfair."
He said in terms of the current friction in the fundraising sector that it is disappointing that other charities are "not standing up and saying ‘actually we don't do this, and this isn't representative of how we do things.’ Most charities are extraordinarily well run and use fundraising practices which have extreme sensitivity towards the people they are fundraising with."
John Low, chief executive of Charities Aid Foundation, told delegates that the sector had done wrong, and that it needed to pull its act together.
He said: "Public trust in charities has fallen significantly. We have done things wrong and we didn't act fast enough to some of the issues that were burning in the heart of the nation. We will fix it as a sector, we have to pull our act together."
The session followed on from the launch of research this month by CAF into what the public and MPs think about charities.
Today Sarah Atkinson, Director of policy and communications at the Charity Commission, said in response that there was strong support for her organisation's approach.
“The Charity Commission’s strategic plan, published in June, clearly sets out our four key strategic and operational priorities for the years to 2018," she said. "They are to protect charities from abuse and mismanagement, enable trustees to run their charities effectively, encourage greater transparency and accountability in charities, and to operate as an efficient expert regulator with sustainable funding.
"Research into public trust and confidence in the Commission, also published in June, shows strong support from our stakeholders, and the public, for the Commission’s regulatory approach.”
