The Charity Commission spent nearly more than £445,000 on recruitment advertising and services in the last financial year, and has budgeted to reduce the figure to £200,000 for the current year.

Charity Commission chief executive Andrew Hind (pictured) revealed in a letter to parliament tabled on Monday that the regulator had spent £445,380 on recruitment in the 2008/2009 financial year, the majority of which was spent via two companies: TMP (UK) and the Bernard Hodes Group.

Hind said that the spending was a result of major recruitment campaigns for positions created in the organisational restructure following the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review. He said that part of the £200,000 spent with the Bernard Hodes Group involved the building of a dedicated careers website, which has helped the Commission to reduce the recruitment budget for 2009/2010 to £200,000.

Hind indicated that recruitment spending for the current financial year so far would indicate the Commission will remain within the £200,000 budget.

A spokeswoman for the Charity Commission told Civil Society that 2008/2009 was “an exceptional period for recruitment” related to the significant organisational restructure. Of the £445,000, £323,000 was spent on print and online advertising costs. The Commission estimates that the new website created in 2008/2009 will lead to around £100,000 in annual advertising savings.

During the period the Commission hired 86 new staff members, 12 of which were in “strategically important or specialist roles”.  Many of the new posts were in the compliance team.

“As recruiting for these roles requires a more targeted process involving dedicated firms, the cost was higher than that of filling the other vacancies,” the spokeswoman said.

The revelation by the Charity Commission chief follows a question put to minister of state Tessa Jowell by shadow minister for charities, social enterprise and volunteering Nick Hurd, asking for figures on similar spending at the Central Office of Information and Cabinet Office. The COI reported recruitment spending of nearly a tenth of that of the Charity Commission, at just under £50,000 on external recruitment services for the year. (It is not known how much the COI spent in-house.)