The Charity Commission has backed away from its proposal to devise a standard way for charities to report their admin costs after feedback from the sector revealed "concerns" about the idea.
Commission chief executive Sam Younger yesterday confirmed that development of an index whereby charities could be compared according to the proportion of income they spend on 'the cause', is no longer a priority for the regulator.
Dame Suzi had announced the initiative at the Commission's first new-style public meeting in Wales in May, insisting the regulator ought to at least attempt to devise some kind of comparative index because "that's what all the research tells us the public want to know about - how much goes on the cause".
But yesterday, speaking to an audience of charity accountants at the ICAEW's Charity and Voluntary Sector Group conference, Sam Younger downplayed the announcement, saying that Dame Suzi had merely been "having a debate".
He said: "The point of the new public meeting format is to raise issues and float ideas and so what Dame Suzi was doing was having a debate about what transparency means."
He said she was posing the question of whether the level of information currently available to the public on the Commission's website is adequate, or whether it might be improved to better drive the accountability of charities to those that support them.
"And one idea which came up, I think, really in Suzi's mind when she put it forward... was thinking is there a way we could develop the sorts of information that we put into the public domain through the annual reporting that goes onto the Charity Commission website that would provide better answers to questions supporters of charities may have about how their money is used."
But Younger admitted that the sector didn't like the idea and so it had now been shelved, at least temporarily.
"What was quite clear from the discussions we had in posing that notion was that there is a good deal of concern surrounding it, about how it would be made practical, how it would actually work and be meaningful.
"So while it is unfair to say it is on the back-burner, it is something that is going to take a while to work out. I think our focus, when it comes to the information that charities provide for the current year, is on making that which is already submitted better, easier to interrogate, and easier to navigate around.
"There is a longer-term issue that we are in discussion with the sector about, which is whether we can fundamentally improve that information, and that area of administrative cost and the proportion of income that is taken up with administrative cost is a key element of that but it is one that is not on the immediate horizon in terms of change."
