The Commission is considering if it will continue to support small charities and whether it should partner with other sector organisations as part of radical changes needed to manage its 33 per cent funding cut, an audience of sector figures heard yesterday.
Charity Commission chair Dame Suzi Leather (pictured) and recently-appointed chief executive Sam Younger voiced the possibilities at a meeting of the an All-Party Parliamentary Group on Civil Society and Volunteering. The meeting was held as part of the Commission's review process for handling the government funding cuts announced in the October spending review to be implemented in April next year.
The Commission has previously advised that an estimated 140 jobs will be lost but a full reform of the organisation is necessary to balance the cuts, said Younger: “What this requires, which is something that Suzi and I are very clear about, is not an exercise where we look at salami-slicing or whether we chop this or that here or there, but actually requires a schematic review saying what is the Commission for, what are the key risks to the sector, what are we regulating to achieve, and therefore where we put the limited resources we’ve got.”
Opening up the review to questions, Dame Suzi, who recently called the cuts "a violence" against the organisation, discussed considerations for the future of the Commission:
“Are there other bodies, singular or plural, that could or should take on any of our functions or could carry out some of our functions in partnership,” she said. “And then what should our regulatory approach be - should we be effectively the policer as well as a sort of auditor, or can we drop one of those activities?
“And where does the real risk lie, does it lie within the big organisations, the household names, after all that is where the bulk of the income lies, or is it really with the small end, the organisations that don’t have staffing, that aren’t able to pay for accountancy or legal advice, maybe that’s where the real risk lies?”
Audience members, including the chair of the APPG, MP Alun Michael, questioned the logic of choosing between big or small organisations: “Is there really such a polarisation?” he asked.
“Possibly not,” Dame Suzi responded, but pointed to the potential for a “gradual erosion of effectiveness and confidence” in the Commission, before further questioning whether the Charity Commission is best placed to serve the needs of smaller organisations.
"You, through constituents, and the people you work with," she told Michael, "you will have a sense I think of what those small organisations need from us and whether we are actually the people who should be giving out advice to them."
But the sheer number of small charities was highlighted by several audience members and Michael eleborated on an opinion he had stated years before, that the sector has become a “loose and baggy monster", adding: "but now it’s looser and baggier and had children”.
Limiting numbers of new charities
Options discussed to limit the number of charities included legal powers to prevent registration, raising the threshold of registration from the current advised minimum of £5,000 raised per annum, or giving the Commission the power to prevent those that raise less than this from registering as a charity, which it currently is not authorised to do.
