The Charity Commission’s searchable online register of charities is due to launch in beta this autumn, after a four-month delay, as the organisation prepares to move its website to gov.uk.  

In April the Commission revealed plans to launch a new online register by the end of May, which would display more information about charities, such as whether trustees are paid. It will also have a more detailed search function that will allow researchers to gather more detailed information about individual charities.

A Commission spokeswoman told Civil Society News that: “The Commission is undertaking a number of IT-related projects. Many of these have interdependencies, and as internal priorities change, some completion dates need to be altered.

“The new online charity search has been built and we are now working on finetuning the jobs that transfer the data to this new tool. We anticipate being able to launch a beta version in the next few weeks.”

Move to gov.uk

The Commission’s gov.uk homepage was published last week in preparation for the move to gov.uk later this month.

From this week links will start redirecting to information on gov.uk rather than the Commission’s site. Email subscribers will continue to receive updates from gov.uk.

In 2012 the government announced that all 24 government departments would move to gov.uk. As a non-ministerial department that reports directly to Parliament, the Charity Commission was included in the plans and was supposed to be integrated by March 2014.

The Commission asked for an exemption claiming that the move would damage the perception that the regulator is separate from government. The government insisted that the Commission website move to gov.uk but has exempted it from adopting government branding.

The current version of the Commission’s website was launched in May 2013 at a cost of £75,000.