The Charity Commission’s handling of a case over more than 20 years was “so poor as to amount to maladministration”, according to an ombudsman’s report published this week.
The report, from the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, upholds a number of complaints by the Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation (CISWO), which delivers welfare services for miners. It upholds a number of complaints relating to lack of clarity, unhelpfulness and delays, and recommends that the Commission apologise to CISWO and pay around £20,000 to compensate the charity for legal costs, staff time spent, and travel expenses.
The report was handed down in September last year, but made public earlier this week by law firm Brabners, who acted for CISWO.
The ombudsman assesses complaints about the management of cases by public bodies. It does not judge whether complaints have merit in law, but assesses whether an organisation has not acted properly or fairly or has given a poor service and not put things right.
Its 29-page report covers the Commission’s handling of a dispute between CISWO and the Newbold Verdon Institute, another miners’ charity, over the closure of Newbold and the sale of its property. The Commission was involved in handling the issue between 1992 and 2014.
CISWO sought advice on whether Newbold needed its permission to sell property, and the ombudsman judged that the Commission had not fulfilled its role properly.
“It is clear to us that the Commission failed to explain their views and reasons for their decisions properly,” the report says.
“They contradicted themselves, they sent confusing letters, they refused to clarify issues and they sent mixed messages to CISWO on a continuous basis. We consider that the Commission’s service was so poor that it amounts to maladministration.”
The report says that the Commission provided advice to CISWO on several occasions, but that this advice was frequently unclear, and contradicted what it had previously said.
It said: “The way the Commission conveyed its views was extremely poor and so unclear as to have caused CISWO a decade of dissatisfaction.”
It said the regulator’s actions “could go against the Commission’s core role to protect the public’s interest in the integrity of charity and the public benefit”.
It also said the Commission lacked a “corporate memory” which allowed it to understand how it had reached legal decisions in the past. The report said the regulator took too long to respond to queries and did not provide clear reasons for its decisions.
However the ombudsman did not uphold a CISWO complaint that the Commission had allowed the proceeds of the sale of Newbold’s property to go to an organisation CISWO did not approve of.
Commission response
The Commission has apologised and said it has already changed its systems to avoid a similar situation and has agreed to compensate CISWO.
A Commission spokesman said: “We welcome the ombudsman’s thorough and careful report. We accept that our service in this case fell well below our usual standard and was unacceptably poor. The substantive part of this reports relates to actions taken by the Commission some considerable time ago, but we would like to repeat our apologies to those involved and reassure charities and the public that we have already changed our systems and processes to avoid similar problems arising again. When customers request us to reconsider our position, we now conduct quicker internal reviews led by non-conflicted senior staff members, and no longer operate the outcome review panel, which we accept was sometimes slow to respond to the customers’ needs.
“More generally, we are focused on improving the Commission’s service to customers and we are confident that the changes we are introducing, including to prioritise complex and high risk work and automate lower risk work, will improve charities’ and the public’s experience of our services. Indeed, we hope that charities are already noticing these improvements. The most recent NAO report, published in January 2015, acknowledged the Commission’s 'positive first steps' in regulating more effectively and we continue to build on that.
“We are working closely with the Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation (CISWO) and all cases involving coal community charities and CISWO are now dealt with by a specialist senior case manager to ensure consistency and speed.
“We have agreed the consolatory payment and recompense for wider costs incurred by CISWO, as the Ombudsman recommends.”
