Sam Younger has reiterated the Charity Commission’s belief that charities need to be more honest about their administration costs, warning that sector leaders should not “bury their heads in the sand”.

Speaking at the annual conference of the Community Foundation Network yesterday, Younger said there was a need for “a generous dose of honesty about what it means to run a professional charity”.

He said: “Our public opinion research reveals that ‘knowing a reasonable proportion of a charity’s income goes to the end cause’ is the single most important factor driving trust.

“But I would argue that the way to respond to that finding is not for charities to bury their heads in the sand and pretend there isn’t an issue.

“Because I have become aware of a slight tendency among charities to dismiss peoples’ preoccupation with money as proof that they simply don’t understand. That’s not really good enough.

“So my plea to the sector would be to have faith in your ability to make the public understand.”

Umbrella groups

Elsewhere, he extolled the virtues of umbrella bodies and urged charities to join them, saying that such groups can help raise standards of governance, support the Commission, benefit individual charities and increase public trust.

“Encouraging trust requires joint effort between individual charities, the networks you form and the Commission as regulator. And that demands strong relationships between charities and their umbrella bodies.

“The Community Foundation movement is a good example of that relationship working. We can contact one charity – CFN – in the knowledge that it can reach individual members more easily, quickly, and efficiently than we can.

“In an age of austerity, when we are adjusting to budget cuts of a third over four years, that kind of multiplier effect is of huge value.”

He added that recent research into patterns of joint working between smaller charities showed that 80 per cent of participants felt that their experience was a success.