The Fundraising Regulator will publish its proposals on how charities will be able to register with it and the structure of its levy in the coming weeks, according to its interim chief executive.

Stephen Dunmore, interim chief executive of the Fundraising Regulator, who was speaking at the Institute of Legacy Management’s annual conference in London last Friday, said that proposals for registration and the levy had been agreed on at its last board meeting and will be published “in the next few weeks”.  

“At our second board meeting last week we looked at the option for levy and registration figures and we will publish our proposals for those in the next couple of weeks and invite comment,” he said. “The registration system is not going to be expensive as we want as many charities and fundraising agencies to register with us”.

Dunmore also said that the Fundraising Regulator’s board is likely to use the levy threshold proposed in the Etherington Review, which should draw in funds from around 2,000 charities.

“As far as the levy is concerned it will be predicated on an annual budget of around £2.5m a year, as was first set out in the Etherington Review and that should provide us with the resources to be engaged with regulation in a proactive way that was not possible for the Fundraising Standards Board.

“The Etherington Review recommended that only charities who spend £100,000 on fundraising should fall within the levy. We are certainly taking that into account, but we will publish those proposals shortly and invite comment. If we went for that £100,000 threshold, we would see around 2,000 charities pay that levy.”  

Dunmore also outlined how the new regulator will approach the regulation of legacy income. He told the conference that unsolicited gifts left in wills would not fall under the regulator’s remit, but confirmed it would look at charities and agencies which use direct marketing to solicit legacies.

“When a charitable, fundraising agency working on behalf of a charity is seen to generate a legacy by communicating with the legator once the legacy has been made, then that would fall under our remit. However the management of a legacy after the death of a donor is not in itself fundraising, provided it did not utilise direct marketing in some way”.

Dunmore said that, once the Fundraising Regulator takes control of the Code of Fundraising Practice in the early summer, he would invite legacy fundraising experts to feed suggestions into it about changes to the code in relation to legacy fundraising.