Being the custodian of the Code of Fundraising Practice at the time of Olive Cooke’s death put the Institute of Fundraising in “a very difficult position”, its chief executive Peter Lewis has said.

In an interview with Fundraising Magazine, Peter Lewis, chief executive of the IoF, said that the IoF was constrained in its ability to defend the wider fundraising sector during the events of last summer because it was the custodian of the code.

“Being a custodian of the code put us in a very difficult position,” he said. “The bottom line was that our members set the code and then it was clear that some of our members were breaching those standards.

“So that gave us a starting position that wasn’t exactly full of integrity.”

He said that although the IoF did appoint an independent chair to its standards committee, it was probably already too late to have made a difference.

“We bought in an independent chair but that was probably too late,” he said. “If we’d done that a year earlier we might still have been ok.”

Lewis also admitted that the death of Olive Cooke and the subsequent events of last summer showed that the Code of Fundraising Practice was not strong enough at the time.

“The code did need strengthening, especially on the data sharing and selling, the code wasn’t at the same place as public expectations,” said Lewis. “I think we heard that and responded really quickly to strengthen the code, quite rightly.

“I think that was a lesson for all of us, frankly: That the public does expect us to have higher standards than general, private businesses in some aspects. So we were catching up with what public expectations were.”

Lewis said that the new Fundraising Regulator has the full support of the IoF, and that an independent regulator gives the whole sector “much better balance” and will allow the IoF to “be much stronger on behalf of the fundraising community” in the future.

“I don’t think we’re necessarily going to do less around standards themselves and what they should be. We’re in the process of setting up a standards advisory board that will do just that: take views from our members around how the standards might change and then leading our response to consultations the regulator puts out.”

• The full interview with Peter Lewis and Peter Hills-Jones, chief executive of the Public Fundraising Association, will appear in the next issue of Fundraising Magazine.