Companies House and the Charity Commission have set up a working party to tackle the technical problems that arise from efforts to enable charities to submit just one annual return to them both, Lord Hodgson said last week.
In a speech to the Newton 2012 Charity Investment Conference on Thursday, Lord Hodgson gave an update on progress made on a recommendation that he first mooted in his Unshackling Good Neighbours report, and repeated in his Charities Act review, to make regulation less onerous for charities.
His recommendation was that all charitable companies should have to complete just one annual return that goes to both Companies House and the Charity Commission. This would have the effect of eliminating at least 35,000 documents each year.
In the summer, the Office for Civil Society published an update on progress on this recommendation, which stated that the Commission and Companies House were “considering both the joint submission of accounts and common annual returns”.
The OCS said there were software and other challenges inherent in the proposal but there was “willingness and commitment” from both organisations to overcome these.
Technical difficulties
But on Thursday Lord Hodgson provided his own update in response to a comment from the floor that HMRC is now regulating the sector much more heavily.
He implied that the regulators were not progressing his recommendation as quickly as he would have liked: “The response from Companies House and the Charity Commission has been ‘ohh, extreme technical difficulty, integrating systems, a working party has been set up to consider this, we will report in due course’ – all that sort of stuff.”
He said there was clearly a lot to be done to pull together HMRC, OSCR, the Northern Ireland regulator, and the Charity Commission, to try and get a focused approach. Trying to coordinate them is difficult, he said, “because they all fight for their turf very strongly and none are better at fighting than HMRC who have been at it for about 800 years”.
“It’s a work in progress, is the answer.”
Government's one-year progress update due next week
Lord Hodgson added that the Cabinet Office would be releasing its one-year-on report on progress made by the government on the recommendations in Unshackling Good Neighbours, later this week.
