Martyn Lewis, chair of NCVO, has said that both he and NCVO believe paying trustees is the wrong direction to take, and that people should celebrate the voluntary nature of trusteeship.

Their views clash with those of the organisation’s president Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbott, who last month said the payment of trustees was inevitable.

Lewis, who was speaking at the NCVO Trustee Conference today, said that too often trusteeship was presented as onerous and risk-laden “like paid employment without the benefits”.

He went on to say that this had led to calls for paid trustees, “but NCVO and I believe this is the wrong direction to take”, he said.

During his opening speech to the conference, Lewis said the voluntary sector was changing in a “seismic way”. He noted that in the past year the number of paid employees in the sector had dropped by 30,000, there was an awareness that more charities were closing down or merging, and that trustees were at the forefront of making these difficult decisions.

Toward the end of his speech, he warned that he thought the government’s austerity programme would last more than a year: “It will get worse before it gets better,” he said.