The Charity Commission must retain its regulatory role with regards to granting charities permission to pay their trustees, the NCVO has said in its submission to the taskforce charged with cutting red tape in the sector.

While the umbrella body makes a number of suggestions for reducing the regulatory burden, it also warns against removing existing protections “that have been put in place for good reason”.

After consulting with its membership, the NCVO concluded: “There is an overarching concern about cutting back on what is necessary regulation, particularly in relation to the payment of trustees.

“The Commission’s regulatory role over trustee remuneration is therefore essential to ensure government boards minimise the risks to their charity’s reputation.”

The themes that have emerged as representing a burden for NCVO member organisations are:

•    The overlap of charity regulation
•    The further duplication of monitoring and reporting requirements
•    Commissioning and procurement procedures
•    Barriers to volunteering, such as CRB checks
•    Gift aid
•    VAT
•    Licensing requirements

In its submission, the NCVO recommends that the government make the new constitutional form, the Charitable Incorporated Organisation, available as soon as possible.  This opposes the Charity Law Association’s position on the subject; it has already said it thinks the CIO should be scrapped in order to save the Charity Commission money.

The NCVO also recommends that those charity managers who are deemed not to be ‘fit and proper persons’ under the new Finance Act should have a right to appeal, beyond HMRC’s complaints procedure.

You can read the NCVO’s full submission to the Office for Civil Society/Department for Business, Innovation and Skills Red Tape Taskforce here.