Richard Corden, former chief executive of the Commission for the Compact and veteran of numerous civil service roles working with the voluntary sector, has joined Helen Donoghue’s public affairs agency Central Lobby Consultants.

Central Lobby Consultants (CLC) runs Charity Tax Group, the Legislation Monitoring Service for Charities and the Churches’ Legislation Advisory Service. It specialises in tax and technical issues affecting the voluntary sector and lobbies on behalf of clients in Westminster, Whitehall, the devolved administrations and Europe.

It also provides secretariat services to many of its clients, and runs the secretariat for three All-Party Parliamentary Groups.

Corden joined a few days ago and says he will be working across the whole gamut of CLC’s campaigns. He told CivilSociety.co.uk he had a good understanding of charity tax matters: “I’ve not spent 20 years in the voluntary sector part of government without picking up quite a spread of knowledge about these things.”

Explaining why he was attracted to the agency, Corden said: “I’ve known Central Lobby Consultants and Helen personally for some years and always admired them and the way they do business.  The quango came to an end in March and this seemed a very timely opportunity.”

Corden joined the Commission for the Compact as interim chief executive in June 2007 and was confirmed in that role permanently in June 2008.

He has 20 years’ experience of working within government on voluntary sector policy, on charity law and practice, and on the regulation of charities. He joined the Commission from HM Treasury, where he worked on the government’s review of the role of the third sector in social and economic regeneration. Before that, he worked in the Office of the Third Sector, where he was in charge of pushing through the Charities Act 2006 to reform and modernise the law and regulation of charities.

His earlier appointments were in the Home Office, the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, and the Charity Commission.