The charity sector should “calm down” about the introduction of a Fundraising Preference Service, civil society minister Rob Wilson told a summit on the future of fundraising regulation today.

Wilson said he did not envisage the FPS becoming the “default way” that donors dealt with charities, and that the FPS was unlikely to have the negative impact many believed.

He said fundraisers had responsibility for ensuring this by conducting themselves ethically.

Wilson said he felt it was possible to have a “more nuanced” approach to the issue of the Fundraising Preference Service, which would allow donors to express a preference over who could contact them and how often, rather than ruling out all contact forever.

“Some of the current projections seem to me to be very crude,” he said.

However he said that this greater complexity could not make the FPS hard for donors to use. Nor could it turn the FPS into a lengthy IT project which would take a long time to implement.

He said the FPS would address the concerns of donors who felt “inundated” with requests for donations, and that he had “every confidence” it could be made to work for everyone.

Wilson also warned that the government had come close to introducing statutory regulation of fundraising, and that the decision had been “on a knife edge”. He said he had “fought hard” to ensure that charities were given one more opportunity for self-regulation.

He said charities had been given warning that reform was needed.

“This has been building up for some time,” he said. “There was plenty of evidence that the public were not happy. The public want greater control over how and whether they are contacted.”

He said MPs frequently wrote to him with complaints from constituents about fundraising practices, including one elderly woman who spent half her income on charitable donations.