The Charity Commission barely has the resources to regulate the sector effectively, its chief executive Sam Younger told a Commons committee today.

During a Public Administration Select Committee evidence session into the work of the Commission, Younger was asked by Andrew Turner, Tory MP for the Isle of Wight, whether it had sufficient resources to regulate charities effectively.

Younger replied: “The answer is very close to being no.”

He continued that a committee had been set up “to prepare the Commission for the case it needs to make to an incoming government about future funding”.

'A tougher regulator does not come cheap'

William Shawcross, chair of the Charity Commission, said that he expected to spend much of his time over the next year lobbying Treasury for more funding.

“This salami-slicing is very damaging,” he said. “If we had another 10 per cent on top of our current budget that would be extremely helpful.”

He said the Commission wanted to carry out more investigations. “But using our resources and investigative powers intensively is very expensive,” he said. “If you want us to be a tougher regulator it doesn’t come cheap.”

The Commission had not yet arrived at a figure it felt it needed to do its job appropriately, but work is being done to define this figure, Shawcross said. He said it would be “absurd” to ask for as much as the £30m  the Commission received annually five years ago.

“But I will spend the next few months arguing that if our budget was cut further, down to something like £15m, we would be unable to do our job,” he said.

Costs cut on offices

The Commission will aim to halve the amount it spends on its offices, Younger told the committee.

The Commission currently has four offices, in London, Taunton, Liverpool, and Newport in Wales. Younger said there were “obvious inefficiencies” working across four sites” and that by 2016/17 he hoped to have halved accommodation costs.