The habitual late filing of regulatory documents by William Shawcross’s charity puts the Charity Commission in an invidious position, says Tania Mason.
The revelations that emerged last week about the way that new Charity Commission chair William Shawcross ran his own charity raises serious questions about his attitudes to the responsibilities that come with trusteeship – and about how closely he was cross-examined about these attitudes by the government’s appointments panel.
Firstly, Shawcross and his two trustees have all been on the board of Response for 23 years – Lord Hodgson, in his Charities Act review, recommended that trustees should serve no longer than three terms of three years.
And secondly – and most importantly - he didn’t bother to keep up-to-date with filing the charity’s annual update to the Commission. Even though there is no statutory deadline for filing an annual update, the Commission still urges all charities to get their updates in before the statutory ten-month deadline, and frowns upon late submission.
The fact that the Commission’s new chair didn’t think that filing on time was worth bothering about sends entirely the wrong message to the sector. It also makes it much more difficult for the regulator to do its job. The Commission’s chief executive Sam Younger has been treading the boards at meetings and events all over the country for months, diligently lecturing charities about the importance of filing their documents on time so as to maintain public trust and confidence in their sector. But all this hard work is potentially undermined by his new chair’s laissez faire approach to filing. No wonder Younger refused to comment when asked about it – he’s been put in an impossible and embarrassing position.
Shawcross’s excuse for not filing was that his charity was only tiny – its income for most of the last five years was somewhere between £2,000 and £3,000. Some readers of our stories on this issue seemed to agree that this is a trivial matter and not worthy of coverage. One said: “William Shawcross’s comment that most small charities get on with their work properly and independently is surely correct.”
But that misses the point. Response is a registered charity, and with registration comes responsibility. As Lord Hodgson told a conference last week: “Charitable status is a privilege, not a right. Once I want to get a charity number, my relationship with society changes. A charity number means I have the wraparound of the brand.”
‘Tiny’ charities – those with incomes of less than £10,000 a year - make up close to half of the Charity Commission’s register. A glance at the website shows that around 10 per cent are currently overdue to file their annual update. But if the Commission’s own chair didn’t see the point, why should they?
