In her recent speech to the Royal Society of Arts about the Charity Commission’s new strategic direction, the Commission’s chair Baroness Stowell said the whole sector shares a collective responsibility to meet public expectations of charity and avoid “being complicit in its decline”. She said people feel that the “promise of charity has not always been kept” and that this is partly because of “uncharitable behaviour” in areas such as fundraising and “the single-minded pursuit of organisational growth”. The public wants to see charities holding themselves to the highest standards of charitable behaviour, as “charitable aims cannot justify uncharitable means,” she asserted.

She gave the example of a large charity which had recently told her that it had decided to not compete for contracts if the service is currently being provided by another charity. “That leader understands that the charity’s purpose is to help their beneficiaries, not to grow bigger and stronger for the sake of it – or worse, at the expense of another, smaller charity,” she said. This is the kind of behaviour and appreciation of the “wider responsibility” the Commission wants to encourage.