The first draft of the new Charity Governance Code contains one particularly challenging clause: If other organisations are seen to be fulfilling similar charitable purposes more effectively than your organisation, then your trustees should consider partnerships, merger or dissolution.

In an article for G&L’s sister publication Charity Finance a while back, HCT Group chief executive Dai Powell mused that directors of private companies have a legal duty to maximise shareholder value, yet no such obligation to maximise charitable impact is conferred on charity trustees. As a result, he wrote, a charity trustee’s responsibility seems to be more targeted at minimising risk than maximising anything. If the legal responsibility of a charity trustee was to maximise the impact of the charity’s mission, then arguably charities would achieve more, he said.