The Charity Commission has already granted more requests from charities to pay their trustees in the first seven months of this financial year, as it did in either of the last two entire years.

So far this year, the Commission has approved ten charities' requests for trustee payments. In 2009, it approved nine such requests and in 2008, just four.  In 2007, ten were approved; eight in 2006.

A spokeswoman said that most requests for trustee payments come from large charities - those with incomes over £5m and the Commission only formally collates requests from these types of charities. So the numbers released only relate to large charities.

However, the Commission could not say whether the numbers of charities applying to pay their trustees was growing.  The spokeswoman said: “The process by which charities seek the Commission's permission to pay trustees is not a straightforward interaction or form-based exercise.

“It usually involves detailed conversations and exchanges between the charity and the Commission during which applicants might amend or change their original request.

“Sometimes, during the course of such conversations, charities find that they no longer wish to seek permission to pay a trustee. Sometimes we request information from the charity but then don’t hear back.  For this reason, we can’t provide figures of applications versus approvals which would allow you assess how many applications we ‘reject’.”