The Code of Fundraising Practice is "far too weak" and the Institute of Fundraising should be stripped of responsibility for setting it, the incoming chair of the Fundraising Standards Board told a committee of MPs.

Andrew Hind was giving evidence to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, which is conducting an inquiry into fundraising regulation.

"We do not have an effective regulatory structure for fundraising," he said."I think we have a Code of Fundraising Practice which is far too weak. It has failed to outlaw practices which the public have said they find completely unacceptable.

"I think we need to have a standards committee which is housed outside the Institute of Fundraising."

He said this was partly due to the “vested interests” of the members of the fundraising sector who sit on the committee.

He said regulation needs fundamental changes and that "if those changes can be made then self-regulation can work".

He said those changes included compulsory regulation for fundraising charities who raise over £1m of voluntary income, a regulator which could demand changes to the Code of Fundraising Practice, and statutory support for the regulator from the Charity Commission.

He also said the regulator must proactively conduct audits into charities' fundraising practice.

Alistair McLean, chief executive of the FRSB, said that the IoF had been too slow in implementing certain recommendations that the FRSB had made in the past, before the death of Olive Cooke.

"I have lots of examples of cases in the last 18 months, where our recommendations have been kicked a long way down the road," he said.

He said one example was the FRSB's request that the IoF amend the code to say fundraisers should not call at houses with "no cold-calling" stickers.

He said the FRSB had made 17 recommendations to strengthen the code in an interim report shortly after fundraising regulation first came into the media spotlight.

“Three months after publishing our interim report, the IoF still have not made all the changes to the code that the FRSB suggested," he said.

“The IoF’s fundraising code being written by fundraisers doesn’t work, as fundraisers are less likely to want to implement changes that might put a stop on their work.”

Lewis defends IoF record

Peter Lewis, chief executive of the IoF, refuted the allegations that the IoF’s Standards Committee is weak and said it was taking responsibility for the situation.

“I don’t accept that the code is weak," he said. "The code has always has been a work in progress. I would say though that we have consistently been ahead of the recommendations of the FRSB.”

Lewis also said that the IoF was already working on introducing lay members and an independent chair to its Standard Committee.

Richard Taylor, chair of the IoF, also said that the sector as a whole recognised the gravity of the situation but said: “It would be a mistake to completely remove the expertise of fundraisers from the setting of the codes.

“It is not the code that is responsible for some of the bad behaviour that we have been seeing.”

This comes after the IoF co-ordinated with 17 of the UK’s biggest charities in writing an open letter calling for the FRSB to be replaced with a new, stronger regulator in the Sunday Times.

PFRA backs IoF

Paul Stallard, chair of the Public Fundraising Association, said that the PFRA supported the regulation model that the IoF has recommended. He agreed the FRSB should be replaced with a "new, independent regulator" and said a lot of effort must be put into making the public aware of it.

Stallard said that publicising the model would cost between £5m and £10m to implement and that charities would have to pay for it. 

Richard Taylor appears on One Show

Richard Taylor, chair of the Institute of Fundraising, told the One Show yesterday that the fundraising regulator's silence on the issue during the summer was to allow charities to speak to individuals themselves.

“Over the summer, there’s been a lot of work going on,” Taylor told One Show journalist Lucy Siegle. “A lot of charities have been trying to get to the bottom of some of the revelations that we’ve seen in the media and they have been responsibly talking to their supporters, their donors, addressing concerns that their supporters might have, at an individual level.

“We at the Institute thought that now might be a good time to facilitate an apology from the whole sector – the sector doesn’t tend to talk as one voice.”

Taylor also said that while some of the blame should be attributed to telemarketing agencies, the majority of those still in business follow the IoF’s code to a very high standard.

“Some of the problems are to do with third party agencies, we accept that, but we have to be careful because a lot of these agencies do great work for charities and they do it to a very high standard,” he said. 

The One Show also said that a pro forma letter it had drafted to allow watchers to opt out of charity communications has now been downloaded by over 40,000 people.