The Charity Commission is right that many trustees don't know their basic duties, and it needs to do more to tackle the issue, says Leon Ward.

The Charity Commission is finally finding its teeth and last week Sarah Atkinson, the Commission’s Head of Policy and Communication, took her turn to have a bite. She declared the Commission was the sector’s regulator and not its defender or champion.

She then said the Commission will not hold charities’ hands, and will not provide bespoke support to trustees, even though she acknowledged that many trustees don’t understand their basic duties. And she said the Commission is becoming more “innovative” at providing advice.

On the first point, Atkinson is broadly right. It isn’t the Commission’s job to defend the sector. But it does have a duty to ensure that trustees know their duties.

And she is right to say that many trustees do have little knowledge of their basic duties. Many trustees – even at quite large charities, with significant staffs and incomes – don’t even know what the Charity Commission is or does, or that it regulates them as guardians of the charities they serve. I have come across trustees who do not know their names appear on the Commission’s website.

It can all get a bit frightening when you realise the scale of this knowledge gap.

No surprise then, that more often than not, the duty to understand the regulatory burden and the relationship between the Commission and the charity passes onto the charity’s executive.

In theory, three groups all need to work together. Charity executives need to highlight what skills, input and advice the organisation actually needs from a board, and then hold their trustees to account for such. Trustees, following a skills audit, should continuously highlight what additional training they need, and recognise the need to be proactive themselves in seeking to fill those gaps. And the Commission should provide fit-for-purpose, accessible and clear advice and guidance.

It seems to me that we are in a very different position at the moment. There is a severe lack of knowledge amongst many trustees of what the role of the Charity Commission actually is, which automatically results in a lack of knowledge about their roles as trustees. And vice versa.

In particular, there is no immediate accountability or contact mechanism between trustees and the body to which they are ultimately answerable, if and when things go wrong.

One problem is that the information the Commission provides is clunky and inaccessible. If an unsuspecting trustee explores their website and clicks Guidance for Trustees and then Managing your charity, they will find a total of 92 links to scroll through. Each link takes you through to yet more pages of text and other hyperlinks. It is very hard to understand.

I suppose the Commission is due some credit on the basis that it is at least starting to try. Their primary guide, The essential trustee, is under review. And who can blame them for not having started before? They’ve had a pretty tough time finding their feet. Unfortunately, the guidance has been heavily criticised, and it is likely they will have to go back to the drawing board.

And what about the “innovative” guidance we’re supposed to be getting? I’m pretty sure innovation isn’t copying and pasting hundreds of pages of guidance onto a website. Where are the video clips? Where are the interactive quizzes? The diagrams to explain ideal charity structures? The interviews with key individuals at the Commission and with other experts?

Atkinson is right to feel proud of the quality of guidance, because once you eventually get to what you are looking for within the deeper recesses of the Commission’s labyrinth-like website, it does actually tell you what you need to know, and it does it well. The problem is most people don’t know it is there. It is inaccessible.  

My advice is that the Commission needs to speedily hurry through updating and improving its guidance before it loses yet more friends in the charity sector. And once it has the right guidance, it needs to communicate it better. And it needs help to do so from umbrella groups, charity staff, incumbent trustees and anyone else who fancies helping.