Charities with income of less than £25,000 a year reap multiple benefits from registering with the Charity Commission, says Pauline Broomhead.
Why is Lord Hodgson still banging on about deregistration of charities with an income of less than £25,000 leaving 60 per cent of the sector unregulated?
What do small charities need to do to keep the public trust? The Foundation for Social Improvement asked them and this is what they said: 'We need to be more transparent, more open and we need to let the public know where their donations go, how their money is spent. We need to convey our charitable purposes more openly and clearly to the public and we need to show them our impact, let them share our achievements.'
This was the overwhelming response coming from small charities participating in the Small Charity Index this month when asked “How do you think public perceptions of the small charity sector might be improved?”
Do they, like Lord Hodgson, think that ‘operating under the radar’ and being ‘unregulated’ builds public trust? The answer is simply, no they do not. They want to operate ‘above the radar’, they want to be open, transparent and to show the public what they do and how they spend the gifts given to them.
How can they achieve this? By being regulated by the Charity Commission.
What a small charity with under £25,000 per annum does has no less impact, creates no less value to those they support and is delivered with the same passion and determination as larger organisations. That all-important charity number allows the public to ‘have trust’, it gives the potential supporter the opportunity to check them out and look at their accounts.
When Lord Hodgson himself says that the Charity Commission simply cannot regulate 160,000 charities he lets us know unequivocally that his aim is not to increase public trust of all charities but to lessen the burden on the Charity Commission. Do we, as small charities, and does the public really believe that having 60 per cent of charities currently registered not being regulated would increase trust? We don’t think so.
Pauline Broomhead is CEO of the Foundation for Social Improvement.
