What will the Charity Commission be regulating/inspecting?
The new charities bill states that the Commission’s job will be to ensure trustees meet their legal duties, ensure charities maximise their social and economic impact and promote accountability and public trust. Taken together this obviously means looking at the governance of charities, which is a very difficult thing to inspect or even to qualify. If the Charity Commission is to be required to regulate the governance process then this is a huge job in itself, but this also raises the problem of what exactly they will be inspecting, given all the different models and approaches to the subject. While it is very easy to identify specific breaches of charity law etc. these are often caused by a failure in the governance process and a Commission inspection might target a symptom but leave the problem unchanged. If the Commission does select a baseline to measure inspections against what will this be, and what will be the impact of this on the sector? Will funders want all charities to have
