Memorandum from the Charity Commission,
2 September 2008
We hope you are well and enjoying the recess.
We are very much looking forward to appearing before the Committee
in October, and wanted to send you some initial material at this
stage. We understand that the Committee has a particular interest
in our public benefit guidance, and that you will want to pick
up on your previous session with us on this issue. We also know
you would like to cover our annual report (which was recently
laid before Parliament and a copy of which I have enclosed[1]).
We have also enclosed our Strategic Plan, which describes the
Commission's priorities and objectives over the next three years.
We hope that these documents will be of interest to the Committee
and will be useful in explaining the approach we are taking to
regulating the sector.
We also wanted to highlight some of the key
issues for the Commission since we last appeared before the Committee.
Last month, we published our counter-terrorism strategy, which
is a statement of our approach to delivering our regulatory response
to the threat of terrorist involvement or abuse in the charitable
sector. You may also be aware that we recently launched a new
Toolkit for MPs, which aims to explain our role in relation to
constituency casework. At the same time we launched a new function
on our website allowing MPs to search charities in their constituencies.
We would be happy to send further information on these initiatives
over to you if the Committee is interested in seeing them.
By the time of the hearing we will have also
launched on our website an improved version of the Register of
Charities, which will make information about charities and their
income and expenditure easier for the public to use. We hope this
will contribute to greater transparency and accountability. We
will send you some further information about this initiative nearer
to the launch.
We noted with interest the Committee's When
Citizens Complain report, and our Independent Complaints Reviewer
(ICR) assessed our own complaints procedures against its recommendations.
We take complaints-handling very seriously, and we are proud to
say that the ICR's assessment was that we measured up well.
We are currently analysing the responses to
our public benefit consultations on sub-sector guidance for charities
which advance education or religion, fee-charging charities and
charities for the relief or prevention of poverty. We will enclose
a summary of the responses in a second submission to the Committee
around the end of September, along with an update and an outline
of our next steps in this area.
1 Not printed. Back
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