Memorandum from the Sainsbury Family Charitable
Trusts (DCH 329)
I understand that Lord Sainsbury of Preston
Candover spoke to you yesterday about expanding the point he put
on the record concerning over-burdening purely grant making trusts
with regulatory obligations that are largely irrelevant to the
activities of such charities.
He quoted in Committee the current draft of
the Standard Information Return, which is open for consultation
until the end of this month. I know that a number of grant making
trusts will be making it clear in that process that they do not
see how these questions will add any clarity to the publicly available
information about their activities. As is clear from the draft
guidance on the form which is also currently posted on the Charity
Commission website, this document and the guidance has been prepared
without any thought to the different characteristics of grant
making trusts.
In the same vein, Lord Sainsbury wanted to set
on the record the growth in sheer volume of requirements now imposed
by the Statement of Recommended Practice (SORP) on accounting
for charities. Although this document is notionally "recommended
practice", compliance now has the force of law following
cross-references in Accounting Standards which have statutory
force. For the record, this material has a habit of expanding:
— SORP 1995, contained 68 pages and
240 paragraphs.
— SORP 2000 was 89 pages and 358 paragraphs.
— The latest draft is 100 pages and
439 paragraphs.
(These references exclude about half as much
again in worked examples appearing in the documents.)
The reality is that this is a charter for accountants
and registered auditors to charge charities. When the Charity
Commission comments in its evidence that it doubts whether any
charity is fully in compliance with its regulatory requirements,
the sheer scale of the minutiae with which all charities are expected
to comply under the terms of this one document alone gives a rapid
explanation of why the compliance regime is getting completely
out of hand. This is probably a bigger problem for tiny charities
without professional advice but it is also a major and largely
unnecessary overhead and diversion for sizeable grant making charities
which often have relatively few transactions to report in any
given year. One size fits all regulation fails to meet the presumption
of proportionate and fair regulation, about which much hot air
was expended by the Home Office Minister and her adviser at your
session yesterday.
Michael Pattison
July 2004
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