The Dundee-based Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR) today celebrates its tenth birthday. Confidence in charities in Scotland is higher than south of the border, with more than four out of five people in Scotland saying they trust charities, in a recent survey carried out for the Scottish Council of Voluntary Organisations (SCVO). In a similar study in England and Wales (for the Charities Aid Foundation), fewer than three out of five people had this same faith in them.
The SCVO research also found that nine out of ten people in Scotland have personally supported a charity during the past year. Again, the numbers are better than the UK figures, where the number is around eight out of ten people.
This is all good news for Scotland, where the charity sector handles over £10 billion a year. It’s a tribute to the effective input of the sector’s paid workers, volunteers and advisers, as well as OSCR’s staff in Dundee, and the 180,000 people in Scotland who act as charity trustees.
Yet, there is no room for complacency. Scotland too has seen stories of poor charity governance in recent months, even if they are lower-profile than Kids Company. And with politicians, media and the public alike scrutinising the sector, trustees must be on their toes when it comes to governance – ie, how they set the long-term direction of their charity, including its objectives, and its policies and activities to achieve those objectives,
It’s a sign of the growing attention on this area that ‘Governance perspectives’ was the theme of this year’s WS Societies Charity Conference, held in Edinburgh last month (March 2016), which Alastair Keatinge, our Charity Law Partner, chaired, and where speakers included Jude Turbyne (Head of Engagement) from OSCR. The conference considered evolving governance practices in the sector, from the points of view of charity professionals, trustees advisers and the regulator, all of whom have a role in securing effective governance and therefore public confidence in the sector.
Of course, the regulator also has a huge role in this, and OSCR is on target here. It is marking its tenth anniversary with changes to the way it regulates Scotland’s 24,000 charities – including changing the information gathered on charity annual returns, and providing greater transparency to the public on the way that charities are managed.
It is also requiring charities to proactively alert it to ‘notifiable events’ such as investigations by the police or the tax authorities, allegations of abuse, or substantial donations from unknown sources. These changes should underpin public confidence in the sector.
The changes are also designed to be user-friendly – another element on which OSCR generally scores well – with reporting requirements for smaller charities kept to a minimum.
In this landscape, charities of all sizes need advice and training more than ever – not just to ensure they comply with the new rules, but to ensure that trustees fully understand what effective governance actually entails, from financial responsibilities, to setting KPIs, to embedding good decision-making practices. They need to know what questions to ask, and to do so proactively, to safeguard their charity’s long-term reputation.
As OSCR celebrates its first decade, there is plenty to congratulate it on, and also plenty more to think about, on which it is already setting the ball rolling. Happy birthday, OSCR!
