after a report by the NAO in 2013 prompted by the Cup Trust scandal, mentioned above, stated that the Commission was failing to regulate charities effectively and ‘does not do enough to identify and tackle abuse of charitable status’.17 A drive began to improve internal efficiency, take a harder line with errant charities and generally toughen the rhetoric. Shawcross talked of the Commission as a ‘policeman’, albeit a friendly one. By 2015 he was able to report that the Commission had used its various statutory powers to tackle abuse and mismanagement in charities 1,200 times in 2014/15, compared to 216 times two years previously, and had opened 103 new statutory inquiries – the strongest intervention at its disposal – compared with 15 two years before.18
The new board that Shawcross appointed included one person with 25 years of experience working in social enterprise, but its composition was otherwise seen by some in the charity sector as indicating an emphasis on enforcement, with a particular focus on preventing charity funds being diverted to support terrorism.19 One of the new board members was Peter Clarke, a former head of the Anti-Terrorist Branch at Scotland Yard, who said in an interview in 2013 that his role included helping to improve partnerships with the security services and other agencies.20 In 2014, Shawcross told The Sunday Times: “The problem of Islamist extremism is not the most widespread problem we face in terms of abuse of charities, but is potentially the most deadly. And it is, alas, growing.”21 He said the Commission was currently running five inquiries and 43 ‘monitoring cases’ into charities where there were suspicions related to terrorism, particularly in Syria.
In 2015 the Conservative Party cancelled a fringe event at its annual conference by the Muslim Charities Forum after an allegation in The Daily Telegraph that it had links with the Union of Good, which had funded Hamas, considered to be a terrorist organisation.22 Two years later Baroness (Sayeeda) Warsi, co‑chair of the Conservative Party from 2010 to 2012 and a former minister in the Coalition government, said in a lecture that the Commission had a “disproportionate” focus on Muslim charities that made them feel under scrutiny all the time.23 This was unjustified, she said, referring to a reported statement by Tom Keatinge, director of the Royal United Services Institute’s Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies, that “the abuse of UK charities in support of terrorism is negligible. The standards are very high and awareness amongst the big charities of this issue is intense.”24
The Commission’s own annual reports, Tackling Abuse and Mismanagement – later renamed Dealing with Wrongdoing and Harm – show that in the five years from 2012/13 the number of statutory inquiries relating to terrorism that were opened or under way in each year ranged from 6 to 14, with an upward blip to 20 in 2014/15.25 The number of terrorism-related ‘serious incidents’ reported to the Commission grew steadily from 1 to 27 over the same five years. The Commission’s examples of terrorism-related incidents that charities should report include a member of staff being arrested under suspicion of terrorism offences, a charity’s warehouse in a war zone being raided at gunpoint or a visiting speaker promoting extremist messages. The Commission maintained throughout that it was not targeting Muslim charities, but the subject was highly sensitive and some of the rhetoric soured its relations with Muslim charities.
Shawcross was succeeded as chair of the Commission in March 2018 by Baroness (Tina) Stowell, a Conservative peer who had been leader of the House of Lords from 2014 to 2016 and a member of the Cabinet for the second of those two years. On her appointment she resigned the Conservative whip to become an independent, or ‘crossbench’, peer; and after seven months she delivered a ‘statement of strategic intent’ which emphasised that charity was ‘a vital force for good in society’ and that the Commission shared responsibility to maximise its positive impact.26
But she was critical of the recent record of charities generally in an article in The Times after the Commission published its report on the Oxfam affair:27
We’ve seen charities losing sight of what they stand for in pursuit of organisational advantage. We’ve seen charities engage in pressure-tactic fundraising, supposedly justified by the money that raises for the cause. We’ve seen charities that should be working together instead competing for scarce resources. And we’ve seen charities putting their reputations before their purposes in responding to failings.
This prompted Sir Stuart Etherington, then chief executive of the NCVO, to complain in a letter to the Commission about a lack of balance:28
Charities have been far from complacent. I am concerned that the message coming from the commission is only a partial one. While claiming that it wants charity to thrive and inspire, it is only talking about how ‘charity’ has failed. Of course we want charities to learn from the mistakes of others, but these broad generalisations are far from helpful. Indeed, there is a real risk that they will achieve the opposite effect: they entrench public misconceptions and erode the public’s trust.
Public opinion
All the factors outlined above – scandals in charities, harsher political and media attitudes and a tougher approach by the regulator – were significant in themselves. But collectively they also influenced and chimed to some extent with the mood of the public, which was perhaps the most significant effect of all. There was a measureable change in the public’s attitudes to charities. One survey showed that people did not much like being cold-called by charities, being stopped in the street by ‘chuggers’, being talked at by fundraisers on their doorstep in the evening or receiving mailshots out of the blue from charities they had no interest in.29 Research on trust in charities, conducted every two years for the Charity Commission, scored it in 2018 at 5.5 out of 10, compared to 5.7 in 2016 and 6.7 in 2012 and 2014.30 Of the 45% of respondents who said in 2018 that their trust in charities had decreased in the previous two years, 62% cited negative news stories as a reason and 41% said they were donating less because of their loss of trust. Regular surveys by the research consultancy nfpSynergy showed that the proportion of respondents who trust charities ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ dropped from 70% in 2010 to 54% in September 2018, with a low point of 47% in October 2015, soon after the fundraising scandal, and a relative recovery to 64% in February 2017.31
The historical perspective
The sobering and occasionally shocking stories that emerged in the 2010s are not entirely a new phenomenon. Ever since charities were first established in mediaeval times there has been a risk of abuse, often to do with trustees misapplying or appropriating charitable funds.
Criticism of charities by politicians is not new either. William Gladstone called charities “institutions of questionable value” when he was chancellor of the exchequer in 1863.32 The government led by Margaret Thatcher was at loggerheads with the Church of England in 1985 over its report Faith in the City, which led to the Church – a charitable body – being labelled the unofficial opposition to the government: one cabinet minister was reported as dismissing the document as “pure Marxist theology” and another Conservative MP said it proved that the Church was governed by a “load of Communist clerics”.33 When Douglas, now Lord, Hurd was home secretary in 1986, he referred to organisations, including charities, that took issue with government policies as “strangling serpents”.34
But anti-charity sentiment after 2010 was unusually intense, leaving charities collectively feeling bruised, demoralised and less sure of themselves. Occasional transgression by individuals made matters worse: charity staff or volunteers are convicted in the courts, from time to time, of helping themselves to charity funds. In 2018, for example, the former chief executive of Birmingham Dogs Home, Simon Price, was jailed for five years after defrauding the charity of around £900,000.35 Five years earlier, five people were jailed in Southampton after they used fake identity documents and collecting tins with home-printed logos to collect money in pubs: they pocketed £26,000,
