Protection of Charities
The Charity Commission’s statutory objectives include increasing public trust and confidence in charities and promoting charities’ compliance with their legal obligations. A significant part of the Charity Commission’s compliance work involves identifying and investigating misconduct or mismanagement in charities and taking appropriate and proportionate action in response to protect charity assets.
	The Charity Commission already has a range of investigatory and enforcement powers designed to protect charitable assets where there is serious misconduct or mismanagement. As a civil regulator, the Commission has no powers of prosecution, so if the Charity Commission discovers criminal activities it reports those activities to the police or other appropriate law enforcement agencies. The Charity Commission must not become directly involved in the running of or administration of a charity, although it can under certain circumstances give directions to charity trustees, appoint interim managers to displace the trustees and make remedial schemes.
	Currently, people with an unspent conviction for a criminal offence involving dishonesty or deception are automatically disqualified from acting as a charity trustee until their conviction is spent or they obtain a waiver from the disqualification from the Charity Commission.
	In his 2012 statutory review of the Charities Act 2006 "Trusted and Independent; giving charity back to charities ", Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbott’s recommended that the Government consider extending the range of offences that automatically disqualify a person from being a charity trustee. The Government accepted his recommendation in its response in September 2013.
	In December 2013 the National Audit Office (NAO) published a report on the regulatory effectiveness of the Charity Commission. The report concluded that the Charity Commission did not do enough to identify and tackle abuse of charitable status, and that this "undermines the Commission’s ability to meet its statutory objective to increase public trust and confidence in charities".
	The report found that the Charity Commission "needs to make greater use of its statutory powers in line with its objective of maintaining confidence in the sector; and develop an approach to identify and deal with those few trustees who deliberately abuse charitable status".
	The NAO report also identified deficiencies in the Charity Commission’s powers and barriers to their use. It made a number of recommendations to the Charity Commission and recommended that the Cabinet Office should "assist the Commission in securing legislative changes to address gaps and deficiencies in the Commission’s powers."
	The Government’s Extremism Task Force also recommended addressing gaps and deficiencies in the Charity Commission’s powers in the specific context of tackling extremism. It recommended "consulting on new legislation to strengthen the powers of the Charity Commission: these powers will help us tackle extremism, as well as other abuses of charitable status such as tax avoidance and fraud." Subsequently, the Home Affairs Select Committee, in its 2014 report on counter-terrorism also recommended stronger legal powers for the Charity Commission to counter the abuse of charities for terrorist purposes.
	In December 2013 the Government published a consultation on 17 proposals for reform put forward by the Charity Commission and which dealt both with the range of offences resulting in automatic disqualification from charity trusteeship, and gaps and weaknesses in the Charity Commission’s existing powers.
	Consultation feedback indicated broad support for the role of the Charity Commission and for ensuring it has the tools it needs to do its job. Not all of the proposals attracted support from the majority of respondents. A draft Bill was published for pre-legislative scrutiny in October 2014. Ten of the original 17 proposals were taken forward in the draft Bill.
	Parliamentary pre-legislative scrutiny was undertaken by the Joint Committee on the Draft Protection of Charities Bill. The Joint Committee took evidence from a wide range of stakeholders, and published its report on the draft Bill in February 2015. The Joint Committee broadly supported the proposals to give the Charity Commission more powers, however it recommended that effective safeguards must be in place to ensure charities and their trustees are treated fairly by the Commission.
	The Government’s response to the Joint Committee report was published in March 2015. It accepted most, but not all, of the Joint Committee’s recommendations, and the draft Bill was amended accordingly.
	In terms of protection of charities, the Act:
adds new criteria, including certain criminal offences, to the criteria which automatically disqualify a person from being a charity trustee in England and Wales;
extends automatic disqualification to senior management positions in charities;
gives the Charity Commission a new power to disqualify an unfit person in certain circumstances from being a charity trustee and senior manager in a charity for up to 15 years, subject to safeguards;
enables the Charity Commission to continue to proceed with removal where a trustee resigns after notice of removal has been served;
gives the Charity Commission a new warning power, enabling it to issue a statutory warning where the Commission considers there is either a breach of trust or duty or other misconduct or mismanagement;
gives the Charity Commission a new power to direct a charity to be wound-up following an investigation, and after public notice of its intention to act and a period for representations, where that would be more appropriate than attempting to restore the charity to health;
enables the Charity Commission, in the context of a statutory inquiry, to direct that a charity not take certain actions.
	The Act also:
makes clear that failure to follow a Charity Commission order or direction constitutes misconduct;
extends the period for which the Charity Commission may suspend a person from charity trusteeship pending removal from a maximum of one year to a maximum of two years;
enables the Charity Commission to exercise its existing scheme-making power in the context of a statutory inquiry where it is satisfied that there has been misconduct or mismanagement or there is a need to protect charity property. Currently both misconduct/mismanagement and need to protect charity property limbs must be met;
enables the Charity Commission to remove a disqualified trustee from a charity where they have not stepped down;
updates the existing power to direct charity property to be applied to another charity to deal with a particular problem;
prevents a person disqualified as a charity trustee who is also an officer of a corporate body that is a charity trustee from participating in discussions and decisions when the corporate body is acting as a charity trustee.