Corporate report

Charity Commission Business Plan 2022 to 2023

Published 13 May 2022

Applies to England and Wales

Introduction

The Charity Commission’s purpose is to ensure that charity can thrive and inspire trust so that people can improve lives and strengthen society.

Building on progress we have made over the last 3 years, our business plan sets out the detailed steps we will take to deliver against our purpose, strategy, and statutory objectives during 2022-23. We can now plan for the future with confidence, focusing on longer term shifts that will ultimately deliver greater impact; and 3 key shifts are interwoven into the actions set out in this plan.

Data

We want to better use the data and information we hold, so that we can help the public make informed choices about charities; enable us to identify risk in charities sooner; and provide our stakeholders with better visibility of the scale and scope of the sector.

Trustees

This business plan also sets out the next steps in our journey to fundamentally change the way in which we communicate with charities. These plans include our ambition for a new online portal, which over time will be tailored to trustees’ specific needs, aiming to improve their experiences of engaging with us and better receiving the support they need to run their charities.

People

Our ability to achieve our ambitions relies on our greatest resource, our people. We will therefore be continuing to invest in our staff with training and development, ensuring we have built the capability and capacity we need to deliver our priorities.

We have structured our planned work, in the year ahead, around 3 priorities:

• we will improve our ability to regulate efficiently, effectively and robustly
• we will better engage with trustees, supporting them to run their charities well
• we will strengthen our organisation to ensure we deliver our ambition

Our Priorities

Priority 1: we will improve our ability to regulate efficiently, effectively and robustly

We have made significant improvements to the way we work, but we know that we must continue to adapt and improve how we regulate.

We will continue to put the public interest front and centre of our approach to regulating charities. We will further strengthen our already robust approach, being clear where things have gone wrong and why it matters.

We will aim to increase the amount of wrongdoing we uncover proactively, making use of our increasingly sophisticated approach to intelligence gathering and data analysis.

As the registrar of charities, we will also develop our unique position as the primary source of key information about charities in England and Wales.

To achieve this, we will seek to widen the data we hold about charities and improve our ability to analyse that data. We will implement changes to the charity classifications and launch a consultation on proposed changes to the annual return. We will continue to contribute to the review of SORP and will explore further online filing of accounts.

Alongside this, we will build the skills of our staff to ensure they feel confident in delivering casework outcomes swiftly and robustly and supporting them with systems and tools that enable them to identify and tackle harm.

We will strengthen the quality of our casework, empowering managers and leaders to ensure consistency of approach, high standards and continuous improvement in our casework.

We will start to automate our processes, where possible, making information more easily accessible and processes smoother. These changes will result in a reduction of initial contacts, repeat and subsequent queries about the same issue. This will free up capacity for more complex casework with charities that either need support or where they may be responsible for wrongdoing and harm.

Deliverables

• implement the Charities Act 2022 as it comes into effect in stages, through changes to our guidance, online services and regulatory approach
• review our charity data collection requirements including where and how that data is best gathered
• improve the way charities are classified to support a more detailed understanding of the type of work charities do
• explore further opportunities to automate our processes
• complete the rollout of the Commission Academy, providing advanced learning, training and knowledge to our people
• embed a casework quality assurance framework, to ensure high standards across all customer-facing teams

Priority 2: better engage with trustees to support them run their charities well

Over the next 3 years, we will fundamentally shift how we communicate with charities. We will aim to move away from communicating solely with organisations, to engaging proactively with individual trustees.

We will seek out a more personalised relationship with trustees, tailoring our communications and enabling trustees to share appropriate and timely information about themselves and their charities with us. In doing so, we will together drive-up compliance with regulatory requirements and increase transparency, improving the sector’s accountability to the public.

In 2022-23, we will also reach out to trustees through sustained and targeted campaigns with messages that help them to understand their responsibilities and engage them with our growing suite of practical guidance.

We will continue to modernise our guidance to ensure that trustees are supported to understand their responsibilities and, ultimately, help them to improve the governance of their charities and increase their impact for society.

While we have a permanent office in Wales, speak at a number of events, work closely with representative bodies and engage positively with the Welsh Government and Senedd Members on matters of shared importance, we want to do more in Wales in the year ahead.

Deliverables

• deliver phase one of our portal to start to reshape our relationship with trustees
• improve website journeys for all users so they can navigate and find what they need
• modernise and rationalise our external guidance
• deliver a programme of campaigns to support trustees to understand their responsibilities and to help the public make safe and informed choices
• strengthen our visibility and engagement in Wales

Priority 3 – we will strengthen our organisation to ensure we deliver our ambition

Over the coming year, we will begin to make our vision for the future of our workforce a reality. We will deliver changes to how we work, how we support and develop our people and what we want and need the culture of the Commission to be.

Essential to the delivery of priorities in this plan will be the implementation of a range of digital, data and technology changes. Through our IT Roadmap we will continue to deliver improved systems or build new systems and tools for the benefit of our people and for those that engage with us.

Deliverables

• commission, in line with best practice, an external review of our governance arrangements
• develop regulatory impact measures to further understand the impact we have for the public and the charity sector
• further strengthen our organisational and cultural identity
• implement a new complaints-handling policy and process to drive improved quality and continuous learning
• deliver improvements to IT and digital services as per the IT roadmap

Tracking our performance

We will report performance against our Business Plan in our Annual Report for that financial year. We will also continue to track our performance against our Strategic Impact Measures and Customer Service Standards, to ensure the public can see how, each year, the Commission is meeting its strategic and operational objectives.