Corporate report

Charity Commission Business Plan 2023 to 2024

Published 21 June 2023

Applies to England and Wales

Introduction

Over the last ten years, the Commission has been on a journey of improvement. In more recent years, as we have delivered against our 2018-23 strategy, we have focused on getting ‘our house in order’, understanding our casework better and managing down historic backlogs, while maturing into a better, more professional organisation.

As we come to the end of our current strategy, we are beginning to look ahead to the next 5 years. Our aspiration is to be widely perceived as an expert Commission, which is fair, balanced and independent in the way it delivers its regulation.

As we have defined the activity within this business plan, we have sought to build on the progress we have made while also looking ahead. As such, this is a transition plan – it aims to deliver against the commitments made in the last year of our current strategy, while setting us up ready to deliver a new strategy from 2024.

Our plan for 2023-24 is shaped around four priorities:

• we will regulate effectively, being clear about our role and our decision-making
• we will strengthen our support and interventions to ensure charities are run well
• in challenging times, we will improve how we use our voice, data and intelligence to help charity deliver impact
• we will invest in our people and our systems so that we continue to be an expert Commission

Our Priorities

Priority 1: We will regulate effectively, being clear about our role and our decision-making

Over the course of the year, we will deliver activities targeted at ensuring our regulatory approach is clear, transparent, and rooted in fairness and consistency.

To ensure our processes are rigorous, and meet professional standards, we will undertake a review of our risk assessment model, ensuring it remains fit for purpose, and that we are focusing our resources on the issues that pose the greatest risk to the sector.

We will progress development work on making our charity registration processes more digital, efficient, and effective.

We will implement a new writing style when we are directly communicating with those involved in our casework, ensuring they understand why we take the action we do and reassuring them that our approach is fair and consistent, even if the outcomes in individual cases may not be the ones they hoped for.

We will also consider how we can further clarify our regulatory approach publicly, making sure that our wider stakeholders – including the public, trustees, and other agencies – understand our role, our remit and what we can do.

Priority 2: We will strengthen our support and interventions to ensure charities are run well

We will deliver activities that ensure we are both more effective at discovering and responding to wrongdoing and harm and that we better support trustees in running their charities.

We know that no matter how successful the charitable endeavour, the best plans can go astray. In our interventions, we will be proportionate – helping trustees to respond when problems occur, while tackling intentional wrongdoing robustly.

This year we will deliver the next phase of our awareness campaigns and online improvements alongside further steps in our programme of guidance redesign, together continuing to support and improve trustees’ understanding of their responsibilities and contributing to a longer-term reduction in unintentional harms caused by poor governance.

New guidance will underpin the delivery of the second and third phases of the Charities Act 2022, which will also require updates to internal processes and digital systems.

With the launch of our ‘My Charity Commission Account’ this year, we will put in place groundwork that will help us, over time, to reshape our relationship with trustees.

Together with conducting research to inform the future development of the Account, we will have taken important steps towards our ultimate ambitions for the service: providing a more efficient and tailored communications channel and an improved customer experience for trustees, which proactively serves them with the guidance and reminders they need to be compliant.

Priority 3: In challenging times, we will improve how we use our voice, data and intelligence to help charity deliver impact

In our work we will listen to all concerns with the respect they deserve, but while we report to Parliament, we will be beholden to no-one in applying the law, continuing to put the public interest front and centre of our regulatory approach.

Over the course of the year, we will speak out on the issues that matter, and we will explore ways to explain our casework in a way that is meaningful to the public and useful to trustees, and which reinforces the independence of our work. We will also raise awareness of the information on our Register.

Through our activity, we will be more proactive in anticipating wrongdoing, dealing with it speedily where we find it. We will continue to deploy our increasingly sophisticated approach to intelligence gathering and data analysis, improving how we use data and intelligence to inform our work, helping us to identify and address the issues and risks that emerge.

This will be supported by the introduction of the improved Annual Return 2023 question set onto our digital services following widespread consultation last year, as well as making the changes to our current system for the classification of what charities do so that we are able to understand better the charity sector through segmentation.

Working with others, we will also continue to progress the redevelopment of the SORP accounting framework, and our long-term work ambitions for the digitisation of charity accounts.

Priority 4: We will invest in our people and our systems so that we continue to be an expert Commission

Our activities under this priority are focused on achieving our ambition to be an expert Commission. We want the Commission to be a great place to work with an employee experience that attracts, retains, engages and develops talented people who believe in what the Commission does. We will continue to develop our offer for staff in this context. To empower our people to deliver excellence in regulation, we will equip them with the knowledge they need through updates and amendments to our operational guidance, as well as looking to bolster capacity by seeking to improve, continuously, existing casework processes.

Through the delivery of the next phase of our IT roadmap, and a wider programme of continuous improvement, we will make sure that our people can deliver their work effectively and efficiently, improving how we use existing systems as well as introducing new ones where appropriate.

This year, we will be developing and will publish our new 5 year strategy from 2024, which will set out a clear and ambitious vision for our future as an expert Commission, which is fair, balanced and independent in the way it delivers its regulation.

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.