Guidance

Compliance toolkit chapter 5: Summary

Updated 26 March 2024

Applies to England and Wales

Charities often play an important role in different parts of society and in different ways. This can include challenging held views and perceptions and undertaking high risk activities, which may involve encouraging free speech.

Charities are often central to providing an environment that allows for a range of views to be expressed, discussed and debated within the law. Many charities therefore further their charitable purposes by arranging events and meetings involving speakers, and by distributing literature and other educational materials, including online. In most cases, this causes no problems.

However, there have been occasions when terrorists, and those with extremist views who encourage and support terrorism and terrorist ideology, have used charity events to make those views known or have used charities to promote or distribute their literature. The risks vary from charity to charity, depending on its activities and its beneficiaries, but as a trustee, you need to be aware of the risks and take reasonable and proportionate steps to protect your charity accordingly.

As a trustee, you should actively manage any risks that speakers or literature may:

• break the law, for example by
  • encouraging or glorifying terrorism
  • inciting hatred on the grounds of race, religion or sexual orientation
  • inciting criminal acts or public order offences
• be outside of the charity’s objects
• put the charity’s assets (including its reputation), people or beneficiaries at undue risk
• be otherwise in breach of charity law, because, for example, it breaks the rules on carrying out political activities or not be for the public benefit

What are trustees’ duties and responsibilities?

As a trustee, you must comply with the general law. This means you must not promote extremist views or activity that supports terrorism or terrorist ideology through your charity’s work.

You must also comply with your charity law duties^{[footnote 1]}. As a trustee, you must always act in the best interests of your charity and with reasonable care and skill. Your charity’s assets must be used only to support its charitable purposes and you must avoid exposing these assets (including its reputation), people or beneficiaries to undue risk. Your charity must not act in a way that could lead a reasonable member of the public to conclude that the charity or its trustees were associated with a proscribed organisation or promoting or supporting terrorism.

A charity’s activities can only be in pursuit of its lawful charitable purposes. Concerns about a charity involved in supporting, or giving a platform to, inappropriate extremist views, would call into question whether what it was doing was lawful, supporting its purposes and for the public benefit. Those views might include promoting violence or hatred on the grounds of race, religion or sexual orientation; encouraging people to adopt a violent ideology; or, making claims to which violence is subsequently presented as the only solution.

Views or activities that are violent or that encourage unlawful violence cannot be for the public benefit because they are illegal. Even where certain views fall below the criminal threshold, if, for example, they are harmful to social cohesion, such as denigrating those of a particular faith or no faith, these may also be inconsistent with the public benefit requirement. As a trustee you must also ensure you comply with the charity law rules on political campaigning. This means that you must not allow the charity to be used as a vehicle for the expression of the political views of any individual trustee, staff member or other representative.

Where speech is lawful, you should consider the risk of damage to charity’s reputation that could be caused by inhibiting free speech. This could include a detrimental impact towards your charity’s independence or credibility. For charities with purposes to advance education, this risk assessment should also include consideration of their charitable purposes.

What do trustees need to do?

The risks vary from charity to charity and your response should be proportionate to the risks faced by your charity. The higher the risks the more you and your co-trustees need to do to protect your charity and ensure you comply with your duties. You should be vigilant and put appropriate measures in place to:

• ensure that adequate procedures are put in place and properly implemented to prevent terrorist organisations and extremists from taking advantage of your charity’s status, reputation, facilities or assets
• assess the risks in connection with any proposed event, meeting or publication, including those undertaken by partner organisations
• ensure you know enough about proposed speakers and close partner organisations, carrying out checks against the Home Office list of proscribed groups and against the OFSI list of designated persons and entities
• assess how events and publications further your charity’s aims and are in its best interests
• be clear about how speakers, partners, sponsors and publications are selected and approved
• provide clear guidelines for speakers, authors, translators and editors
• properly manage charity events to prevent inappropriate activities taking place and, where incidents do arise, deal with them promptly
• take steps to prevent the charity’s activities and views from being misinterpreted
• be mindful about what you and your co-trustees do or say in a personal capacity because this may also impact on the charity
• consider how to facilitate the right to reply to various points or views raised
• set procedures for responding to complaints and concerns
• record decisions made on events, speakers and publications

Where a charity carries out events or provides or distributes literature on a regular basis, you should have written policies and clear procedures in place covering the above points.

Where a charity’s activities may, or may appear to, encourage terrorist activity and terrorist ideology, you should take immediate steps to deal with this. The Commission expects any person connected with a charity, whether a trustee, employee or volunteer to deal responsibly with concerns of the charity’s possible links with extremist activity.

For more detailed advice and guidance, see the full publication.

1. These are explained in detail in The essential trustee: what you need to know, what you need to do’ (CC3). ↩