Reflections on continuity and change
Helen Stephenson, CEO addressed the Charity Commission's Annual Public Meeting for 2023, reflecting on her period in office so far.
I am delighted that we are here at the Florrie, in the heart of Liverpool, a city that is also very much at the heart of the Commission.
This is where most of our staff are based, with many travelling from Merseyside, the Wirral, North Wales, and the Northwest to our Bootle office. It is where we do much of our core regulatory work – registering charities, supporting trustees through the Contact Centre, undertaking compliance case work, and our digital communications and campaigns.
In a way, coming to Merseyside is like coming home. Our team here work hard to make the Bootle office homely – coffee mornings, charity fundraisers, retirement picnics. All involve plenty of cake which makes the place have a true sense of community (albeit divided between Everton and Liverpool fans).
So hosting today’s meeting here feels appropriate at this my seventh and last Annual Public Meeting as the Commission’s Chief Executive.
It’s certainly been an eventful almost seven years.
Not just for the Commission as an institution, but for the sector we regulate, and the society we serve.
But more on that later.
The Commission has been in continuous existence for 170 years and our core mission has remained unchanged throughout that century and a half: protecting and promoting the special bond of trust between the public and charities. Enabling and encouraging people to work together to improve lives and strengthen communities.
But how we do that, and therefore what we do, has evolved over time - reflecting sometimes subtly, sometimes directly, the hopes, needs, values, and expectations of the public.
This, of course, is because the sector itself serves as a mirror on society – what matters to individuals, communities of place and interest, and what matters to us collectively in society is so often expressed in and through charity.
I’ve seen that truth confirmed many times during my time with the Commission.
Service and support
When I started, I was determined that we nurture the right relationship with the trustees we regulate.
We are neither a loyal friend, championing individual charities or trustees – nor are we a fearsome foe – and engaging with us should not feel like riding into battle.
We are not influenced but informed by the sector we regulate – with our ambition to be the expert, trusted regulator that enables charity to thrive.
To be the effective regulator that the sector deserves – and indeed requires – I have always been clear that the Commission must place an equal emphasis on being a source of support to trustees, but also a tough enforcer, prepared to tackle wrongdoing and harm, robustly and swiftly.
In large part, it is through investing in our people and our systems that we’ve been able to do so.
It is our staff who work tirelessly to articulate the legal framework we are the guardians of, to get charities back on track. Where they need to deliver sanctions to limit harm, they do so with professionalism and integrity and true commitment to the mission of many in the sector - to help others.
We have also invested hugely in the support we offer charities. Not least in the fundamental review of the tools and support we provide trustees.
For example, in recent years we have transformed the guidance we produce. Today, I am confident that it far better meets the needs of busy trustees – it is clear, and as simple as the law allows, and structured in a way that is accessible and easy to understand.
You will no doubt have heard me say before how proud I am of our suite of 5-minute guides – and that’s something I’ll say again today!
These bite-sized guides which provide the basic syllabus of issues trustees need to know about have made it so much easier for them to develop a foundation of knowledge and understanding from which to build as and when they need to.
We’ve also focused on making our more in-depth guidance shorter, and, I hope, clearer.
Over the summer, we published an updated version of CC14 – about charities and investments.
We thoroughly redesigned this guidance not only to make sure it was easier to understand but also to give trustees confidence to make investment decisions that are right for their charity. We made sure the language we use is clearer and the structure easier to follow. I hope if you’ve used CC14, you have felt the benefits of this approach and found the information you need more quickly.
In his opening remarks, Orlando referred to our new social media guidance, published in September. This was commissioned to meet demand from the sector who sought advice on this ever-evolving communications tool. It was widely consulted on and crafted - from the outset – with trustees’ needs in mind.
I’m delighted that the final product has been well received across the sector and also that our motivation in preparing it has been understood and welcomed.
For many people, I know that being a trustee comes on top of a busy day job and a number of other commitments. So it is important that the Commission can meet you halfway – whether that means through easier to digest information, or more accessible services.
Earlier this year, we launched My Charity Commission Account. This new system represents a long-term investment on our part as regulator, to change the way we interact with trustees as individuals rather than charities as organisations.
Over the summer we’ve worked tirelessly to launch the system. We’ve invited trustees to sign up and made our new annual return available through the portal.
Now, I know that some charities are experiencing difficulties with the system. And that with increased demand for our Contact Centre, it’s been challenging to get through.
Please know that we are working hard to ensure we resolve those issues – and rest assured that no charity will be penalised if they cannot file their annual return or accounts, because they encounter a difficulty with the system. I am pleased that the majority of charities are now set up and have been able to file on time.
When I arrived at the Commission, our Contact Centre was open just a few hours a day – making it nearly impossible for people to contact us. Since then, I’ve overseen significant investment in our wonderful team here in Liverpool, improving the tools they have to do their job, bolstering their numbers and extending the opening hours so that we are available every working day. For many trustees, the Contact Centre is both the main and the only human interface they have with the Commission – so it is important it’s there when you need it.
But the Contact Centre is just one of the ways the public interact with our work.
Each year, we see individuals come forward as whistleblowers – this can take real courage and the concerns raised can have a significant impact on the operations of a charity or on trust in the sector at large.
So, another area where we have made it easier for people to engage with us is whistleblowing. We’ve improved the journey for charity workers and volunteers wishing to draw serious concerns about their charity to our attention. And we know that to be a truly trusted regulator, we need to serve these people with the respect and give them the support they deserve. The service we offer does just this.
Our emphasis on service and support reflects the growing expectations we all have whether as customers, citizens, or beneficiaries of charities.
As citizens we expect, and we demand, a good service whether that’s when we’re applying for a new passport or raising a query about a purchase.
Similarly, those accessing charity services – a foodbank, art gallery, mental health charity or cancer support group – expect a respectful, and where possible, personal service.
Charity banking
It is right that we have had an intense focus on customer service in recent years, but it’s not just from the Commission that charities have the right to expect a decent service for. And I’d like to make clear that I think there is room for improvement among some of the organisations we are all most familiar with.
I have become increasingly concerned, over recent years, about the service that many charities experience when interacting with high street banks.
Too often, charities experience accounts being closed or suspended suddenly for long periods of time with poor customer service and administrative delays.
Only last week at an event celebrating Trustees’ Week, a trustee came up to me to tell me how their charity’s bank - one of the high street names - had closed their account with just two weeks’ notice and no explanation. This isn’t just a charity with an income over £100k, but an employer with staff to pay. It is simply not good enough.
All too frequently, charities find that online banking is not designed to match the way they operate and that banks are rolling back bespoke banking services that charities need in order to deliver.
Therefore, today, I, alongside my counterparts at the Office for Scottish Charity Regulation and the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland, have published an open letter to the CEOs of high street banks.
The letter makes clear that we consider the service charities experience from banks is unacceptable.
Charities are on the frontline of the current cost-of-living crisis, providing vital support to people across the country at this challenging time. Many are themselves facing financial difficulties.
The current stresses for charity trustees are heightened by avoidable frustrations at the availability of bank accounts and substandard service from banks.
We have worked behind the scenes for years to support the sector in raising their concerns with the banks. And while there are some good initiatives underway to improve the situation, including with and through UK Finance – not enough has changed. The scale of the response from banks needs to step up now, and at speed.
I hope that our letter today ensures that in future, charities receive the services they need and deserve from their banking providers.
Data and technology
While improvements to banking services for charities have been painfully slow, other aspects of charities’ experience are developing at enormous speed.
It is hard not to acknowledge the leaps and bounds that technology has made in the comparatively short time I’ve led the Commission.
I see peers across government and charity leaders themselves all grappling with the challenges and opportunities that digital and data provide in delivering better public services, more agile solutions to emerging threats, and to grow confidence in our work.
We have made great strides towards becoming a digital by default regulator, upgrading and streamlining our online services for charities.
This investment and improvement in our systems paid off most acutely when we were faced with the first COVID-19 lockdown.
Within days, we enabled our staff to work completely from home. Our Contact Centre was up and running remotely, answering queries from trustees. Our outreach and regulatory work continued, allowing us to consistently fulfil our duty of upholding public trust and confidence. Our support for charities as they navigated this unexpected global event remained steadfast.
We did not miss a beat.
And I have never been prouder than I was of my staff – and their resilience – as I was during that period.
But we needed the technology to enable the shift.
In 2020, we launched an improved online public register of charities – focused on increasing the transparency of the sector and providing information about individual charities for donors and the public to consider when determining who to support.
Since then the Register has gone from strength to strength – with its pages being viewed nearly 46 million times last year alone. It has provided a strong foundation for us to use our data to improve accountability in the charity sector.
Data – how we collect it, use it, and share it – has been a critical feature of the activity in recent years and will be in those that lie ahead. Our work in this area has allowed us – and I am sure will continue to allow us – to be an ever more proactive regulator, intervening at an earlier stage and hopefully avoiding harm and disruption sooner.
Today, we’re publishing the first of a new series of quarterly releases of data on our regulatory and compliance case work. This stride towards greater transparency will, I hope, demonstrate both how extensive our regulatory work is, and provide a flavour of its variety and impact. The data we are releasing is not brand new – they are figures we report on yearly in our annual report. But I hope in releasing data quarterly, we offer a more immediate opportunity for those interested in our work to see what we’re doing and to identify trends and themes.
In the summer, we launched a new annual return. This followed a fundamental review of the information we capture annually from charities.
The new annual return, and planned work to reclassify charities on our Register, is essential so that we can continue to give the public access to information that helps them make informed choices about charities and provide policymakers and researchers with better visibility of the scale and scope of the sector.
So too will be research we intend to undertake to better understand trustees themselves. This research will enable the sector to work out what the barriers to trusteeship might be – and how we open more doors for more people to become trustees. We are now actively looking with partners to develop further research in this area, so as in due course to supply data to help this process of promoting wider trusteeship. This is something that really matters for the future of the sector.
The last six years has been part of this organisation’s long journey with data and digital.
And, it has been extremely satisfying to see the Commission cement its unique position as the source of key information about charities in England and Wales - harnessing innovations in technology, data, and insight.
I have no doubt that the organisation and the sector are primed to make the most of these innovations in the years to come.
Leading for change and resilience
As I said, this will be the last time that I speak a Charity Commission Annual Public Meeting.
So I hope you will indulge me as I take a moment to reflect on my own experience of leading the Commission through what is been an ever-changing and uncertain period.
If I think back to when I first walked through the Commission’s doors in July 2017, I could not have predicted the journey that the organisation, and the sector, would be about to embark on.
The sector was still reeling from the aftershocks of the safeguarding and other scandals, which had driven public trust in charities to an all-time low. The Commission was seeking to deliver meaningful change in the wake of those scandals all the while grappling with rising demand and increasing caseloads.
But if I thought that after such an intense start there would be period of stability. Well I was wrong.
Covid hit.
I remember thinking, as we shut the Commission offices and sent everyone home to work, that by the summer of 2020 normal life would have resumed. Of course it didn’t – and we like all organisations found ourselves profoundly affected and altered by the global health crisis.
As a nation, we had barely righted ourselves after the huge disruption and pain caused by the pandemic, when we were hit by a generational cost of living crisis, impacting many charities on several fronts at once – with demand on services increasing, costs rising, and downward pressures on income.
Beyond our shores, conflict, national disasters, and political instability abound. Not to mention the effects of climate change and the impact of rapid technological change.
It’s been quite the - almost - seven years.
I have hope that the intense financial pressures on charities and those they exist to serve will lessen in the months and years to come. And of course, we all wish for an easing of the horrifying conflict around the world.
But if the past teaches us anything, I do not think that charities or the Commission should expect a future of ‘steady as we go.’
Indeed I’ve heard a lot recently about the world entering a new era of ‘permacrisis.’ And that leaders should prepare for that. This is not to imply calamity will follow calamity.
More that – and to draw on the original meaning of the term crisis - leaders of charities, of all shapes and sizes, will find themselves repeatedly at crossroads and turning points, where significant change is not only possible, but inevitable.
I don’t think this is new either. John F Kennedy, who so often put big ideas into simple language – said of change that it is the “law of life.”
This is understood implicitly by many charities.
Yesterday, as part of Welsh Charities Week, I visited a wonderful charity, Advance Brighter Futures.
Advance Brighter Futures is based in Wrexham and works across North Wales, supporting people experiencing mental health challenges. The charity is celebrating its 30th anniversary. During that time Advance Brighter Futures has remained true to its founding mission to offer services that are driven by the voice and agency of the people it supports. And yet what it does has adapted enormously in response to circumstances, challenges, and opportunities. During the pandemic, the charity acted quickly to pivot its services, offering online support and telephone check ins. I was really impressed with what I saw at Advance Brighter Futures – a real, lived sense of openness and positivity towards change, but with a sharp focus on the charity’s core purpose.
Overall, then, I would argue that charities, like the Commission as regulator, should not see big change as an intrusion, or disruption to well-laid plans. We should accept change as inevitable and lead anticipating, rather than simply reacting to change.
I’d like a share a few conclusions I’ve drawn, or patterns I’ve identified, over the years.
First – being future focused does not mean never looking back. In fact, reflecting on what has come before can be vital to ensuring we lead purposefully into the future.
I have been very aware, throughout my time at the Commission, that the organisation has been thriving for over 170 years, and that as Chief Executive I am a custodian of a purpose that has endured.
That longer view has helped me resist the dual temptations to either jump on every bandwagon that comes along or to simply keep doing what we have always done, in the interests of continuity and safety, never taking a risk.
It is precisely in order to deliver on its enduring purpose effectively that the Commission has had to continually evolve.
Second – I’ve learnt that the unknown is scary, and that the instinct of many institutions is to look the other way and hunker down when trends or events of unknowable impact loom on the horizon. One of the jobs of a leader is to help encourage the opposite, and to ensure organisations tackle difficult issues.
In that spirit, the Commission has grasped some thorny regulatory issues over recent years.
Third, the importance of building flexibility into your strategy and work plans.
Set out the why, not the what or the how. And expect disruption and changes in course.
When the Commission developed our current strategy in 2018, we kept to high level principles, setting out not what we do, but why we matter.
This was particularly pertinent as the pandemic hit us. As a leader, the strategy became the lodestar allowing me to make sure we kept our sense of direction but also enabled us to pivot our activities. Providing support and guidance to trustees, engaging with Government to ensure measures they introduced worked for charities as well, listening to and engaging with sector leaders on the challenges they faced, and needs they had from us as regulator.
These principles of flexibility and adaptability are very much in our mind as we develop our new strategy, which we will launch early next year.
And finally – the clearest, and most hopeful conclusion I have drawn from my experience at the Commission over recent years is just how resilient and indeed ingenious the sector is.
Many predicted the pandemic would have a cataclysmic impact on the shape and size of the sector. Instead what we saw, by and large, was innovation and flexibility - charities adapting the way they delivered their services in order to achieve their fundamental purpose.
Similarly, while the cost-of-living crisis is unquestionably putting many charities under tremendous strain, there is no shortage of organisations applying to register, including charities set up to address the impact of the financial squeeze.
There are big generational shifts happening in our society at the moment, with attitudes to many cultural and societal issues changing with pace.
And while I can’t predict what the big themes for the coming years at the Commission, or in the sector will be - I am convinced that the charitable spirit that has seen charities at the centre of society for the 170 years the Commission has been in business will continue to flourish, expressing itself in new ways as need and expectations change.
But whatever the challenges, as a sector and as its regulator we need to keep embracing innovation and having an open mind to change. As someone once said: “Standing still is the fastest way of moving backwards in a rapidly changing world.”
I believe that as a regulator, we need to be rooted in our past and rightly proud of our history, but ready and willing to embrace change and innovation in our future.
Conclusion
I’m exceptionally proud of my time at the Commission and when I leave next year, I will look back with great satisfaction at the challenges we have overcome, the improvements we have delivered and the expert organisation the Commission is becoming.
I have been honoured to work with such a strong, skilled leadership team, and to have a led a dedicated, enthusiastic staff – all committed to overseeing the work of our dynamic sector and achieving excellence in all they do.
The challenge for the next leader of the Commission will be to ensure that the regulator continues to stay true to its fundamental purpose, while keeping pace with the changes we see in the sector we regulate, and the society we serve.
But I say this with certainty, that the Commission and its staff and Board, are well placed to take the next steps in its long and proud history and will deliver to ensure charity can continue to thrive.
Thank you.