More staff needed to cope with compliance cases

Dozens of new posts are to be created by the Charity Commission in England in a bid to tackle a huge increase of compliance cases.

Its annual report and accounts, published last week, revealed the regulator examined 2,269 compliance cases in the 12 months to the end of March this year.

This is an increase from 1,664 in the previous year.

As such the commission is planning to recruit 85 additional staff after receiving a £5m increase to its budget.

The rise is down to an increase in the reporting of safeguarding incidents by charities as a result of the Oxfam scandal in February.

Serious incidents reported to the regulator witnessed a huge increase also from 54 in 2016 to 287 last year.

Compliance casework includes dealing with matters that are not serious enough to warrant statutory inquiries and is increasing sharply said the regulator.

"We are responding with ever-sharper risk prioritisation, so that we first apply our resources to problems and issues likely to have the most serious consequences," the report says.

"This has the inevitable consequence that lower-risk issues have a lesser priority and some matters will fall below our risk threshold and will not result in our regulatory involvement."

Elsewhere the report said it had continued to experience a rise in the number of applications to register as a charity amounting to 8,375 in 2017/18.

It also received 637 requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act in 2017/18, one more than in the previous year.

The report showed staff attrition rates were relatively high. A third of all staff moved job during the year, and 38% of London-based staff left the regulator for pastures new.