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For people with criminal records
For people with criminal records

Category: Trustee

Joint Committee publish report on proposals to extend disqualification of trustees

Update – “In its report published today, the Joint Committee on the Draft Protection of Charities Bill backs proposals to give the Charity Commission more powers to ensure effective regulation of the charity sector. However the Committee is clear that effective safeguards must be in place to ensure charities and their trustees are treated fairly by the Commission.”

The report can be downloaded from the Parliament website.

In the report, the Committee has drawn on the evidence that we submitted in both oral and written evidence. In particular, see pages 56, 57, 64 and 72 of the report.

Unlock give evidence to Parliamentary Committee on rules regarding becoming a trustee with convictions

Yesterday our Director of Services, Christopher Stacey, gave evidence to the Joint Committee on the Protection of Charities Bill.

You can watch the evidence below (the session Unlock takes part in starts from 15.15), or you can follow this link to watch it on the Parliament TV site.

Update (January 2015) – Following the oral evidence, we followed this with written evidence which can be downloaded here – it is also available on the Parliament website.

For more information about the policy work around becoming a trustee, click here.

Charity Commission respond to our concerns about governing documents

We recently met with the Charity Commission, where we discussed a number of areas of concern as part of work to enable people with unspent convictions to become trustees of charities.

In particular, we discussed an issue that we raised in our report of February this year relating to a charities’ governing documents, and how the way that the Commission were interpreting these were causing problems for charities like Unlock to recruit people with convictions.

We’re pleased to report that the Commission have, following our meeting, provided us with the response below.

Turning to one of the specific issues we discussed, I referred the governing document point to one of our lawyers I can confirm that we seem to have been mistaken in 2011. The Articles as they were then did not mean a waiver would have been ineffective. If one had been granted it would have meant, as we thought at the meeting, that the individual was no longer disqualified and so could have been appointed as a trustee.

Charity Commission representative

We’re pleased that the Commission has taken a more common-sense approach to this. It removes what was otherwise a cumbersome bureaucratic hurdle that many charities would have had to go through (amending their governing documents) and now makes it somewhat easier for a charity to recruit somebody with unspent convictions.

You can find out more about our work on enabling people with convictions to become trustees of charities here.

Government publish Draft Protection of Charities Bill

Last week, the Government published their Draft Protection of Charities Bill, following the consultation they held earlier this year.

This paper sets out the Governments plans.

We’re continuing to raise a number of issues that we addressed in our consultation response, in relation to how people with convictions are treated.

People with convictions as trustees – Consultation response by Unlock

Following our recent news about the proposed changes by the Charity Commission, we’ve now submitted our response

As a charity that exists to support the efforts of people with convictions in moving on positively with their lives, and as an organisation which itself has sought to recruit trustees who themselves have convictions, we are concerned about the potential impact of these proposals, as well as being concerned about how the current system operates.

There is a common theme that runs throughout our response – our aim is to ensure that the processes of the Charity Commission work in a way which allows charities the freedom to recruit people as trustees who have unspent convictions, where the charity believes that the individual can fulfil their obligations as a trustee and the charity can show it has taken reasonable steps to protect the interests of the charity.

In addition to drawing on our own experience as an organisation, and the individuals that we’ve worked with, we sought to raise awareness of this consultation amongst organisations that we know keen to have people with convictions involved at a management level within their organisations. In particular, we have worked with Clinks, which is a charity that supports voluntary organisations that work with offenders and their families.

As well as encouraging responses from other organisations, we have included in our response anonymous extracts from the responses that we received, in order to raise awareness of the concerns of other organisations.

Download our response here.

 

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