News

20 November 2007

Independent body needed to assess charities’ performance

Speaking last night at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce), Martin Brookes, NPC’s Director of Research, said that charities would benefit from external assessment. He proposed that the new body should sit alongside, but separate from the Charity Commission to scrutinise the performance of charities.

‘This new body should be concerned with assessing and improving the performance of charities,’ Brookes said. ‘Creating such a body would have far-reaching consequences for the way charities are run and our confidence in their achievements’.

Helping charities do good better

‘Charities are an important driver of social change. I want them to achieve more. And that would be the purpose of the new body.’

In his lecture, Brookes said that charities have not faced the same level of scrutiny as other sectors and highlighted how increased external scrutiny and measurement had contributed to improved performance in other areas such as health and education. Similar mechanisms could work in the charity sector, argued Brookes.

Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA, who chaired the lecture said: ‘Martin Brookes raises important and difficult issues...The question is not whether charities should be subject to scrutiny, surely they must. It is how scrutiny can be developed…as something which the sector sees as a valuable tool to improve its outcomes and public standing.’

Closing the loop
Adam Sampson, Chief Executive of the housing and homelessness charity Shelter, was a respondent to the lecture. ‘We are a curious sector - the people who pay for our work are not the same as the people who use our services’. This lack of customer feedback loop means that scrutiny is all the more important, said Sampson.

It is important that scrutiny is both sensitive and useful, Sampson cautioned. It needs to ‘look at the right numbers and at the outcomes and not the processes’ and ‘it should equip end users to make good decisions between us as charities’.

Scrutiny should value experimental approaches and even failure, as well as the 'repetitive generation of results', concluded Sampson.

Click here to download the speech and here for the media release. See some of the media coverage here. Listen to the RSA's podcast of the lecture.

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