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STOP PRESS: Charities Urged to Review Safeguarding Arrangements

on Tuesday, 10 April 2018.

As safeguarding concerns reach unprecedented levels, what does the Charity Commission's recent focus mean for you and your charity?

If you follow the Charity Commission's publications and have already subscribed to our Compliance Toolkit, you will have seen that, since December 2017, the Charity Commission has been heavily focussed on safeguarding. We understand that over the weekend, 6-9 April 2018, the Charity Commission has also directly emailed some charities about safeguarding.

The regulatory temperature around safeguarding has been rising considerably since last Autumn to the current position where the Charity Commission is expressing unprecedented levels of regulatory concern, resource commitment and directive statements on this issue.

What Has Happened?

It started in September 2017, when the Charity Commission updated its guidance on serious incident reporting. Whilst the requirement to report safeguarding incidents was largely unchanged, the guidance stressed the importance of reporting promptly and the need to report not just actual incidents and harm, but allegations and risks of harm.

On 6 December, the Charity Commission heavily revised its Strategy for dealing with safeguarding issues in charities. The guidance described a much more confident regulator than the previous version. It contained a clear vision of its role regulating charities governance, in particular in relation to promoting welfare of beneficiaries, and preventing harm to people who come into contact with a charity.

Less than two weeks later, on 19 December 2017, the Charity Commission published a regulatory alert on its website. This confirmed the scope of the charity safeguarding duty that it regulated, highlighting its application to staff and volunteers. It set out some regulatory expectations and advised charities to:

  • undertake a thorough review of their safeguarding governance, management arrangements and performance if one has not been recently conducted within the last 12 months
  • contact the Commission about safeguarding issues, or serious safeguarding incidents, complaints or allegations which have not previously been disclosed to the charity regulator

In the latest email, a very active regulator, which has been allocating resources to a task force and holding high profile summits, has reiterated that advice. Its consistent repetition by multiple channels underlines the seriousness of the message.

What Does This Mean for My Charity?

Safeguarding is a burning hot regulatory issue for the charity regulator. It seems to consider that safeguarding incidents have been under-reported and is calling on all charities to ensure that they have reported all outstanding safeguarding issues.

It isn't clear how the Charity Commission will approach reports made in response to its latest advice. But it is likely that it will consider any further delay in reporting safeguarding incidents or any failure to report incidents which later come to light with grave regulatory concern.

We therefore recommend that trustees:

  • check their charity's records for reference to allegations of abuse, neglect or harm to anyone the charity comes into contact with. Consider reporting these as a matter of urgency to the Charity Commission if this has not already been done.
  • review their safeguarding arrangements (to include policy and procedures) to ensure that these are drafted sufficiently widely to cover the charity's safeguarding obligations to all those affected by its operations (rather than focussing only on pupils).

For more information, please contact Tabitha Cave on 0117 314 5381, or Andrew Wherrett on 0117 314 5269.

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