Charities, transparency and doing good—consultation response

NPC’s response to the Charity Commission’s consultation:  Annual return for 2015 – information collected from charities.

We support greater transparency in the charity sector and have established the five principles below which are a set of fair and sensible rules that all data requested should adhere to:

• The data collected must make sense and must be properly comparable across time and across charities.
• Requirements must not impose unfair and unnecessary burdens on charities, especially smaller ones
• Any changes should be tested, and piloted before being introduced.
• The Charity Commission should be clear how they will use, publish and make available the data before the requirements are brought in.
• There must be no implicit favouring of one charity model over another, and absolutely no ‘slippery slope’ towards using this data to question the charitable status of some organisations.