The National Council for Voluntary Organisations has just launched a consultation on a new Code of Ethics for charities.
The working group tasked to develop the Code is being led by Dame Mary Marsh, chair of trustees at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and a non-executive director of HSBC – but please, no comments about bankers and ethics! Dame Mary was formerly chief executive of the NSPCC and a founder and former chief executive of the Clore Social Leadership Programme. Her blog about the Code has just been published here. In it she makes a persuasive case for a code of ethics and it’s hard to argue with the contention that both trustees and charity professionals, even with the best will in the world, either ignore or simply don’t know about the many pitfalls that their organisations can face or how best to tackle them. As she rightly notes, the necessary regulations and guidelines are already in place, if one chooses to seek them out. But often guidelines are so general in nature that applying them to one’s own particular circumstances can be challenging. Charities with fewer resources, those that are more dependent on the goodwill of a few volunteers or major donors who can’t be alienated or, at the other end of the spectrum, those with complex operational structures and very public reputations to protect can, for different reasons, find themselves making the wrong decisions for the wrong reasons. It is this problem that it seems the new Code would be designed to address, providing “an overarching set of ethical principles that could act as a framework for all charities,” as Dame Mary puts it. But will a code help, or even be taken notice of outside of the regulatory and industry ‘bubble’? after all, last year’s Charity Governance Code is probably still unbeknown to many trustees and covers some similar ground. As someone who advises charities and trustee boards about governance, risk management, best practice and compliance issues (and who is a panel advisor on the subject for NCVO), I certainly sense an appetite among trustees for guidance. A code can provide that – allowing trustees and professionals to step back and consider the sometimes obvious but often overlooked basic principles behind their roles. Where regulations and guidelines about regulations often provide a large degree of latitude about how a charity should conduct itself, a code of ethics could serve to remind people why they should beave in a certain way and therefore how best to apply the regulations to their organisations to achieve those desired outcomes. You can read the draft Code here and provide feedback here, by 26 September 2018. If you would like to discuss any of the issues raised by this post, please be in touch with me here.