A date has been set for MPs to question the government’s preferred candidate for chair of the Charity Commission.
The Digital, Culture, Media & Sport Select Committee has confirmed that it will interview Orlando Fraser from 10:45am on Thursday 24 March.
The Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport announced earlier this month that Fraser, a former Conservative Party parliamentary candidate and a former member of the Charity Commission board, was its choice for next chair of the regulator.
Previous nominee Martin Thomas quit before taking up the position last year.
The government is not bound to accept advice from select committees over public roles, although it is unusual for MPs to not rubber-stamp prospective candidates for roles.
In 2018, the committee unanimously rejected Baroness Stowell, the government’s preferred candidate for the Charity Commission role, because of concerns including a perceived lack of charity sector experience and fears about her political neutrality.
But Matt Hancock, the culture secretary at the time, appointed her anyway, saying she was “not only the best candidate for the job, but also the right candidate”.
Julian Knight, chair of the DCMS Select Committee, subsequently said that Stowell’s appearance before the committee was “the worst interview I have seen in 30 years of professional life”.
The training and publishing charity the Directory of Social Change this week wrote to Knight urging his committee to raise questions over Fraser’s selection as the preferred candidate for the role.
Fraser, a commercial barrister, was on the Charity Commission board between 2013 and 2017.
Although he has declared no political activity in the past five years, he stood unsuccessfully for the Tories at the 2005 general election and was a founding fellow of the former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith’s think tank the Centre for Social Justice.
The DSC called for the committee to question Fraser, who was on the regulator’s board as a legal member, over his role in subsequently withdrawn and rewritten guidance issued to charities about their involvement in the 2016 EU referendum and his part in the high-profile court case involving the Charity Commission and the grant-maker the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.