A former Charity Commission board member has questioned the prospective appointment of Orlando Fraser as the regulator’s next chair.
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.
He is due to appear before MPs on the DCMS Select Committee next week before a final decision is taken by the government on whether or not to proceed with the appointment, although a DCMS U-turn would be extraordinary.
In a blog post, Andrew Purkis, who was on the commission’s board between 2006 and 2010, questions Fraser’s link to the Conservative Party and his time as a legal adviser on the regulator’s board between 2013 and 2017.
Purkis says Fraser was part of a board, chaired by William Shawcross, that faced “the most humiliating debacles in 40 years” in the form of flawed guidance for charities before the 2016 EU referendum and the legal battle between the regulator and the grant-maker the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust relating to its funding of the advocacy group Cage.
Purkis says the Shawcross/Fraser era was “an unhappy one for regulation of the charity sector, particularly in relation to the legitimate non-party political activity of charities.”
He writes: “From the start, this board identified ‘the politicisation of charities’, which they never defined, as a major priority on a par with terrorism, fraud and safeguarding.”
Purkis says the EU guidance issued by the regulator was “negative, repressive and flawed”, leading to an outcry that resulted in the regulator withdrawing and revising the document.
“The credibility of the commission was in shreds – a toe-curling, excruciating moment for a former board member like me,” says Purkis.
“Fraser pleaded afterwards that at least they had moved fast to rewrite the guidance. Well, yes, but that is hardly an excuse for producing such an embarrassingly flawed document in the first place.”
Purkis goes on to say that the chair of the regulator needs steady judgement and a cool head under pressure, with a commitment to even-handed adherence to the law.
“On that criterion, Orlando Fraser’s track record is very seriously flawed,” he says.
He concludes: “I cannot see that a person associated unambiguously with a particular political party, and above all with such a very poor track record in the actual practice of charity regulation under political pressure, can be seen as a worthy candidate.”