Sacking Charity Commission staff who were found to have misled parliament in the regulator’s row with the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman would be a “foolish gesture”, its chair has said.
Asked about the case at the Charity Commission’s annual public meeting in central London yesterday, Dame Julia Unwin said asking people to leave would not be the right response to the case.
She said the regulator’s focus should be on “the huge task of getting it right next time and making sure that we’ve learned the lessons”.
A report by the House of Commons Committee of Privileges concluded in July that the regulator had committed a contempt of parliament when it brought legal proceedings to prevent the PHSO from filing reports before parliament about the commission’s handling of two separate safeguarding complaints.
The regulator said it felt the PHSO’s recommendations would force it to act beyond its legal remit and undermined its ability to regulate independently.
But the privileges committee’s report found the commission “clearly committed a contempt of parliament” by seeking a judicial review and said the Charity Commission’s board “should take responsibility for that contempt and should apologise to the house forthwith”.
It also recommended that David Holdsworth, chief executive of the Charity Commission, should apologise to parliament “for repeatedly saying that the commission’s legal action was not intended to quash the laying of the reports when that was precisely its purpose”.
The regulator accepted the report and apologised unreservedly.
A question submitted online to the meeting yesterday by Damian Murray, one of the original safeguarding complainants, asked why senior management at the regulator remained in post after making untrue statements to parliament, although his question was not read out in full.
Unwin said the regulator was “deeply sorry” for the pain and grief caused to those who felt their complaints were not properly handled.
“Parliament has made it very clear through the privileges committee that the Charity Commission did not do the right thing,” she said.
“Our job now is to rectify that and to do the right thing. In terms of the complainants, we have commissioned a high court judge to review it completely independently and as an organisation we’re reviewing everything we’ve done that got us into that position.”
But she said: “As the chair of the board I don’t think now is the time to start making foolish gestures [such as] asking individuals to leave because all we need to do is this huge task of getting it right next time and making sure that we’ve learned the lessons from what happened,” she said.
“I’m absolutely confident that the executive leadership team who were here at the time this happened have learned those lessons and are focused single-mindedly on making sure it doesn’t happen again.
“As a board, we’ve worked really hard to hear what was said by the privileges committee, and it’s not a nice read, it’s a hard thing for any organisation to be told.
“But we have absorbed it and we are going to get better.”
She said bearing in mind there were 180,000 registered charities in England and Wales there would be other complaints.
“These were serious and we have apologised but as chair of this board I don’t think now is the time to ask people to move on – I want everyone to stay and make it better next time.”