Charity Commission consultation on 2018 Annual Return

September 3, 2017

The Charity Commission has announced a consultation on the content of the Annual Return for 2018. The consultation is the second part of a two-year project reviewing the information that the Commission collects from registered charities and displays on the Register of Charities. The Commission wishes to move to a more dynamic annual return that is better targeted and easier to use: under its proposals, smaller charities with simple operating structures will have to answer fewer questions while larger and more complex charities will have to answer more.

The consultation also proposes adding some new questions and removing others. The intention is to ensure that the questions reflect the priority risk areas in the Commission’s strategic plan and help it tackle new regulatory risks as they emerge. However, the Commission is mindful of the need not to create an undue additional burden on charities and believes that further changes made to the service itself, in line with the improvements across its digital services generally, will mean that the annual return will be easy to use and intuitive for all charities, regardless of their size and structure.

Responses can be made via an online survey and supplementary information can be submitted by e-mail. The deadline for responses is 5 pm on Friday 24 November.

The consultation document is available here.