CAF says charities should be ‘ethical guardians’ in AI development

In a submission to the Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, the Charities Aid Foundation says the sector should have a central role in overseeing society’s response to AI

Charities should be deployed as “ethical guardians” of the development of artificial intelligence to ensure the unintended consequences for society are minimised, according to the Charities Aid Foundation.

In its submission to the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, CAF says charities should have a voice in the debate about how AI is used in the workplace and how society should adapt to mass automation.

It says this should include allowing charities to play a central role as “ethical guardians” when systems to oversee the use of AI are created and ensure unintended consequences from the use of the technology are minimised.

CAF says in its submission that it wants charities to receive support to develop the skills and resources to take advantage of AI in addressing social and environmental issues.

AI can also affect the work of charities by causing new social problems that charities will need to address, CAF’s submission says, but could also help charities to find new solutions to existing social issues.

CAF’s submission says AI could offer charities new ways to work more efficiently and effectively, and even help to create new ways of achieving social good that could eventually replace traditional charities.

Rhodri Davies, leader of CAF’s Giving Thought think tank, said: “Artificial intelligence is already having a huge impact on all of us, even if we don’t realise it, and it seems set to transform all aspects of our lives in years to come.

“Charities must get to grips with AI, not only because they could benefit enormously in terms of their own work, but also because they could play a vital role in minimising some of the risks associated with this evolving technology.

“Government and the private sector must work with charities to ensure they get the benefit of their expertise in tackling social and environmental issues caused by the development of AI applications. Now is the time to get involved, as the pace of development of this technology is accelerating and there is a risk that charities and those they seek to help will get left behind.”

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Charities back World Mental Health Day with action

Third Sector is itself running a series of articles online about mental health in the workplace

Scores of charities have made announcements linked to today’s World Mental Health Day, which has the theme of mental health in the workplace.

Third Sector is this week running a series of articles on the theme, which kicked off yesterday with a blog by Mark Flannagan, former chief executive of Beating Bowel Cancer, describing his mental health struggles.

Today Paul Farmer, chief executive of the mental health charity Mind and chair of the charity chief executives body Acevo, has written a piece about the importance of leadership in this area.

The Guardian newspaper today carries a piece written by a novelist using a pseudonym, which calls for more people to consider volunteering for the suicide-prevention charity Samaritans. The newspaper also includes a 20-page supplement on the subject of mental health.

The men’s suicide-prevention charity Calm has partnered with the retailer Topman to launch the #DontBottleItUp campaign, designed to show men it is ok to open up about mental health issues. The campaign is supported by the new Calm ambassador Chris Hughes, who appeared on the ITV show Love Island.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists has launched an advice pack for organisations and staff that contains advice on mental health in the workplace. Resources covering a range of areas, including how to recognise a possible mental health problem and how to support those living with mental ill health, can be downloaded from the RCP’s website.

The British Safety Council has today launched a series of paid-for mental health training courses designed to help organisations and their employees start conversations about mental health issues.

The Fire Fighters Charity has announced today that it has set up a new role to boost the psychological support services it provides.

The charity, which provides psychological and physical support to people in the UK fire community, has said it is recruiting a leader for its psychological services, which are provided from its three bases in England.

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Charity Commission ‘dismissive of incidents reported by small charities’, says SCC chief

Mandy Johnson, chief executive of the Small Charities Coalition, tells Radio 4 show that the regulator has told some of its members to deal with serious problems themselves

The Small Charities Coalition has accused the Charity Commission of being “dismissive” about incidents reported to the regulator by small charities.

Appearing on the BBC Radio 4 consumer show You And Yours yesterday, Mandy Johnson, chief executive of the SCC, said the commission was telling charities that reported some incidents they believed to be serious to deal with the problems themselves.

The claims come after guidance released by the Charity Commission last month said too few serious incidents were being reported to the regulator, which was putting charities at risk of further harm.

Johnson said: “We have worked with many of our small charity members to submit serious incident reports to the Charity Commission. Sadly, we’ve found that when the matters relate to small charities, quite often the Charity Commission can be quite dismissive of the reports we have sent through.”

She said that in one case, one of her organisation’s members had reported to the commission concerns about the charity’s chair, who was allegedly abusing their powers.

“We spent months and months collating evidence to demonstrate this to the Charity Commission,” said Johnson.

“We were really disappointed when we got a response from the Charity Commission essentially saying that it was just a matter for the trustees to sort out between themselves.”

In response to a question about whether these incidents were serious enough to warrant a direct response from the commission, Johnson said that issues like the one with the charity chair “can feel very serious to the charities involved” and should be considered as such by the regulator.

But she said the commission needed additional funding from the government if it was to fulfil its role as a regulator properly.

The Charity Commission has had its budget frozen at £20m until 2020 and is expected to launch a consultation on charging charities to fund the regulator in the near future.

In response to Johnson, Sarah Atkinson, director of policy and communications at the Charity Commission, told the programme that it would sometimes be appropriate for charities to deal with internal issues themselves.

“Our first response was that we did ask the trustees to sort it out themselves,” she said. “Where that is not possible, and there is a risk to the charity, we can intervene.”

Atkinson said failing to report fraud to the regulator, Action Fraud or the police risked similar incidents affecting other charities, but when asked by the interviewer she declined to support calls for a legal obligation on all organisations, including charities, to report fraud to the police.

“We think it is essential that charities report fraud to us, so what we have set out in our guidance is how and when to do that,” she said.

“We do want to encourage charities to report to us. It’s not really up to us whether it should be a legal responsibility; what is up to us is that we are able to act on reports of fraud and tackle it.

“We recognise that small charities want and need support from the regulator to enable them to be resilient to fraud so that the money that is for charity gets to charity, and isn’t getting into the pockets of fraudsters.”

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Charities exempt from ICO fees ‘likely to remain so under GDPR’

Paul Arnold, deputy chief executive of the Information Commissioner’s Office, reveals this on the ICO website, but it has yet to be confirmed by ministers

Charities that are exempt from paying fees to the Information Commissioner’s Office are likely to remain exempt under the new fee structure due to be introduced under the General Data Protection Regulation, the regulator has said.

The ICO has said it is recalculating the fees it charges data controllers to notify the regulator of how and why they are collecting data, something data controllers are required to do under the Data Protection Act 1998.

Data controllers must currently pay a notification fee of £35 or £500, depending on the size of the organisation, but many charities are exempt from the rules unless they sell or swap data with other organisations or they own their own premises and operate CCTV on them.

The GDPR, new data protection legislation due to come into force on 25 May 2018, says that data controllers will no longer be required to notify the ICO.

But Paul Arnold, deputy chief executive of the ICO, said in a statement on the ICO website today that such organisations would still be required to pay the ICO once the GDPR was introduced because they would switch to paying a data protection fee, which was introduced by this year’s Digital Economy Act.

The fees would be used to fund the ICO’s work, Arnold said.

He said the ICO expected those organisations that were exempt under the existing regime would remain exempt under the new system, but this had yet to be confirmed by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport.

In the statement, he said: “The amount of the data protection fee is being developed by the ICO’s sponsoring department, the DCMS, in consultation with the ICO and representatives of those likely to be affected by the change. The final fees will be approved by parliament.”

Arnold said the size of the data protection fee each organisation was required to pay would still be based on the organisation’s size and turnover and would take into account the amount of personal data it was processing.

There were likely to be three categories of fees, he said, but he did not give an indication of how much these fees were likely to be.

The new model would come into force in April, Arnold said, but added that any notification fees would remain valid for a year, so charities would not need to pay the data protection fee until their current fee expired.

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Too much focus on full-time volunteering ‘could risk charities being seen as exploitative’

Karl Wilding, director of public policy and volunteering at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, mulls the issue at a fringe event at the Conservative Party conference

Too much focus on full-time volunteering could perpetuate inequality and risk charities being seen as exploitative, according to Karl Wilding, director of public policy and volunteering at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations.

Speaking at a Conservative Party conference fringe event hosted by the think tank the Centre for Social Justice in Manchester yesterday, Wilding said that although volunteering offered benefits to the volunteers, young people from disadvantaged backgrounds would be unable to afford to participate in full-time, long-term programmes.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport commissioned a review last year into the impact of full time volunteering and the possibility of setting up a government-backed scheme, which is due to report back later this month. 

Wilding said the review needed to consider the impact of encouraging full-time volunteering on social mobility.

He said volunteering was “an incredibly powerful social intervention” in helping volunteers into employment, but questioned whether it needed to be full-time to be valuable.

“Might we be making social mobility problems in this country even worse, by giving some people who already able to give themselves a leg up, an even bigger leg up by creating opportunities that are going to strengthen their CV significantly?” he said.

He said that it might be easier and more cost effective to allow jobseekers to spend more of their time volunteering, rather than insisting they actively look for jobs.

Another concern, he said, was how a full-time volunteering programme would be perceived.

He said: “Are we opening ourselves up to the charge that full-time volunteering, which will require changes to minimum wage legislation to enable us to pay a stipend, is just us finding another way to exploit young people?”

Wilding also said that there were only about 1,000 people volunteering full time and warned that such volunteering could be going against the grain of current volunteering patterns.

“All the trends tell us that the way people are getting involved is actually shifting away from full-time volunteering to episodic, disjointed pieces of time,” he said.

But James Probert, director of strategy and impact at City Year, a charity that supports young people to complete a year’s full-time volunteering, said many of Wilding’s concerns could be dealt with by a change in the legal status of full time volunteers.

Talking about the current legislative set up, he said: “If you do volunteering you are ‘Neet’ – not in employment, education or training – there is no other box for people who are not doing it alongside work or studying.”

He said minimum wage rules, under which people could be paid subsistence expenses but not a stipend and could not receive benefits in kind such as recognised training, was making it very difficult for volunteers and organisations that wanted to provide opportunities.

He said he wanted to see a recognised system for taking a year out to volunteer, pointing to similar systems in America, France and Italy.

Lack of access, he said, was “a problem with the status quo” which could be improved by taking replicating the government’s the International Citizen Service, which offers 12-month volunteering opportunities overseas as a domestic gap year, which “doesn’t cost a lot of money and isn’t only for rich kids”.

He said he hoped the government would allow volunteers on such a scheme to receive benefits at around the same rate as job seekers’ allowance to help support them.

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Charities will not face regulatory action for failing to apply new governance code, says Sarah Atkinson

But the director of policy and communications at the Charity Commission says the regulator will use the document to determine the overall health of the organisation

The Charity Commission will not take regulatory action against charities that fail to apply the new sector governance code, but will use it to determine the overall health of the organisation, according to Sarah Atkinson, director of policy and communications at the Charity Commission.

Speaking at the law firm Bates Wells Braithwaite’s annual charity and social enterprise tea party yesterday, Atkinson said that because the Charity Governance Code was voluntary, it would not form the basis for regulatory action, and said the commission was keen to avoid “regulatory creep”.

The Charity Governance Code, which was revised earlier this year, recommends a number of policies including larger charities submitting to an external reviews every three years.

Atkinson told the conference that charities would not be subject to regulatory action solely because they were not applying the code, or because they had not heard of it. 

“But we will think you are a stronger charity better equipped to face the challenges that you have if you are familiar with and applying the code,” she said. 

She said the commission would refer to the code when considering any sector-wider recommendations as part of a statutory inquiry.

“What we will take regulatory action on is our guidance set out in trustee duties,” she said.

Atkinson also said that she hoped the release of the code was “very much the start of what needs to be a process to socialise the code and create a movement around good governance”.

The code also recommends that charities review whether to retain trustees that have served nine years or more in the role, and Atkinson said it was important that decisions to keep trustees in place were taken in the best interests of the charity.

“It is important that when people want to stay for a long time, it is because the charity needs them, not because they need the charity,” she said.

“It can’t be about you – there has to be other ways you can continue to support and love that organisation. It has to be that the charity has particular need of something you can continue to bring, and continue to bring afresh.”

Philip Kirkpatrick, co-head of the charities and social enterprise team at BWB, said that it was important to balance “the need for continuity and knowledge, and the need for innovation and new ideas, and of course allowing for diversity” when deciding whether to extend trustees’ term of office past nine years.

He also said that there was a risk that the code “becomes a stick to beat people with rather than what the code team wanted it to be, which is an aspirational thing to pull people up”.

Also speaking at the conference, Rosie Chapman, chair of the Charity Governance Code Steering Group, which oversaw the redevelopment of the new code, said that she thought the latest version was realistic, but said that some charities already meeting other organisations’ governance codes, such as housing associations or sports charities, “might as well continue to meet their codes” to ensure funding remains in place.

Baroness Pitkeathley, chair of the House of Lords Select Committee on Charities, said that despite the pressures on modern trustees, the sector should be cautious about overemphasising the difficulties ahead of the benefits of trusteeship.

“I think we pile more and more responsibility onto trustees, and perhaps we should be cautious about emphasising all the possible negatives that there are in the responsibilities from being a trustee,” she said.

“I personally have had huge joy from being a trustee – I have learnt things, I have developed skills and I have had terrific experiences. I think we should always remember that when we think about the extras we are giving to trustees.”

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Money held in banks by largest charities increases to £16.2bn over the past year, report finds

The latest figures, from the charity data website Charity Financials, are based on data from the largest 5,000 UK charities by income, expenditure or net assets

The amount of money held in banks by the UK’s largest charities has increased by £300m over the past year to a total £16.2bn, according to a new report on charities and the banking sector.

The latest Charity Banking Spotlight, which is produced by the charity data website Charity Financials and based on the top 5,000 charities in terms of income, expenditure or net assets, says the most recent figure is still below the peak of £16.8bn in 2012, but almost £600m more than in 2014.

The report identifies the Charities Aid Foundation as having the most cash in hand or at the bank, with the charity having £768.8m.

CAF, which runs its own bank, had the most borrowing with £1bn – about £700m more than the charity in second place, Aston Student Villages.

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The Church Commissioners of England had the greatest change in cash levels over the past year, with a £49.1m increase to a total of £440.7m, the report says.

More than half of the charities surveyed have been with their bank for more than a decade, the report says, and HSBC saw the biggest fall in cash levels, with a drop of £287m.

Barclays, which also sponsored the report, was the most popular bank among the top 5,000 charities, and also is the bank of choice for a third of the top 100 charities in terms of income, the report says.

But NatWest holds the most cash on behalf of charities, with £3.2bn compared with Barclays’ £3.1bn, the report says.

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Peer says a Labour government should be more supportive of charities

Baroness Young of Old Scone, who chairs the Woodland Trust, tells a fringe meeting at Labour’s conference that both the Charity Commission and the Fundraising Regulator put the sector under pressure

A Labour government should build a better relationship with charities, and the Charity Commission and the Fundraising Regulator should both be more supportive of the sector, a Labour peer has told the party’s conference in Brighton.

Baroness Young of Old Scone, who is also chair of the Woodland Trust, told a fringe event hosted by the People’s Postcode Lottery that the charity sector was under substantial pressure, including a lack of support from the two regulators.

“We are being reviled in the Daily Mail, not hugely supported by the government, the taxman is trying to get as much tax out of us as they can and the Charity Commission has kind of forgotten that, as well as having a regulatory role, it ought to be a promoter and supporter of the concept of charity,” she said. “So we are feeling picked on.

“To make it worse, the new Fundraising Regulator, which we all support because it is an independent regulator supported by the charity sector, has set off on a slightly wrong foot in that it believes in punishment rather than support and improvement.”

Young said that this environment for charities coincided with falling levels of funding from local and central government, traditional forms of fundraising and the EU, and with increased demand on charities’ services and tax demands from HM Revenue & Customs.

Young said that Labour should therefore seek a better relationship with charities and prioritise a “more supportive regulatory regime”.

She said: “It does seem to me that a new Labour government has got to support charities and charity better than the government at the moment. If they want us to support people and services, they have got to support us.

“We would like a much more supportive regulatory regime and get the Charity Commission to stop bad-mouthing charities.”

At the fringe event, the People’s Postcode Lottery renewed its call for reforms to charity lotteries in order to unlock more funding for the sector.

The lottery wants the annual turnover limit on a charity lottery to be raised from £10m to £100m, and the permissible value of ticket sales for a single draw to be increased from £4m to £10m.

These proposals echo similar reforms suggested in a 2015 House of Commons Culture, Media & Sport Committee report on society lotteries, which recommended raising limits on charity lotteries and dismissed concerns that this could affect levels of participation in the National Lottery.

The People’s Postcode Lottery said these proposals would help to reduce administration costs, make the lottery system more transparent for players and increase funding to the charity sector.

It also claimed there was a £39.4m gap between the trust income available for charitable causes and the value of the applications the lottery receives. It said the existing £10m limit forced charity lotteries to reduce the number of draws they hold each year, which reduced the funding available to the charity sector.

Young and Shami Chakrabarti, the shadow attorney general, both told the fringe meeting that they supported the reforms.

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Fraudsters target charities with invoices for the Fundraising Preference Service

The Fundraising Regulator has warned charities to be wary of any email that demands payment for the FPS, which is already covered by the voluntary levy paid by hundreds of charities

Fraudsters are sending charities invoices that demand payment for the Fundraising Preference Service, the Fundraising Regulator has warned.

The regulator alerted organisations to the scam today and urged those affected to get in touch.

“A number of charities have been invoiced fraudulently, although we do not believe that any have paid money,” a spokesman for the regulator said.

He said the spoof messages came from an email address not registered to the regulator’s @fundraisingregulator.org.uk domain and contained a link to an external website.

The regulator had alerted the national fraud centre Action Fraud to the phishing attempt, the spokesman said, and was raising it with sector bodies including the Charity Commission, the Institute of Fundraising and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations.

The regulator has asked charities that spend more than £100,000 a year on fundraising to pay a voluntary levy to cover the Fundraising Regulator’s costs, which includes the operation of the FPS.

The regulator started the FPS this year to allow people to block post, telephone, email or text communications from named charities.

The amount that charities have been asked to pay by the regulator for the levy varies according to how much each organisation spends on generating voluntary income.

The spokesman added: “The Fundraising Regulator will never issue an invoice for the FPS, since it is funded by our levy. If you know or you believe you have received one of these fraudulent FPS emails and have concerns, or if you have any questions, please get in contact with us on 0300 999 3407 or at [email protected].

“We would also like to ensure that those organisations that fall within the scope of the fundraising levy do not assume the invoices we are currently sending for year two are in any way associated with this fraudulent scheme.”

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