Cutting red tape for charities

Yesterday the National Audit Office (NAO), the UK government body that accounts for how public money is used, published some welcome guidance on ‘intelligent’ monitoring. This new guidance follows directly from NPC’s Turning the Tables research recommending more could be done to reduce the unnecessary monitoring and reporting burden on charities.

We’re pleased to see that the guidance incorporates many of the points that we made in our report, which found the average burden for UK public funding agreements is 9%—much higher than for that for other types of funding. Of course, the government is spending public money and so greater accountability is to be expected, but we concluded that very little is known about whether the information produced for monitoring and reporting purposes is useful, to either funders or charities.

Time spent producing information that is not useful, or time wasted producing information in an onerous way, could be better spent delivering services. The guidance takes this as its starting point, essentially defining intelligent monitoring as that which strikes the right balance. Critically, it is one of the first examples of guidance that we’ve seen that actually explains what is meant by ‘proportionate’ and we hope should be of practical help to government funders in implementing the ‘principles of proportionate monitoring and reporting’ that the Office of the Third Sector (OTS), a UK government department, issued yesterday.

The guidance, along with the principles, is one of the steps the UK government is taking to cut red tape for charities. They are a step in the right direction, although implementing them will take a lot of work. Our research shows it is near impossible to unilaterally change monitoring and reporting requirements. It is therefore up to charities as well as funders to work hard to implement them to ensure monitoring and reporting are useful to everyone.