Charity News Alert
Dalton condemns “negative spin” in acevo governance report
Tania Mason
Governance expert Dorothy Dalton has denounced the “negative spin” that chief executives’ body acevo has attached to its latest report into voluntary sector governance.
Dalton, editor of governance magazine and a former acevo chief executive (pictured), will use her leader column in the January issue of governance to condemn the way acevo has presented the findings of its recent governance inquiry chaired by Sir Rodney Brooke.
The results of the inquiry, which collated more than 1,200 responses to two acevo surveys earlier this year, were presented at acevo’s annual conference last week
Introducing the report, Brooke, who is chair of the General Social Care Council, said its intention was to provide ammunition to those chief executives who suffer from bad governance “so they can persuade their trustees to mend their ways”.
The study found that 40 per cent of CEOs agreed or strongly agreed that their board was “highly effective in developing and reviewing strategy”. A quarter of respondents either disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement.
Dalton said the negative way acevo presented the results was unhelpful to the sector. “Instead of rejoicing that only 25 per cent disagree with the statement ‘my board is highly effective in developing and reviewing our strategy’, it chastises us with ‘strikingly, only 40 per cent of acevo members agree with the phrase’. What could be seen as success, acevo presents as failure.”
In her leader column, Dalton urges the sector not to believe the spin. “Over the last five years, boards of trustees up and down the country have been working hard at improving governance. As a sector we lead the way. Instead of going in for self-flagellation as acevo recommends, let’s celebrate a real success story: we might not be perfect but we have, as a sector, made huge strides in improving governance and the public and private sectors have a lot to learn from us.”
In other findings, 83 per cent of respondents said they had a good or very good relationship with their chair. Just over 5 per cent of CEOs had a place on the board. Nearly nine-tenths were aware of the Code of Good Governance, but only half of those were implementing it.
Some 76 per cent of charities did not appraise individual trustees or chairs and two-thirds had no board appraisal system in place. And 15 per cent said they should be able to pay trustees in order to attract the right skills and experience onto the board.
Brooke recommended charities should consider introducing a ‘senior trustee’ role “as a mechanism for responding to stakeholder concerns about governance, especially the performance of the chair”. He also advised more reporting on performance; adopting the Code; considering whether the CEO should join the board; implementing board appraisals and a code of conduct for individual trustees, and considering payment to board members.
In instances where a charity wishes to pay its trustees, he went on, the Charity Commission should have to prove that it would be detrimental to the charity’s good governance to do so, rather than the charity having to demonstrate that it would not.
His obvious predeliction for trustee renumeration raised inevitable hackles among some delegates at the conference, with Women’s Resource Centre chair Helen Rice saying she found it “upsetting that we are going down this route”.
Kate Davies, chief executive of Notting Hill Housing Trust, which pays its chair £15,000 a year, defended remuneration. “I reject the automatic assumption that if you take money you are somehow less committed than someone who does it out of the goodness of their heart.
“I am a paid employee and I am no less comitted or passionate than one of our volunteers,” she argued.
- See Tania Mason’s Sketch of last week’s acevo debate on the motion ‘No longer semi-detached? – trustee boards are becoming powerful forces for better gevernance’ here
