On Friday the Charity Commission published this document which comprises a few words of text and 12 spreadsheets, each of which covers a month of their expenditure that exceeds £25,000. They are doing so in the interests of transparency. As they explain in the text around 68% of their total expenditure (£20.4m) is on staff costs. This means that 14m is spent on their wages, National Insurance and Pensions. Clearly there are no individual wages listed in the spreadsheets. However one of the most substantial listing is the payments made to three separate organisations to cover the cost of Agency Staff. It is perfectly understandable for any large organisation to need to use agency staff from time to time. However adding up all of the sums involved identifies a total expenditure of nearly £1.95m on agency staff. This means that the organisation spends around 14% of its staff costs on agency workers. This seems rather high to me, although I confess I don’t have anything to compare it to. What I found slightly more concerning was that of the £1.95m, a total of £1.77m was all secured via one single supplier, which is Capita. This again may not be an issue but it does appear to be a case of most of the eggs being placed in one basket. Sadly the notes on the publication do not make any reference to this aspect of the listings. The fact that nearly every item relating to Agency Staff refers to the expenditure as “Field Glass agency staff” means nothing to me, although there is a technology company called Fieldglass that offers temporary staff for technology issues. When the Commission is claiming to be transparent, it does not seem unreasonable for them to explain why 14% of their wages bill is spent on Field Glass agency staff and why 90% of the agency staff Bill is paid out to one outsourcing company, particularly in the light of the recent failure of Carillion.

It would be great to think that the Charity Commission were open to questions and responsive. When they recently set out the press release of their proposed new Chair of the Board I pointed out to her that listing her charity experience would make sense, however this did not get changed when she was announced as having been selected as the Chair. This from an agency that calls on Charities to be responsive to their supporters and local communities!