The Regulator for Charities in England and Wales
The short answer:
The Local Government Association and the Charity Commission have jointly published the Councillor’s guide to a council’s role as charity trustee – a quick guide to a council’s responsibilities where it is a corporate charity trustee. You can download from our Website.
The National Association of Local Councils (NALC) has produced legal guidance on basic charity law which is available on its website to parish councils in its membership: http://www.nalc.gov.uk/Default.aspx .
If you need more detailed information, the Commission has also produced the Local Government Toolkit, a more comprehensive reference manual covering a range of relevant topics.
In more detail:
Contents
Please note: You will be unable to access the toolkit if you do not have PowerPoint available on your computer. You can download a free copy of PowerPoint Viewer allowing you to view presentations via the Microsoft website.
The Local Government Charity Toolkit is a free online reference manual designed to help local authorities work with charities. The toolkit has been developed by the Charity Commission, in liaison with the LGA, the National Association for Voluntary & Community Action, and the Commission for the Compact.
The toolkit explains the legal and fiscal framework within which charities must operate – a useful guide for: sub-committees and officers administering charitable assets in the council’s care; and for Councillors or other individuals that the authority nominates to serve as charity trustees.
However, the toolkit offers much more. It will help you manage many common risks associated with local authority-run charities. Using real case studies, it highlights where things can go wrong and offers a range of tips on how to avoid the pitfalls. You can also consult the toolkit on the possible options for modernising, merging, or even winding up, the charities you run. Planning to sell some charity land? The toolkit will help you ask the right questions to avoid making expensive mistakes.
The toolkit also highlights the legal, financial and governance issues that arise from the relationship between local government and charities that can get in the way of an effective partnership. In addition, you can download profiles of the charitable sector nationally and in your Government Office region.
For the time being the toolkit is in the form of a PowerPoint presentation.
This has much of the functions of a normal webpage – eg, you can navigate using hyperlinks. However, there are some differences. Please note in particular that the back button usually found on your browser will not work with the Toolkit.
You may be able to get a working back button by cutting and pasting the toolkit web address into a Word document. Press Enter if the address has not formatted as a hyperlink. Then press CTRL while clicking the left mouse button to access the hyperlink.
Please don’t save the toolkit to your PC. This might affect the functionality of the toolkit and will not allow you to benefit from any updates.