Why does the charity regulator sound like the sector's fiercest critics?

Possibly because Sir William Shawcross falls to the same end of the political scale

William Shawcross with his Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (RVO) medal (Getty)

I do not think the world of charity has responded well to the wrongdoing exposed in certain parts of it. One representative claimed on Radio 4 that “charity-bashing” stories in the media were damaging the sector, not – as you might have thought – the questionable activities of the charities themselves, such as Age UK, selling the elderly expensive energy contracts, or Oxfam, employing unscrupulous phone-bank companies to do their fundraising. If there’s charity-bashing in the air, it’s partly because a lot of charities are asking to be bashed.

The right response is to own up, and change tack. Age UK only grudgingly dropped its contract with E.on after The Sun exposé, claiming that the figures were not as bad as they looked, and that the contract they marketed was an industry leader. That is irrelevant, frankly. What this looks like is a charity exploiting a captive audience – its own captive audience – and receiving kickbacks from an energy company for doing so (Age UK was reportedly paid £41 per person signed up). You can ask people to consider it from a different angle, but the whole thing still smells bad.

So, up to a point, I back Sir William Shawcross, the charity regulator, who yesterday laid down the law – promising tougher rules for the sector as whole. But just as Age UK has been too defensive, the man charged with reforming the world of charity piles in too hard.

“It cannot be right,” he said, “for people to be hounded on the telephone, through the letterbox or in the street.” This broad-brush rhetoric matches, quite closely, the line taken in the right-wing press – suggestive of an industry “totally out of control”, as one Telegraph columnist put it. I have been mildly annoyed by fundraisers calling my mobile phone. But they stopped when I asked them to.

I have been slightly troubled by the odd chugger. But again, they didn’t chase me down the street. Hounded? Not once, and I would suggest that is the case for the majority of people who come into contact with charities. The rogues need to be dealt with (many charities have already curtailed their more dubious practices), but tarring the sector as a whole cannot be the right way to go about it.

This is where it pays to give a little more attention to the man delivering the message. Quango bosses are thought to be neutral, ghost-like bureaucrats. They are trusted on that basis – just glance at the headline “Charity regulator blasts sector”; if the regulator says as much, you assume, things must have reached a pretty pass.

But Sir William, who as a journalist wrote a brilliant 1970 exposé of America’s covert bombing of Cambodia, has question marks hanging over his head. He has attempted to quash rumblings of political bias, but has long struck insiders as something of a right-wing ideologue.

Before he took the job, he wrote that a Conservative vote in 2010 was needed to bring the country back from “the abyss”. He has supported waterboarding and Guantanamo Bay, and been criticised for singling out a “victim mentality” in the Muslim community. Charming, certainly; efficient, too, but “he’s a walking PR disaster” for the charitable world, one chief told Third Sector magazine. He was quick to blame charities for the death of Olive Cook, though the family maintains begging letters were not linked to the 92-year-old’s suicide.

It’s critical that the charitable sector not be excused its failings because of the kind of work it does (see Kids Company for the defining example of why). It’s also important that the figures who hold power over it do not add to the damaging impression of endemic corruption. The lesson? Always check a Quango boss’s backstory.