Charity news

‘Covenant’ agreement between charities and government to launch ‘in the new year’ 

A new agreement between the government and charity sector to improve relationships and understanding between the two is set to be published “in the new year”, NCVO’s chief executive has said. Speaking at a fringe event at the Labour Party conference, NCVO’s CEO Sarah Elliott said there had been “a real desire” from the government to work with the sector since the general election. 

She said NCVO and fellow sector body ACEVO were “very actively working on” developing a new agreement that would be “akin to the Compact”, which was introduced in 1998 to ensure effective partnership between the government and civil society organisations in England. Elliott said the new agreement, called a “covenant”, would be different to the Compact and launch “in the new year”. 

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Church of England invests millions to slash its carbon emissions

Report on progress towards net-zero published.

Further tens of millions of pounds are to be pumped into efforts to drastically reduce the Church of England’s carbon emissions over the next six years, the first impact report on its net-zero programme says.

The report summarises progress on the General Synod’s ambition to achieve net zero by 2030, which was set in 2020 (News, 12 February 2020). The Synod approved a “route map” to this goal two years later (News, 15 July 2022).

In real terms, the target is to decrease the Church’s emissions — mainly from its buildings — by 90 per cent against the current baseline: 415,000 tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent (415,000T CO2e). The remaining ten per cent is to be offset by carbon-cancelling schemes, such as tree-planting and installing solar panels.

The report does not quantify the change made so far to the Church’s carbon footprint. The Church Times understands that the programme is working with an external carbon-accountancy firm to calculate the 2022 and 2023 carbon footprints, which will be published towards the end of this year.

Schools are the Church’s highest carbon-emitters, accounting for 48 per cent of all emissions. After that come churches (27 per cent), housing (18 per cent), and church halls (four per cent). Cathedrals emit two per cent (c.8000 tonnes of carbon dioxide p.a.). NCIs, theological colleges, and work-related travel each emit less than one per cent.

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Blog - Charity Commission My Charity Commission Account

When people interact with our services, we want this to be as efficient and helpful an experience as possible for them. That’s why we have set an ambition to embrace technological innovation and improve our online services as part of our new five year strategy. 

Conscious of the pressures on trustees and their advisors, we have prioritised improving the systems they use to keep their charity’s entry on the Register of Charities up-to-date and file their charity’s financials. Last Summer we made a major change to these online systems, with the intention of helping charities to solve problems they had reported to us and making it easier for charities to engage with us.  

Previously, each charity had a single log-in and password to get into our system, with those details often known to several people, including staff members, third party advisors and potentially people who had subsequently left the charity. Such shared log ins are not what people are now used to when interacting with online platforms, nor was this satisfactory in the long term from a data protection perspective. More fundamentally, we wanted to create an online platform that would help us to build a more bespoke, two-way relationship with the people who are responsible for the charities we regulate.  

The result was the launch of My Charity Commission Account (MCCA). This is a new way for charities to access our online services, offering each trustee or authorised employee an individual login. This means it will also be easier for those who are trustees of multiple charities to see all the information they need on one dashboard. It is now the go-to place for trustees to submit their annual returns and update their charity details. In time, we hope it will also enable a long-term shift whereby individual trustees have a more direct digital connection with us. 

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