It’s been a while since I’ve questioned specific areas of government spending. I’ve been firing out a few Official Information Act requests and now have a few answers.

I’d been told the Charities Commission seemed to have a lot of staff for what it did.

So I asked the commission how many staff it had and what they did.

As at August 4 the Charities Commission said it had 62 staff, including 18 permanent staff and 44 on fixed-term agreements.

The commission is an interesting and new beast created by the Labour-led government.  It is designed to register and monitor charities. It’s also supposed to advise the government on charities and improve public confidence in charities. Set up by its own Charities Act 2005, it started operating in July 2005 and started receiving applications for the registration of charities from February 1 last year.

Since then it has processed 11,066 applications, which is part of the way to its forecast for 25,000 applications.  It expects to complete the initial registration part of the task within the 2008/09 financial year before it starts its monitoring role.

So you’d expect that a lot of its work would finish once the registrations are done and it could drop its staff numbers back to a more skeletal level. Or maybe not.

The commission says on page 16 of its Statement of Intent  says there is a risk to “delivering the commission’s outputs” in 2008/09 because of a “challenging financial outlook”. It says it is forecasting to end the 2008/09 financial year with a “working capital deficit” and “may be unable to meet its short term liabilities”.

In answer to my questions about how many staff were earning more than $100,000, it said it had three in 2006/07 and would detail the number for 2007/08  in its annual report due in November. It could not say what its forecast staff numbers were in 2008/09 because it had yet to decide on its “business as usual” levels.

The commission spent $6.2 million in 2006/07.

Why do we have so many people essentially building a database? And it seems the 62 staff are not enough if the murmurs in the statement of intent about challenging financial conditions and not being able to pay its bills.

Would the private sector need 62 people to set up a database for 25,000 entries?

Last 5 posts by Bernard Hickey

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