The Charity Commission takes a zero tolerance approach to links between charities and terrorism, and last year published a revised counter-terrorism strategy. I have asked the Charity Commission to write to set out its approach to this issue.
Letter from Andrew Hind:
As the Chief Executive of the Charity Commission, I have been asked to write in connection with your written Parliamentary Question on what assessment has been made of the effectiveness of the Charity Commission’s monitoring of links between charities and extremism. I thought it would be useful to set out our approach to this issue.
The Charity Commission has a specific monitoring unit to identify and monitor suspected and apparent abuse in charities, including fraud and financial abuse, risks to vulnerable beneficiaries and the risk of terrorist abuse. The Commission published its Counter-Terrorism Strategy in July 2008 which sets out the Commission’s strategic approach to dealing with the vulnerability of the charity sector to terrorism, including criminal extremism. This document is publicly available on our website, www.charitycommission.gov.uk, and I will arrange for a copy of this to be placed in the Library of the House.
Our Compliance Monitoring Unit liaises closely with a variety of agencies. Matters of criminality are for the police to lead on. The Unit is also responsible for conducting compliance visits to charities to carry out on-site inspections and proactively look into matters of concern. As of 31 March 2009 it had 236 proactive monitoring cases open and since the beginning of 2008 it had conducted 15 visits covering the full range of issues and concerns, some of which related to matters of possible criminality and extremism.
I hope this is helpful.