The National Audit Office has today published its report on the progress made by the Charity Commission. The Commission is the regulator of charities in England and Wales and is an independent, non-ministerial government department accountable to Parliament.
29 November 2017
The NAO is publishing a suite of short guides for the new Parliament, one for each government department and a selection of cross-government issues, to assist House of Commons select committees and members of Parliament.
This NAO report looks into the funding and oversight of the charity Broken Rainbow. Broken Rainbow provided support to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender victims and perpetrators of domestic violence. The charity received most of its funding through grants, principally from the Home Office.
Regulators and government need to work together better to ensure that vulnerable consumers get the support they need.
The report examines the system protecting consumers from scams, unfair trading, and unsafe goods. BEIS has made progress since our 2011 review, but needs to do more, particularly in the context of the growth of e-commerce.
This toolkit is designed to guide those overseeing public service markets or assessing the effectiveness of these markets in terms of value for money and user outcomes. It helps government address a set of new challenges around its use of markets to deliver public services, including oversight, consumer protection, regulation and helping to achieve effective competition and innovative delivery.
This good practice guide aids improvement in performance measurement and reporting by regulators and other organisations seeking to deliver outcomes through third parties. It has been developed in collaboration with regulators and includes the NAO’s experience from working with them and examples of regulators’ good practice. It’s complemented by ‘Performance measurement: Good practice criteria and maturity model’.
The Financial Conduct Authority cannot know whether its activities are reducing the overall scale of financial services mis-selling to consumers. The most prominent example of mis-selling is Payment Protection Insurance (PPI). Between April 2011 and November 2015, firms paid out £22.2 billion in compensation to more than 12 million customers who had bought PPI.
The newly-created Competition and Markets Authority has made significant progress in improving how the UK’s competition regime works, and it is now more coherent than before. Business awareness of competition law, however, is low and while it has improved the robustness of its enforcement casework, the regime has so far not produced a substantial flow of enforcement decisions or fines.
This impacts case study shows how our work and identification of the cost of inadequate consumer protection was a catalyst for improvements to consumer law and delivery and accountability arrangements.
It is one example of financial or non-financial benefits realised in 2014 as a result of our involvement, all of which are set out in our interactive PDF.