Public Charitable Collections: Are they a Worthwhile Cause?
| Published date | 01 November 2000 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.00295 |
| Author | Christine R. Barker |
| Date | 01 November 2000 |
THE
MODERN LAW REVIEW
Volume 63 No 6November 2000
Public Charitable Collections: Are they a Worthwhile
Cause?
Christine R. Barker*
This article examines one of the most long-established methods of fund-raising for
charitable causes in the UK – public charitable collections – and looks at
changing patterns in this method of fund-raising in recent years. There have been
changes both in the method of collection, which now extends beyond cash
donations collected by unpaid volunteers to direct debits and credit card
donations collected by paid collectors, and also in the chosen locations for
collections, with a preference for supermarkets and other off-street sites. These
changes have brought with them difficulties in the regulation of such collections.
The article gives a brief overview of current legislative provisions in the UK and
the proposed new measures for England and Wales. It examines some of the
practical problems involved with the implementation of legislative provisions, and
considers some alternative ways of combating potential fraud.
The charitable and wider voluntary sector in the UK has been undergoing a
process of scrutiny and change in recent years, and this is still ongoing. In
England and Wales the Charities Acts 1992 and 1933 replaced or augmented
previous legislation; the Charity Commission is undertaking the first systematic
review of its register of charities since it was first created over 35 years ago;
1
and
the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) is conducting a
general programme of review of the law relating to charitable status.
2
In
(implemented in 1992) introduced for the first time a legal system specifically
directed towards the regulation of charities in Scotland. Together with other
members of Dundee University’s Charity Law Research Unit, the author of this
article has recently completed, on behalf of the Scottish Executive, a major
ßThe Modern Law Review Limited 2000 (MLR 63:6, November). Published by Blackwell Publishers,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 791
* Charity Law Research Unit, University of Dundee. The author is grateful to Philip Cowen (notes 13 and
82 below) for providing additional information about the situation in England and Wales, and to Margaret
Barron Linton for assistance with the desk research. Together with other members of the Charity Law
Research Unit the author has conducted, on behalf of the Scottish Executive, a pilot study of the current
Scottish legislation governing public charitable collections and its operation in practice. The resulting
report, Public Charitable Collections, was published by the Scottish Executive Central Research Unit on 12
June 2000 and is available from The Stationery Office Bookshop, 71 Lothian Road, Edinburgh EH3 9AZ.
1 See Charity Commissioners for England and Wales, Framework for Review of the Register of
Charities (London: The Stationery Office,1998).
2 A report on the NCVO Charity Law Review Project is given in its Issues Paper of May 1999, and
papers from a Colloquium on the Foundations of Charity held in September 1998 at King’s College,
London, under the aegis of NCVO are to be published as a book in 2000.
evaluation of the existing charity legislation in Scotland, which was published in
June 2000.
3
A Commission has been set up to review and reform charity law in
Scotland.
4
HM Treasury has conducted a review of charity taxation which
affects the charitable sector throughout the UK,
5
and the European Commission
has issued a communication on Promoting the Role of Voluntary Organisations
and Foundations in Europe.
6
Against this background, this article looks at public charitable collections, one of
the most traditional forms of fund-raising and particularly significant for the many
small, locally based charities which continue to rely on direct charitable giving. It
examines some of the problems associated with such collections, and considers the
role of legislation and other measures in their regulation. The focus is on the
jurisdictions of England and Wales, and Scotland, and while concentrating
primarily on published material, including that published on the Internet, the article
also draws on unpublished empirical data collected by the author and others in
Scotland and England.
‘Public charitable collections’ have traditionally involved collections of cash
from members of the public, either in the street or from house to house, in aid of a
particular charitable cause. Recognising both the potential for fraud and the danger
that the public might find it offensive to be continually importuned by collectors
for different causes, the UK government has over the years sought to regulate such
collections by means of legislation.
One of the problems with the legislation currently in force – which is not
uniform throughout the UK – is that it is not easily accessible to many of those now
undertaking or permitting public charitable collections. In England and Wales and
Northern Ireland street collections have for over 80 years been regulated by a
section in the Police, Factories etc (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1916, and house
to house collections by separate pieces of legislation introduced at a later date
(1939 in England and Wales and 1952 in Northern Ireland). Scotland adopted a
more unified approach in the 1980s by regulating all public charitable collections,
whether they take place in the street or from house to house, in the same piece of
primary legislation, a section in the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982.
However, this provision is not part of the principal piece of legislation governing
Scottish charities – in itself rather obscurely disguised as Part I of the Law Reform
(Miscellaneous Provisions) (Scotland) Act 1990. As far as England and Wales are
concerned, the Charities Act 1992 seeks to provide a unified code of charity
legislation, but Part III, the section devoted to public charitable collections, has yet
to come into effect.
In order to be effective, legislative and other regulatory measures must clearly
be capable of practical implementation, and changes in collection patterns in
recent years have increased the difficulties of regulating public charitable
collections.
3 Charity Law Research Unit, University of Dundee, Charity Law in Scotland: An Evaluation
(Edinburgh: Scottish Executive Central Research Unit, 2000).
4 The remit and composition of the Commission, which will report in one year, was announced by
Deputy First Minister Jim Wallace, MSP, on 29 March 2000. (SP WA 29 March 2000, 259–260)
5 HM Treasury, Review of Charity Taxation (London: The Stationery Office, March 1999).
6 European Commission, Brussels, 6.6.1997 COM (97) 241 final. A recent communication from the
Enterprise Directorate-General of the EC (letter dated 18 October 1999) stated that a follow-up report
to the Communication will be produced, but the timetable is uncertain.
The Modern Law Review [Vol. 63
792 ßThe Modern Law Review Limited 2000
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