Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps his Department is taking to protect charities and charitable trusts from fraud.

The Commission is responsible for overseeing a program of counter-fraud activities, aimed at both raising awareness of fraud risks to charities and improving their resilience to fraud. The purpose of this work it to ensure charities have the knowledge and tools to prevent fraud from happening in their organisations in the first place.

In addition to publishing detailed guidance for charities, the Commission facilitates the ‘charities against fraud’ coalition, a cross-sector group of nearly 40 stakeholders. The Commission has jointly run two fraud awareness weeks with the Fraud Advisory Panel in 2016 and 2017, which included a national conference on the issue. In 2017 the Commission helped to deliver the first ever national charity fraud awards to help raise awareness of good practice in this area.