Agreed What, Exactly?

I have a confession for my fellow board members. I have sat in more trustee meetings than I can count where a big decision was made over the custard creams and the minutes recorded it as “agreed”. That was it. One word, doing an awful lot of heavy lifting.

I thought of those meetings last month when the Charity Commission closed its inquiry into The Schwarzschild Foundation. It is a bigger charity than most of my clients, with a £5.7m legacy from its founder. The National Crime Agency spotted £250,000 of the charity’s money sitting in a personal account under a trustee’s control. The charity, by the regulator’s account, would never have found it on its own. Two other grants of £250,000 went to organisations where at least one trustee had a conflict nobody managed.

The detail that stuck with me was quieter. The trustees had failed to record their decision-making, so they could not show that their grants and investments were in the charity’s best interests. Perhaps some of those decisions were perfectly sound. We will never know, and neither, crucially, could they.

Most of the boards I know are a long way from that sort of trouble. They are a vicar, a retired head teacher, a treasurer with a spreadsheet only he understands, and someone who joined in 2009 for one meeting and is still there. Good people, every one. But good people are exactly the ones who assume the paperwork can take care of itself, because everyone round the table trusts everyone else.

The Commission’s essential trustee guidance (CC3) talks about acting in the charity’s best interests and managing its resources responsibly. Read it slowly and you notice something. Being trustworthy is only half of it. You also have to be able to show your working, as every maths teacher I ever had insisted.

I find that oddly freeing. The minutes are the board’s memory, and memory is the first thing to go when the chair moves away and the treasurer finally retires. A line or two on why we chose what we chose is a kindness to whoever sits in our seats next.

So next time someone writes “agreed”, I may be the irritating one who asks: agreed what, and why? I will bring the custard creams as a peace offering.