Scandals like Oxfam in Haiti will continue without a regulator that has sharper teeth

Even after everything that has been learnt about the culture of sexual exploitation that seems to have infected almost every British institution in recent decades – from the BBC to the churches; political parties; parliament; local authorities; the police; the NHS; the armed forces; and private companies – the revelations about Oxfam remain especially shocking.

This after all is an institution that was, until relatively recently, an unimpeachable source of assistance and support for those in need, especially after natural disasters and war. It enjoyed global respect. That it has now had its reputation trashed and received an official reprimand by the Charity Commission is a matter for profound shame for all concerned.

This venerable organisation, founded in 1942 as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, was once synonymous with the best of Britain. No longer.

The Charity Commission report amounts to a long litany of charges. The complaints about the charity’s workers after the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, for example, were too often ignored. Only now do we have the definitive report.

We have known about the “culture of poor behaviour”, as the commission describes it, under which sex parties and “sex for aid” occurred, even involving minors. The very evils that the charity was supposed to be fighting were visited by Oxfam staff upon people with nothing – no food, no shelter, no money and certainly no access to the legal protections they should have been entitled to.

The commission says there is “no evidence” of a cover-up at Oxfam, which is legalistic – and not quite the same as saying that no cover-up ever took place, or that there were no piecemeal attempts to conceal what went on for the sake, mistakenly, of protecting the charity, its work and its funding.

When the truth did emerge in 2018, Oxfam saw its donations slip badly, and its future thrown into jeopardy. Its chief executive, Mark Goldring, announced plans to step down permanently from the charity at the end of the year. It was lucky to survive.

High-profile cases such as the Jimmy Savile scandal and grooming gangs in Rotherham and elsewhere demonstrate the extent to which child sexual abuse persists in British society. The various investigations being painstakingly pursued by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse also remind us that the problem was virtually endemic, and may still be in some quarters.

More appositely, for the commission, it is known that Oxfam was not the only charity where mismanagement and complacency undermined the work of many hard-working individuals. Common sense suggests that there was nothing unique to Oxfam that made it vulnerable itself to exploitation, and the suspicion remains that some serial offenders moved from charity to charity to pursue their evil activities.

Last year it was reported, for example, that more than 120 workers from a range of Britain’s leading charities were accused of sexual abuse in 2016-17. Oxfam itself recorded 87 allegations of sexual misconduct between April 2016 and March 2017, 53 of which were referred to the police; Save the Children had 31, of which 10 were referred to the police, and Christian Aid two. The British Red Cross also spoke of a “small number of cases of harassment reported in the UK”.

There is a wider point too, which concerns the resourcing of the Charity Commission for England and Wales. It has taken 18 months to produce this report, which covers events of about a decade ago. The commission, as it stands, is woefully underpowered to properly conduct its role in overseeing the financial and operational propriety of the thousands of charities it is supposed to police.

That is another reason why the scandal at Oxfam happened and continued – there was little fear that the authorities would be able to detect or correct it. This failing is quite apart from the abuse of charitable trust status by private wealth, and the questionable charity status of the public schools.

There is, in other words, much that the Charity Commission can do which it does not, or cannot, now. (Similar strictures apply to counterpart agencies in Northern Ireland and Scotland.)

As the Charity Commission is plainly underfunded, and at a time of strain on the public finances, there is a case for a modest levy on the charities, particularly the larger ones, to help pay for their own regulation. The third sector matters, and it is worth nothing without high ethical standards. The best way to impose those, and to deter wrongdoing, is the fear of detection. A culture of impunity has prevailed for far too long.