What is good governance?

As part of the Change Up initiative there were a number of national bodies established to look at the support services available to voluntary and community groups.  These have been working on documenting good practice and providing tools to help this be implemented.   

The Governance Hub is one of these national bodies and “is a partnership of voluntary and community sector associations working to improve the quality of governance of voluntary and community organisations in England”.  It has produced three pieces of work that are relevant to this project and should become key tools for the work of local infrastructure organisations. 

The first of these is the Good Governance Code for Voluntary and Community Organisations.  This was produced by a group of voluntary sector support organisations along with the Charity Commission.  The code sets out best practice.  It is not mandatory but organisations that comply with the Code are invited to state this in their annual report and other relevant published material. 

The Code has seven principles:

1.    Board Leadership

2.    The board in Control

3.    The high performance board

4.    Board review and renewal

5.    Board delegation

6.    Board and trustee integrity

7.    Board openness 

The Code was launched in July 2005 and the Governance Hub wants to motivate more people to become trustees whilst providing support to enable them to rise to the responsibilities and challenges of being a trustee. 

Each principle in the Code is broken down to more explicit principles and there is an associated toolkit available to help groups find ways of using the Code. 

It has two main uses – either as a tool that can be used to asses the board and to check compliance. Or as a learning and development tool for the board. Detail and publications can be bought or downloaded from the Governance website www.governancehub.org.uk