Charity governance, finance and resilience:

In 'The essential trustee: what you need to know, what you need to do (CC3)' the Charity Commission sets out the 6 key duties for charity trustees and what these cover - the top three being:

• act in the interests of their charity and its beneficiaries
• protect and safeguard the assets of their charity
• act with reasonable care and skill

To deliver against these duties, charity trustees need to be able to identify the critical issues - the charity's purposes and plans, its solvency, its resilience and quality of governance - and to be able to review these at regular intervals. The Commission has designed 15 questions to help charity trustees carry out such a review and decide what they need to focus on.

Charity boards have to make difficult decisions on a regular basis. The Commission's It's your decision guidance offers advice for trustees about how to approach decision making and key things to consider. As a reminder, when making decisions trustees have a legal duty to:

• act within their powers
• act in good faith and only in the interests of the charity
• make sure they are sufficiently informed
• take account of all relevant factors
• ignore any irrelevant factors
• manage conflicts of interest
• make decisions that are within the range of decisions that a reasonable trustee body could make

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