Julia Unwin has used her inaugural speech as Charity Commission chair to criticise the focus of charity boards to use their personal contacts to recruit trustees.

She is “saddened but not surprised” that just 6% of trustees, who took part in a survey published by the Commission last year, were appointed following an open recruitment process by responding to a job advert.

“That is a great loss,” she said in her speech.

“It prevents people contributing, it narrows the mind sets of boards, and it deprives vital organisation of the best, independent engagement that a truly diverse board offers.”

She added: “This of course, creates an ongoing barrier to widening the pool of trusteeship. And this matters. It matters because the best protection against risk is the 360 degree vision that you only get with a genuinely diverse board.

“And it is also a missed opportunity to raise awareness of trusteeship – to explain what it means, entails, and the rewards the role brings.”

Social contract

Unwin also used her speech to describe registered charity status as a “social contract” and “a kind of common treasure, not owned by any one of us, but sustained by all of us, and from which we all benefit”.

However, she said this contract is “now under strain” amid division in society, echoing comments earlier this year from her predecessor, interim chair Mark Simms, “about the growing violence and aggression facing those involved in charities, from people who simply do not support the charity’s work”.

She said charities “should not be expected to be cosy, uncontroversial, unpolitical and urged them to “seek to persuade those who have different views, rather than to attack them”.

She added that the sector should also “use every opportunity to say how deplorable” violent attacks against charities are and “ensure that action is taken to protect, and to prosecute”.

Earlier this month Metropolitan Police deputy commissioner Matt Jukes urged charities to work alongside businesses, faith leaders and politicians to speak out against extremism.

This followed a spate of attacks on London’s Jewish community, including an arson attack on Jewish ambulance charity Hatzola, where four vehicles were set alight and destroyed.

Unwin's appointment as Charity Commission chair was confirmed by the government in December last year.

She took up her three-year term in January.

The former Joseph Rowntree Foundation chief executive was revealed as the government’s preferred candidate and then backed by MPs at a pre-appointment hearing last year.

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