JON MOLYNEUX

Who'd be a charity trustee? These hardy individuals have to wrestle with red tape, regulation and their roles as employers, fundraisers and upholders of charitable mission - and all this for nought but goodwill.

Trustees are also first in the firing line when things go wrong, and in the case of lone parents' charity, One Plus, they went spectacularly wrong.

Around 800 staff lost their jobs last year when One Plus was forced into liquidation with a £2m overdraft and £2.3m in unpaid tax liabilities.

A report into the debacle was published last week by the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR) - and it makes grim reading for the trustees of One Plus, delivering stinging criticism of their lack of skills and expertise, acceptance of bad record-keeping and inability to hold a charismatic chief executive to account.

OSCR's chief executive Jane Ryder has called the report a wake-up call for charities and called on them to look at their own governance arrangements and seek good professional advice. The Scottish Social Enterprise Coalition's Antonia Swinson has said it should be "required reading" for managers and trustees.

But rewind a few years and One Plus was being feted as an example of how to have it all. On the surface it delivered phenomenal growth - from £4m to £11m turnover in five years - while still retaining its core campaigning zeal and service-user representation on its board.

So what does the cautionary tale of One Plus mean for trustees of charities and social enterprises, and does it sound the death knell for user involvement on boards?

Ryder claims the onus is on charities to strike a balance. "Giving a voice to service users is admirable", she said, "but there also needs to be appropriate business skills. This is particularly important where organisations are expanding rapidly."

However, Martin Sime, chief executive of the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, claims that such expectations are unrealistic without more support from government. "Huge resources go into regulating charities, but that does little to ensure their effective governance," he says. "Government needs to support this, and not just through documents on the OSCR website - it needs a raft of measures."

However, Sime warns against making snap judgements: "It certainly doesn't mean an automatic assumption that service users can't manage bigger charities."

Others, including Declan Jones, former director of the Social Enterprise Institute at Heriot Watt, believe the One Plus collapse stokes arguments for increased, regulation of charities. "The annual report and audit process is clearly not enough" he says. "The issues at One Plus were apparently known but not acted on, and it is perhaps fortunate that we've not seen the limited liability of trustees tested yet for acting irresponsibly."

"What is needed is a cultural shift, led by funders and regulators and backed up by professional development of managers and trustees."

Jones also expressed concern at the expectations being placed on charities to become enterprising and deliver contracts.

"It is easy to criticise the managers and directors at One Plus, but if we are in the business of encouraging small campaigning groups to become significant providers of public services, without investing in their core development, then we are asking for trouble."

His thoughts are echoed by Martin Sime, who claims the issue is much bigger than the OSCR report suggests.

"Full-cost recovery has been official government policy for years now, but it just isn't happening in practice. There are underlying issues and you can't just lay all the blame with One Plus' staff and board."

The Scottish Government claims it has already taken on board lessons from the collapse by commissioning a programme of financial management training for social enterprises which it intends to build on in its forthcoming Third Sector Action Plan.