10 things to check when reviewing your charity governance

Governance rarely fails all at once. It erodes quietly: a policy nobody has read in three years; a board that hasn't disagreed about anything since 2022; a trustee who still doesn't quite know where their remit ends and the chief executive's begins. None of that shows up as a crisis… until suddenly it does.

Drawing on the governance insights published by Action Planning's consultants, here are 10 practical things worth checking on your own board.

1. Does your board actually see the whole charity, or just the finance report?

Oversight only works if the right things reach the table. Finance rarely gets missed, but HR, risk, safeguarding and basic operational health are just as often quietly absent from the agenda. A simple fix is a standing slot for each key area, with someone specifically responsible for bringing the report in. It keeps trustees out of the operational weeds while making sure they're never “going in blind”.

2. Are your checks and balances actually distributing power, or just slowing everything down?

Checks and balances exist so that no single person, team or department holds unchecked control. In a charity, that typically means the executive proposes, the board approves and auditors or other independent voices test whether a decision is sound. It's worth checking whether that separation genuinely exists in your structure, or whether, in practice, one group is answerable to everyone and accountable to no one. It's equally worth checking the other failure mode: oversight so layered that decisions can't be made quickly when they need to be. Getting that balance right is an ongoing job, particularly for the Chair and CEO.

3. Do your policies actually get used, or do they just exist?

A large policy folder isn't the same as good governance. The real questions are simpler: do you have the policies you actually need, rather than the ones a template or a funding application told you to have? Are there ones you could retire? Are they easy to find, current and written in language people would actually use, not generic text nobody would recognise as their own charity's way of working? And critically, how do new trustees, staff and volunteers actually absorb them – a genuine induction, or a box-ticking scroll through a PDF? Policies are meant to be a “way of life”, not a shelf of insurance against something going wrong.

4. Is disagreement allowed in the room?

A board where everyone always agrees isn't calm, it's a warning sign. Good governance depends on debate and a good Chair actively draws out different viewpoints, even ones they personally disagree with. If trustees who challenge tend to drift away, and the board quietly returns to easy consensus, that's often read as harmony when it's actually a loss of the scrutiny the board exists to provide.

5. Is challenge from trustees welcomed by the executive and is it framed constructively?

The flip side of point 4: many charity executives genuinely want to be challenged, but many trustees hold back, worried about undermining staff or asking a question that reveals they don't know the detail as well as the people running the charity day to day. The framing matters. Challenge “with positive intent”, asked in the spirit of helping the charity do more or do better, rather than scoring points, tends to be welcomed, not resented. Worth checking: do your trustees ask the “dumb” question when needed, and does your executive team actually want them to?

6. Do trustees understand where governance ends and operations begin?

Two failure patterns show up repeatedly. Some boards get too involved in day-to-day operational decisions, at the expense of their real job: strategy, oversight and risk. Others go too far the other way, handing everything to staff and disengaging from how the charity is actually delivering on its objectives. Both are a failure to discharge the core responsibilities of a trustee, just in opposite directions.

7. Are trustees trained, appraised and properly recruited, or just co-opted?

Trustee boards that skip formal induction, training and any kind of performance conversation tend to be the same boards that misunderstand their role and struggle to function well as a group. And boards that recruit informally – without a real interview process, references or proper board discussion of a candidate – tend to end up both weaker and less diverse, since people naturally reach for others like themselves. Treat recruiting a trustee with at least as much rigour as recruiting a senior member of staff.

8. Does your board actually reflect a range of backgrounds and perspectives?

Weak recruitment and a lack of diversity tend to go hand in hand, and boards short on diverse perspectives are more prone to “groupthink”. This isn't only about gender, ethnicity or age for their own sake – sector research has pointed to charity boards where women remain under-represented relative to both the workforce and the wider population, despite evidence that more diverse boards bring a wider range of perspectives to decision-making, and that funders and stakeholders increasingly expect to see it. Worth an honest look: does your board's make-up look like the community and people you exist to serve?

9. Is anyone actually responsible for the charity's future?

A commonly under-asked question in board meetings is simply: who talks about the future of this charity? All trustees are charged with promoting and delivering the charity's objects, which means setting aside real time – ideally on a fixed annual date, and often with outside help to get the conversation going – to think about strategy, not just the next set of accounts. Even a simple plan, revisited regularly, is better than none.

10. Would you actually know if your governance had a problem?

Only about 20 per cent of charities are really on top of their governance; the rest fall into one of three groups: those with genuinely good governance who can't demonstrate it to funders; those with no real governance focus at all, quietly drifting until a crisis forces the issue; and – the riskiest group – those who know something is wrong but haven't acted. An honest external governance review, along with a simple board calendar that tracks policy reviews, strategy dates and regulatory deadlines (data breach reporting, annual returns, safeguarding, insurance and more) is one of the more reliable ways to find out which of the three you actually are – before a funder, regulator or crisis finds out for you.

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This article draws on themes explored across several Action Planning's governance insights by Andy Strajnic, David Saint, Felicia Willow, Kate Nicholas and Andrew Middleton. For more detail on any of these topics, or to discuss a governance review for your own charity, visit Action Planning's Governance page or get in touch.