Due Diligence Duties for Charity Trustees Vetting Speakers

Why speaker due diligence is a trustee duty, not an optional extra

Charity trustees in England and Wales carry a general legal duty to act in the best interests of their charity, to manage its resources responsibly, and to protect it from harm to its reputation, beneficiaries and charitable purposes. Inviting an external speaker to address a congregation, conference or community event falls squarely within that duty. A speaker who makes extremist, discriminatory or otherwise inflammatory remarks on charity premises or under a charity's name can expose the organisation to regulatory action, reputational damage and, in the most serious cases, statutory intervention.

This is not a theoretical risk. The Charity Commission for England and Wales has opened inquiries, issued Official Warnings and made formal directions against charities that failed to screen speakers adequately. Trustees who assume that goodwill or a speaker's professional standing is enough are, in the regulator's own findings, taking on risk they have not properly assessed.

What the Charity Commission's compliance toolkit expects

The Commission's 'Protecting charities from harm' compliance toolkit sets out expectations relevant to speaker vetting, principally in the chapter on protecting charities from abuse for extremist purposes, which was updated specifically to help charities that regularly host events at their premises. The guidance is not a rulebook with box-ticking requirements, but it does describe the kind of governance the Commission expects trustees to have in place.

• Clear, documented policies for how a decision to invite a speaker is made, including who is responsible for the decision
• Defined criteria for identifying when a prospective speaker should be treated as higher-risk or a cause for concern
• Due diligence checks on speakers and any partner organisations involved in an event
• Checks against the Home Office list of proscribed organisations and the OFSI list of designated persons and entities under financial sanctions
• For higher-risk speakers or topics, obtaining and reviewing the content of a speech in advance of the event
• Keeping a written record of the decision made and the reasoning behind it, particularly where a speaker or topic is contentious

What has gone wrong: lessons from regulatory cases

Recent Commission enforcement gives a concrete sense of what inadequate screening looks like in practice. In May and June 2025, the Commission issued Official Warnings to the Mosque and Islamic Centre of Brent and Central Oxford Mosque Society after finding, respectively, that speeches given at the Brent charity contained inflammatory and divisive content with no effective speaker-management policy in place, and that social media content posted by the Oxford charity around the October 2023 Hamas attacks was judged divisive and outside the charity's purposes, again with no relevant policy governing it. Both charities were required to adopt and implement speaker-management or social media policies.

A longer-running example is the Islamic Centre of England, where a statutory inquiry opened in November 2022 followed earlier Official Warnings and an Action Plan concerning events eulogising a sanctioned individual. In May 2025 the Commission used its power under section 84 of the Charities Act 2011 to direct the charity's trustees to provide 'rigorous oversight of future speakers and online activity' — a direct, legally enforceable instruction about speaker vetting.

An earlier case, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh UK inquiry following a 2015 television documentary, found that trustees had 'failed to follow their own procedures and had not properly screened speakers' at a youth camp, despite the charity having a policy on paper. The lesson from that case is that a policy which exists but is not actually followed offers no real protection — screening has to be a live, applied practice, not a document in a drawer.

Taken together, these cases show the Commission treating adequate speaker vetting as a governance expectation it is willing to enforce, not merely aspirational best practice.

Building a proportionate screening process

Trustees do not need a bureaucratic process for every visiting speaker, but they do need one that is proportionate to risk and that can be evidenced if questioned. A workable approach typically includes an initial risk triage (is this a well-known, low-risk community figure, or someone about whom little is known, or whose public statements are contested?), a basic background check using publicly available information, a sanctions and proscribed-organisation check where relevant, and a documented sign-off by a named trustee or staff member before the invitation is confirmed. Higher-risk cases warrant a closer look at recent public statements and, where practical, sight of planned remarks in advance.

Recording the decision matters as much as making it. Several of the cases above turned in part on the absence of any written rationale for who was invited and why — a gap that leaves trustees unable to demonstrate they exercised reasonable care even where the actual decision was defensible.

Practical checklist for trustees

Before finalising a speaker invitation, trustees or the staff member delegated to manage events should be able to answer the following:

• Has the speaker's public record — statements, affiliations, past controversies — been reviewed?
• Have the proscribed-organisation and financial sanctions lists been checked where the speaker's background warrants it?
• Is there a named person responsible for the decision, and is it recorded in writing?
• For a higher-risk speaker or topic, has the planned content been reviewed or discussed in advance?
• Is there a clear escalation route if concerns arise closer to the event date, including a fallback decision to withdraw the invitation?

Where this fits in wider governance

Speaker due diligence sits alongside other trustee duties around safeguarding, financial control and reputational risk management — it is one strand of the broader duty of care the Charities Act 2011 and the Commission's guidance place on trustees. It is worth reviewing speaker-vetting arrangements at the same time as other governance policies are reviewed, rather than treating it as a one-off task carried out only after something has gone wrong.

A note on this guide

This article summarises general good practice and publicly reported regulatory cases; it is not legal advice, and trustees facing a specific decision should consult the Charity Commission's published guidance directly or seek independent legal advice. Structured screening tools such as CharityScreen can support trustees in applying a consistent, documented due diligence process to prospective speakers.