First guide to Charitable Incorporated Organisations published by DSC

The Directory of Social Change has published a guide to the Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO), the new legal structure available to voluntary organisations with charitable aims.

The new legal structure of became law in England and Wales in January 2013 under the Charities Act 2011, and since then the Charity Commission has registered more than 200 new charities as CIOs.

The Scottish form of CIO, the SCIO, became law in 2011. Since then more than 400 SCIOs have been registered. In fact, one in three charity registrations in Scotland now use the SCIO structure.

By using the structure of a CIO, a charity can be formed with corporate status and limited liability but registered only as charity, with the Charity Commission (in England and Wales) or with OSCR (in Scotland). Because a CIO is not a company, those running CIOs do not have to submit returns or accounts to Companies House and so they avoid the complexities of charitable companies which have to apply company law and charity law.

Gareth G Morgan, Professor of Charity Studies at Sheffield Hallam University, has written the first book on this new structure. He commented: “CIOs were, in my judgement, the single most important element in the Charities Act 2006. Now they are finally implemented, CIOs mean smaller and medium-sized charities can be formed as corporate bodies without all the time-consuming complexities of a charitable company.”

As well as explaining how to form a CIO, the book compares CIOs with other legal structures, analyses the insolvency framework when CIOs fail, and explores in detail the processes for converting existing charities to the CIO form.

Key Guides: Charitable Incorporated Organisations can be purchased for £19.95 from the DSC or from Amazon.