CHARITIES should help build a strong system to regulate their fundraising to help maintain public confidence, according to their own leaders and the Scottish Government.

The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO) said a failure to act could leave charities at the mercy of complex and costly external regulation being brought in south of the Border.

A working group backed by the Scottish Government is to attempt to set up a system of self-regulation for Scottish charities to make sure that the public can have trust and confidence in the work they do, and take action when things go wrong.

It calling on charities to work with the group chaired by Theresa Shearer, chief executive of the learning disability charity Enable Scotland, to decide what should happen in Scotland.

She said: “The working group’s vision is a fundraising regulatory system in Scotland that commands confidence in charity fundraising, inspires public trust and promotes good fundraising. This is a crucially important issue for the whole of the charitable sector in Scotland.

"We need to come together to decide the best system of regulation for our donors and the people we support.”

Despite a series of fundraising scandals in England since last summer, Scotland's charity sector has largely been free of allegations of wrong-doing.

The UK Government is currently setting up an outside fundraising regulator to oversee charities after claims some used fundraisers who harassed vulnerable or elderly donors, and sold on lists of possible supporters to other charities and commercial partners.

It came after the death of 92-year-old poppy seller Olive Cooke, who had had hundreds of appeals for donations in the months before she took her own life in the Avon Gorge last May.

The Scottish group is looking at three ways charity fundraising could be regulated on behalf of the public - by allowing UK regulator to act as intermediary, by setting up a separate regulator, or by enhancing the current role of the charity watchdog OSCR.

Richard Hamer, a consultant who published a report on fundraising in Scotland for SCVO, said concern about charities' activities across the UK had made change inevitable.

"A change in culture in fundraising was clearly needed, as was a greater degree of transparency," he said. "Charities needed to grasp and own this system, rather than leaving it to the Institute of Fundraising, statutory regulators or even government to do so."