Scotland names Pauline Radcliffe to chair its charity regulator from December

Scotland's charity regulator will have a new chair from December. Shirley-Anne Somerville, the Scottish Government's Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice and Housing, announced on October 30, 2026, that Pauline Radcliffe will chair the board of the Scottish Charity Regulator, known as OSCR, from December 1, 2026, to November 30, 2030.

The announcement credits Radcliffe with more than 34 years of work in Scotland's public and voluntary sectors, including leadership, grant funding and organizational development roles. She has chaired the CLD Standards Council for Scotland since May 2026 and was chief executive of the SCQF Partnership until December 2025. She has also been a Scottish Government policy adviser on tertiary education, has chaired several Scottish voluntary organizations as a volunteer and runs a consultancy that helps organizations rethink how they operate.

The terms

At £308.64 a day for four days a month, the part-time post is worth about £14,800 a year, by our calculation. That day rate is 8.3% above the £285 set when Dwarshuis was appointed in 2022, while the expected time falls from up to five days a month to four. Radcliffe holds no other public appointment and has undertaken no political activity in the past five years, the announcement says. The Ethical Standards Commissioner regulates the appointment.

A planned handover

Dwarshuis, who was part of the senior management team that set up OSCR, has chaired its board since October 15, 2022. Her four-year term was due to end on October 14, 2026; in July the government extended it to November 30, 2026, "to allow for the recruitment of a new Chair." OSCR's board page still lists her as chair. Before her, George Walker served as interim chair from April 2021, after Lindsay Montgomery resigned in late March 2021.

What the regulator does

OSCR is a non-ministerial office that has been part of the Scottish Administration since the Charities and Trustee Investment (Scotland) Act 2005 took effect, and it reports directly to the Scottish Parliament every year. It decides which bodies are charities, keeps the public Scottish Charity Register, monitors compliance and investigates apparent misconduct, for around 25,000 charities, from community groups and religious bodies to schools, universities, grant-makers and large care providers. Its board, appointed by Scottish ministers through open public appointments, is responsible for strategy, oversight and governance.

A more open register

Radcliffe takes over months after the last changes under the Charities (Regulation and Administration) (Scotland) Act 2023 took effect. Since March 9, 2026, the register has shown the first and last names of charity trustees, unless an exemption applies, and accounts documents submitted from that date are published in full, without redactions. Entries also carry a description of each charity in its own words and its numbers of staff, trustees and volunteers.

The regulator also publishes what it finds. In September it released an inquiry report on how Harvest Ministries Limited handled safeguarding concerns and how its trustees oversaw the charity, and a report drawing lessons from its inquiries on charities' financial record keeping. Scotland was also represented at the October 19-20 meeting in Ireland where charity regulators agreed to form a working group on digital transformation and AI, as we reported.