Prince Louis has been driving a digger as part of volunteering efforts on the final day of Coronation celebrations.

The five-year-old, along with brother Prince George and sister Princess Charlotte, helped Scouts in Slough, while the prime minister made food in a village hall.

People across the UK are being urged to get involved in local projects such as beach cleaning and flower planting.

It is part of a drive to encourage a post-pandemic return to volunteering.

Tens of thousands of charities have been taking part in the Big Help Out, with a total of 30,000 organisations putting on 55,000 events across the UK.

A cyclist who rode a penny farthing bike from Land’s End to John O’Groats in four days and 12 hours has been told he has broken a 133-year-old record.

Richard Thoday, of Matlock, Derbyshire, completed the 874-mile challenge in July but had to wait for confirmation from Guinness World Records.

The previous record was set in 1886 by celebrated cyclist GP Mills, who did the journey in five days and one hour.

Mr Thoday said the wait was “nerve-racking” but he felt “very relieved”.

“I gave Guinness World Records all the evidence I could provide so if they said ‘no’ there was nothing else I could do,” he said.

“I certainly wouldn’t be doing it again anyway.

“It was just so hard.”

The 55-year-old’s record attempt helped to raise £10,000 for Children in Need.

Commissioners of public services are making governance for charities more difficult and potentially “driving out innovation” from the sector.

This was the view of Lord Michael Bichard, former civil servant and cross-bench life peer, given at CIPFA’s governance summit on working across public bodies and the third sector today.

“Governance is important and it is being made more difficult by the way commissioners in the statutory sector are operating,” Bichard said.

He added: “Many excellent public service initiatives have grown out of the charitable sector – it is in an innovative sector.

“If what we do is to define not just the outcomes from the charitable sector but the way of delivering outcomes, then we drive out the possibility of charities innovating and we lose sight of the long-term and they [charities] become more risk-averse,” he said.

He warned that commissioners in the public sector often lacked the strategic partnerships with the charities needed to get the most out of the third sector, including what he described as charity’s “flexibility, public trust and innovation”.

This process was being driven by commissioners seeking standardised short-term contracts for narrowly defined service definitions, which he said “can often be at the expense of innovation”, because of the lack of time charities were given between contracts.

He said a “genuine partnership” was needed between the statutory and non-statutory, although he recognised achieving this “has continued to prove very difficult”.

Bichard stated that many of the issues which affect these partnerships and overall governance in charities related to how services were commissioned.

Grant funding has significantly reduced from around £6bn in 2003 to around £2.2bn in 2013 and there has been a major shift to contracts.

Bichard said this has benefited larger charities while smaller ones have suffered a 40% loss in income between 2008 and 2014 because they lack the capacity to compete for contracts, which are often short-term.

This leads to charities chasing contracts of one or two years “merely to survive” – which makes it hard to plan for financial sustainability.

The word is that Sir Stuart Etherington, chief executive of the National Council of Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), is going to be upbeat when he gives his “state of the sector” address to the annual conference of the voluntary sector umbrella group on Thursday 20 April. Curious, then, that the motivational speaker following later is survivalist Bear Grylls.

Will the assembled charity leaders be captivated more by Etherington’s reasons to be cheerful or by Grylls’ tips for wrestling alligators? After seven years of austerity, many charity bosses must feel up to their armpits in the latter.

Yet there’s good reason for Etherington to accentuate the positives. Of late, he has played an important, if often unpopular, role in spelling out some home truths to a sector seemingly in denial about the dangers of questionable fundraising practices and opaque senior pay policies. The worst of those storms now appear to have been weathered.

If charities are to play a key part in shaping the UK’s Brexit settlement – and Etherington has acknowledged that they failed to make their voices heard sufficiently ahead of the referendum – they need to regain their composure and confidence.

Latest survey findings suggest grounds for doing so. According to the Charities Aid Foundation’s annual UK Giving report, donations to charity are holding steady at £9.7bn a year despite Brexit uncertainty. Intriguingly, though, there has been a marked rise in the proportion of people saying they did something charitable – giving money or goods, or volunteering – last year, up to 89%, compared with 79% in 2015.

In addition, 56% of people say they signed a petition in 2016 and 6%, equivalent to 3 million of us, went on a demonstration. Is Brexit stirring activism?

Public trust in charities in England and Wales has fallen to the lowest recorded level since monitoring began in 2005, in the wake of a series of high-profile scandals.

Research for the Charity Commission found that people were increasingly concerned about how charities spend their money and perceived aggressive fundraising techniques.

The main reason given for trusting charities less, cited by 33% of people questioned, was media coverage. Stories to have hit the headlines since the last survey, two years ago, include the collapse of Kid’s Company amid allegations of financial mismanagement, and the suicide of Olive Cooke, believed to have received almost 3,000 mailings from charities in a year.

Another controversy concerned Age UK’s deal to help market an E.ON energy tariff to older people, for which it received £6m in commission.

Such stories have contributed to charities’ trust rating declining to 57%, from 67% in 2014.

As a result of public scrutiny, the way charities explain how they spend their money is changing. From raising funds to running an office, many end-of-year reports now offer a fuller picture of an organisation – rather than just what is spent on providing a service for beneficiaries. The new accounting regime (SORP) will also mean that this trend will continue.

Reporting will become even more focused on what charities have done, why they have done it and how this is making a difference. This impact-focused reporting will justify why organisations exist and will mean that the days of charities stating that they spend 100% of public donations on charitable activity will, hopefully, soon be over.

The reality is that any organisation, including a commercial company, needs to spend money on running its operations. This means that a charity really does need a head office to control the organisation, as well as ensuring compliance with laws and regulations. Even volunteers cost money: they need to be trained, coordinated and supported, and that all requires resources. The myth that charities can operate with zero overheads is utterly misleading and creates the illusion in the public’s mind – and it damages the rest of the charity sector.

the True and Fair Foundation has published two contentious reports that reviewed the costs incurred by charities and the proportion of their income spent on frontline services. One report, which argued that only a small amount of charities’ income went on frontline services, resulted in a media furore and was rejected by the sector as misleading because it failed to account for things like trading costs.While much as the analysis conducted by the True and Fair Foundation may have been misguided, there are still some organisations that claim that 100% of every pound raised by their charity is used exclusively for charitable purposes. But this is only an illusion, made possible because other costs incurred are covered by other income sources – such as grants. These claims are unhelpful for the sector because they perpetuate the myth that charities have no management and administration costs.

We need to stop communicating on what we have spent and concentrate on the difference it has made – and how we know. Some charities are getting it right, and learning the importance of being honest and open. Action on Hearing Loss did this from an early stage and charities such as Great Ormond Street hospital have followed in their footsteps.

Charities must move away from a headline percentage of what’s been spent on charitable expenditure and instead show what it costs to make change happen and, by doing so, get to the bottom of what charities are about: making society better. Only by being honest and open about how much it costs to improve society can we start to move away from the media and government’s obsession with management and administration costs.

Giving by the UK’s 100 largest family foundations reached a record high of £1.63bn last year, despite a 35 per cent drop in donations to them, a new report shows.

The Family Foundation Giving Trends survey, which is in its sixth year and is published by the Association of Charitable Foundations, says that charitable spending exceeded the previous record of £1.61bn recorded in 2007/08. It also rose 18 per cent from the £1.4bn recorded in the last sample, which covered financial years ending between 2010 and 2012.

The report – which was produced by the Centre for Charitable Giving and Philanthropy at the Cass Business School – uses figures in the most recently available annual reports of the top 100 family foundations based on the annual value of the grants they give out. Because foundations do not all use the same year-end, the most recently available data spans 2011 to 2013.

By far the biggest giver over this period was the Wellcome Trust, which made grants worth £511m in the year to September 2012, more than triple the £145m given out by the second-largest grant-maker, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, in the year to April 2012.

The ACF said that the drop in the level of donations to family foundations raised concerns about the amount of funds that would be available to support charitable purposes in the future.