What The Committee Room is, and what it isn't

If you've been handed the constitution at an AGM, you're our reader. If you're a clerk to a parish council trying to understand whether the new policy quote is fair, you're our reader. If you're a treasurer staring at a renewal notice and wondering whether trustee indemnity insurance is actually worth the £400, you're our reader.

What you have in common: very limited time, real legal exposure if you get it wrong, and almost nowhere to look for a straight answer that isn't either a broker landing page or a 60-page Charity Commission PDF.

Three things, in roughly equal measure.

Insurance guides.Specimen pricing, named underwriters, what cover actually does and where it falls down. We don't do affiliate-bait listicles where every provider is “the best” for a different reason. When one option is cleaner for your situation, we say so.

Governance and legal-structure guides. Choosing between a CIC, a CIO and an unincorporated association. Constitutions. Trustee duties. The bits the Charity Commission assumes you already know.

Compliance how-tos. Safeguarding, GDPR, DBS checks, accounting thresholds, gift aid, business rates relief. The work nobody pays you to do but everyone expects you to have done.

The Committee Room is published by Known by One, LLC, a small editorial company registered in Delaware, USA. The site is written for a UK audience by an editor with a personal stake in the sector — the kind of person who actually has been the treasurer of a small voluntary group, has had to read the Charities Act on a Sunday evening, and has paid a renewal premium they later realised was twice what it should have been.

We work with subject-matter specialists where it matters — insurance brokers, charity-sector lawyers, parish clerks — and we cite the source documents so you can check our working.

The plan is affiliate referrals. When you click through from one of our insurance guides to a provider and buy a policy, the provider pays us a small commission. That commission does not change the price you pay.

We are currently in the process of joining the affiliate programmes of PolicyBee, Simply Business, Markel UK and events-insurance.co.uk. Until those applications clear, links on this site go directly to the providers and we earn nothing from them. We mention this not because we have to but because it's the truth and the truth is shorter than the alternative.

Full details, including which links are tracked and which aren't, are on the affiliate disclosure page.

We are not authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority. Nothing on this site is regulated financial advice. For a binding recommendation on a specific policy, you need a regulated broker.

We are not solicitors. Where the law is genuinely contested or you're facing a live dispute, you need a charity-sector solicitor, not a website.

We are not accountants. Our compliance guides cover the rules and the thresholds; they don't replace an independent examiner or a qualified accountant when the numbers get serious.

Name names.We will tell you which provider, which underwriter, which scheme. Anonymous “top 5” lists are useless to the person who actually has to make a decision.

Show real numbers.If we can find published or broker-quoted pricing, we publish it with the date and the source. If we can't, we say so plainly rather than inventing ranges.

Acknowledge what nobody else says.Most insurers won't publish specimen pricing for a village hall. Most comparison sites won't admit a small charity might genuinely not need trustee indemnity insurance. We will.

Update or remove.Insurance markets change. Schemes get withdrawn. Underwriters switch. When that happens, the page changes too — with a visible “last updated” date.

If we've got something wrong — a price that's out of date, a provider that no longer underwrites a scheme, a regulation that's changed — tell us. We will fix it, credit you in the change log if you want, and not get defensive about it.

How to reach us.