A charity board pack needs four things, and only four: the agenda, last meeting's minutes, a one-page finance snapshot, and one one-page paper for each decision you're asking trustees to make. There's no Charity Commission requirement for a "board pack" at all — CC48, its guidance on charity meetings, never even uses the phrase. If your search results are showing 100-page corporate packs with risk registers and stakeholder maps, that's for listed companies with company secretaries, not for a five-trustee charity meeting next Tuesday.
Does the Charity Commission require a "board pack"?
No.
CC48 doesn't set out a "board pack" as a thing you must produce. What it actually says is narrower and more useful: "You should share an agenda before your meeting," and "You should send copies of any relevant documents with the agenda to allow people to prepare for the meeting" — for example, an annual report, the charity's accounts, or the wording of any resolutions that will be voted on. That's guidance, not law. CC48 uses "should" throughout, never "must", and this guide follows that word choice too.
CC48 also recommends a standing item at every meeting to discuss the charity's financial position and performance — which is the guidance behind the finance snapshot below. None of this adds up to a heavyweight document. It adds up to: send the agenda, and send whatever a trustee needs to understand it.
The minimum-viable pack: four things, nothing more
If you take nothing else from this guide, take this list. A charity board pack for a small trustee board is:
- The agenda. What's being discussed, in what order, and roughly how long each item gets.
- Last meeting's minutes. So the board can approve them as accurate and pick up anything left open.
- A one-page finance snapshot. Bank balance, income and spend since the last meeting, anything unusual — one page, not a full management-accounts pack.
- One one-page paper per decision. For each item where you're actually asking the board to decide something, not just note something.
That's it. No governance framework diagrams, no stakeholder-engagement summaries, no 20-page strategy appendix "for context". If an item on your agenda is purely informational — "the summer fete raised £1,200" — it doesn't need a paper at all. A line on the agenda or a sentence in the finance snapshot will do. Papers exist to support a decision, not to pad the pack.
This is also where a lot of well-meaning secretaries go wrong: attaching everything that might be relevant "just in case", because that's what a board pack looked like at the company they used to work for. A small charity board doesn't need that, and CC48 doesn't ask for it.
The one-page decision paper (copy this template)
For any item where you're asking trustees to make a decision, use one page, structured like this:
DECISION PAPER — [item name]
What we're asking you to decide: [one sentence]
Why now: [1–2 sentences]
The options: [A / B / do nothing]
What we recommend and why: [2–3 sentences]
What it costs / risks: [one line]
Worked example — should we move banking provider? (Illustrative only: the banks, fees and figures below are invented to show the shape, not a real recommendation.)
DECISION PAPER — Change of banking provider
What we're asking you to decide: Whether to move our main account
from Acorn Bank to Two Rivers Charity Bank.
Why now: Acorn is withdrawing free business banking for charities
from September, and our monthly fees would rise to £18.
The options: A) Move to Two Rivers (free for charities under £100k
income). B) Stay with Acorn and accept the new fee. C) Do nothing
and decide again nearer September.
What we recommend and why: Move to Two Rivers. It's free, offers
the same online banking features we use, and two trustees have
used it for other charities without issues.
What it costs / risks: The switch takes about three weeks and needs
two signatories to update mandates; no cost to move.
Six lines, one page, and a trustee who's never seen the correspondence can read it in under a minute and know exactly what's being asked of them. That's the test for every decision paper: could a trustee arriving cold understand the ask, the options, and the recommendation without a conversation first?
What to leave out
Leave out anything that isn't the agenda, the minutes, the finance snapshot, or a decision paper. In practice that usually means: full management accounts (a one-page summary is enough for the meeting; keep the detail available if someone asks), long narrative reports where the actual decision is buried three paragraphs in, policy documents attached "for information" that nobody asked to review, and previous board packs bundled in "so people have the history".
Corporate board packs routinely run to hundreds of pages, and it isn't a badge of rigour — it's a symptom. An oft-cited 2017 governance-industry survey found most people who receive packs like that think they're too long. The lengths it reported ran to well over 100 pages even for smaller organisations. Nobody reads a 150-page pack properly before a two-hour meeting; they skim it, or they don't open it at all, and then everyone's collectively responsible for a decision half the board didn't actually engage with. A practitioner rule worth borrowing, from the charity governance consultancy Cranfield Trust: if you can't say what you need to say about a subject on one page of A4, the problem usually isn't the page limit — it's that the item needs more thought before it reaches the board, not more paper.
How far ahead should the pack go out?
Check your own governing document first. Whatever it says about notice for meetings is binding on you, and it comes before anything in this guide. Beyond that, CC48's only specific number — three weeks' notice — is a fallback for calling a general meeting when a charity's own rules are silent on the point. It isn't a rule about when papers must go out, and this guide won't pretend it is.
What the guidance does say is simpler: papers travel with the agenda, and NCVO's advice is that they should reach trustees "with enough time... to consider the material and raise any questions" — in good time to actually read them, not dropped in an inbox the night before. For most small charity boards that means the pack goes out alongside the agenda, however many days ahead that is for you, so trustees open one email and have everything they need to prepare.
Common mistakes
Sending the agenda without the papers. Trustees arrive having read a list of item titles and nothing else, then spend the first ten minutes of each item being briefed from scratch. The papers are what let a meeting start with a decision, not a briefing.
No finance page, even at a standing item. CC48 expects finance to come up at every meeting. If there's no snapshot to look at, "any update on finances?" turns into someone reciting numbers from memory, and nothing gets minuted properly.
The decision buried in three paragraphs of narrative. We see this often: a well-written update that mentions, somewhere in the middle, that the board is actually being asked to approve something. If a trustee has to hunt for the ask, rewrite it as a decision paper instead.
Unnamed PDF attachments. "Document1.pdf" and "Scan_003.pdf" tell a trustee nothing before they open them, and make the pack much harder to search for later. Name every file for what it is — "Finance snapshot June 2026", "Decision paper – banking provider".
Do this once, then let it run itself. Trustee Meetings is a simple board-meetings tool built for small UK charities. It builds the pack for you — papers attach to agenda items, the whole meeting downloads as one PDF, and every trustee gets it by email. Free until your first board meeting is done — no card, no clock running. Then £180 a year (or £15 a month), every trustee included. Try it with your board
Frequently asked questions
How long should a charity board pack be? There's no legal length. For a small charity, an agenda, last meeting's minutes, one finance page, and one page per decision usually covers it — often under 15 pages in total. That's a practitioner rule of thumb (Cranfield Trust), not a Charity Commission requirement.
Should the pack be one PDF or separate files? CC48 doesn't say. One combined, clearly-named PDF is simply easier to open on a phone than five attachments — it's a formatting choice, not a legal one.
Who prepares the board pack if we have no staff? Whoever organises the meeting. CC48 says this is usually the secretary, but if you don't have one, a trustee or an employee can do it instead — no company-secretary role is required.
Should papers go out on paper or by email? CC48 is silent on format. Send both if some trustees read better on paper. There's no rule either way — just make sure everyone can actually open and read what you send.
How far ahead should the pack go out? Check your governing document first — it's binding on notice periods. Beyond that, papers should travel with the agenda and reach trustees in good time to read them and raise questions (NCVO). There's no separate Charity Commission day-count for papers specifically.
What if a trustee never actually reads the pack? They're still collectively responsible for the decision, even if they didn't read the papers, didn't attend, or voted against it (CC48). That's exactly why the pack should be short enough that reading it isn't a chore.
This guide covers England and Wales. Scottish charities and those in Northern Ireland should check OSCR's or CCNI's own guidance — the detail can differ even where the underlying approach is similar.
Build your own pack in minutes with the annotated agenda template and the charity minutes template, or see the full cycle in how to run a charity board meeting and what should charity minutes include. Or browse the full guides library and try it with your board.