Most small charities that employ staff go years without a single formal disciplinary case — and then one arrives, usually at the worst possible moment, and the board discovers there is no written procedure to follow. If that is roughly where you are, take heart: the fix is straightforward, the authoritative source material is free, and a sound policy can be adopted at your next trustee meeting.
A charity disciplinary policy is a written document that sets out the standards of conduct and performance the charity expects of its paid staff (the rules) and the fair, staged process it will follow when those standards may have been breached (the procedure). For charities in England and Wales it is not optional window-dressing: if you employ anyone, the law requires your disciplinary rules and procedure to be specified in writing, and the ACAS Code of Practice sets the standard a tribunal will measure you against.
The good news is that you do not need an HR department to get this right. This guide explains exactly what the law requires, walks through every section a good policy should contain, and shows how a charity with two or three staff can run a genuinely fair process without pretending to be a large employer. It is one of the core employment policies covered in our pillar guide, what policies does a charity need.
Is a disciplinary policy legally required for charities?
For any charity with employees, effectively yes. Section 3 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 requires the written statement of employment particulars — the document every new employee must receive, its principal part on or before their first day — to include a note specifying any disciplinary rules that apply to them and the procedure for taking disciplinary decisions, including dismissal, or to refer the employee to a reasonably accessible document containing them (the disciplinary note itself may lawfully follow within two months of the start date, but the policy it points to still has to exist). In practice that "reasonably accessible document" is your disciplinary policy, so the policy has to exist and staff have to be able to find it.
Sitting alongside the statute is the ACAS Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures. The Code is not itself legislation, but it has statutory teeth: under section 207A of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, an employment tribunal can increase a successful employee's award by up to 25% where the employer unreasonably failed to follow the Code — and reduce it by up to 25% where the employee did. On an unfair dismissal award, that uplift can be thousands of pounds of charitable funds. The Code applies to misconduct and poor-performance cases; it does not cover redundancy or the non-renewal of fixed-term contracts.
Two boundaries are worth stating plainly. First, the Code and this policy apply to employees, not volunteers — volunteers have no employment rights to engage, and conduct concerns about them belong in the separate problem-solving route described in our charity volunteer policy guide. Second, a charity with no paid staff at all does not need a disciplinary policy, whatever a borrowed policy checklist may imply.
What your charity disciplinary policy must include
The strongest starting point is the free disciplinary procedure template that ACAS publishes as a Word download under the Open Government Licence — our template adapts it for charity governance. Whichever text you start from, a complete policy contains the following sections.
Purpose and scope
One short paragraph: the policy exists to deal with conduct and performance concerns fairly, consistently and without unnecessary delay. Then state exactly who it covers — all employees — and who it does not: volunteers and trustees. Many small charities also exclude workers on genuinely casual terms, but say so explicitly rather than leaving it ambiguous.
Rules and procedure — two different things
Section 3 of the ERA 1996 requires both, and conflating them is the commonest drafting fault. The rules are the standards themselves: timekeeping, honesty, safeguarding conduct, use of charity funds and property. The procedure is the process that follows an alleged breach. Your rules section should give illustrative (not exhaustive) examples of ordinary misconduct and, separately, of gross misconduct — theft or fraud, serious safeguarding breaches, violence, serious breach of confidentiality — because gross misconduct can justify dismissal without notice, and staff are entitled to know in advance which behaviours carry that risk.
The informal stage
Most problems should never reach a hearing. The policy should say that minor conduct or performance issues will normally be raised first in a private, informal conversation with a clear note of what must change and by when. An informal word is not a warning and goes on no record beyond the manager's own note — but the policy should reserve the right to move straight to the formal procedure where the matter is serious.
Investigation
Before any hearing, someone must establish the facts: gather documents, take statements, and give the employee a chance to explain. The ACAS Code expects the investigation and the disciplinary hearing to be handled by different people where practicable — a safeguard your policy should adopt with exactly that qualifier, since in a three-person team it will not always be possible. An investigatory meeting is fact-finding only; it must never slide into a disciplinary hearing, and no sanction can come out of it.
Suspension
Suspension should be rare, and the policy should say so. It is appropriate only where there is a genuine risk — to beneficiaries, colleagues, funds or the integrity of the investigation — and after alternatives such as a temporary change of duties have been considered. When used, it is on full pay, for the shortest time possible, kept under review, and the policy should state in terms that suspension is not a disciplinary sanction and implies no assumption of guilt.
The hearing
The formal heart of the procedure, and the part tribunals scrutinise hardest. The employee must be told in writing, with reasonable notice, what they are alleged to have done, what the possible consequences are, and be given copies of the evidence in advance. They have a statutory right, on request, under section 10 of the Employment Relations Act 1999, to be accompanied by a companion of their choice — a trade union official, a certified union representative, or a colleague — who may put and sum up the employee's case and confer with them, though not answer questions on their behalf. The hearing should be held without unreasonable delay, and the employee must have a genuine opportunity to answer the allegations before any decision is made.
Decisions and the sanctions ladder
Set out the ladder explicitly: first written warning, final written warning, then dismissal with notice — with the right to move in at a higher rung for serious matters, and summary dismissal (without notice) reserved for gross misconduct. Give each warning a stated life, commonly six months for a first written warning and twelve for a final one, after which it is disregarded for disciplinary purposes. Every decision goes to the employee in writing, with reasons and a reminder of the right of appeal.
Appeals
The employee may appeal any formal sanction, in writing, within a stated window (five working days is typical). The appeal should be heard, wherever possible, by someone more senior than and independent of the original decision-maker — in a small charity, this is where trustees earn their keep, as the next section explains. The appeal decision is final, and the outcome is again confirmed in writing.
Records and retention
Notes, statements and outcome letters are held confidentially, shared only with those who need them, and kept in line with your data retention schedule and your charity's data protection policy. Expired warnings are disregarded in future disciplinary decisions, though underlying records may need longer retention where safeguarding is engaged.
Safeguarding allegations
Where an allegation involves harm or risk of harm to children or adults at risk, the disciplinary procedure does not run alone: parallel external duties are triggered, and your policy should say so. Concerns about someone working with children go to the local authority designated officer (LADO) under local arrangements; serious incidents may need reporting to the Charity Commission; and there is a legal duty to refer to the Disclosure and Barring Service where your charity provides regulated activity and both conditions are met — you withdraw the person's permission to work in regulated activity or move them out of it (or they leave before you can), and you believe they engaged in relevant conduct, satisfied the harm test, or were cautioned or convicted of a relevant offence. Failing to refer without reasonable justification is an offence. The disciplinary process may need to pause while statutory agencies act — your safeguarding policy should carry the detail, and the two documents must point at each other.
Review
Name a policy owner, a review date, and the version history. More on cadence below.
Download our free charity disciplinary policy template (Word) — openly licensed, written for small charities in England and Wales, and yours to adapt with no sign-up.
How a three-person charity runs a fair process
The ACAS Code sketches distinct roles — investigator, hearing manager, appeal manager, plus note-takers and companions — and a charity with three staff cannot field five impartial people. The Code anticipates this: separation of roles is required "where practicable", and tribunals assess fairness in light of the employer's size and resources. Proportionate compliance is the standard, not perfection. What a tribunal will not forgive, at any size, is skipping the fundamentals: establishing the facts, telling the person the case against them, hearing them out, and offering an appeal to someone with an open mind.
The practical solution for small charities is to plan the role map before a case arrives, and it almost always involves trustees. A sensible default: the employee's line manager (often the CEO or lead officer) investigates minor matters and hears them; for anything that could end in a final warning or dismissal, a trustee investigates or hears the case; and the appeal goes to the chair or a small panel of trustees who have had no earlier involvement. The one iron rule is to keep the appeal route untainted — if the chair helped decide the original sanction, the chair cannot hear the appeal, so brief the board early and sparingly rather than copying every trustee into the detail.
The chair–CEO relationship needs its own line in the policy. Where the person facing action is the chief executive, the normal management chain fails: the chair (as the CEO's line manager) typically commissions the investigation and hears the case, with an appeal to a panel of other trustees. Writing this down in calm times spares the board from improvising it in a crisis.
Adopting the policy properly
A downloaded document protects nobody. Tailor the template — real role names, your actual staffing structure, your safeguarding contacts — and check it agrees with your contracts and written statements, which should refer to the policy rather than reproduce it (keeping the procedure non-contractual preserves your ability to improve it). Adopt it by a board decision recorded in the minutes, then make sure every employee can actually find it, which is what section 3's "reasonably accessible" requires. Finally, give it an owner and a review date; Trustee Meetings keeps policies, owners and review dates alongside your agendas and minutes and resurfaces each one when it falls due — free to try, no card needed.
Adopt the twin grievance policy at the same meeting: the two procedures interlock (a grievance raised mid-disciplinary is common, and the policy should say whether the processes run concurrently or pause), and section 3 requires the grievance route to be specified too.
Common mistakes charities make
These are the failures that actually surface in tribunal claims and Commission casework, not hypotheticals.
- Deciding first, investigating second. A hearing convened after the outcome has privately been settled is the classic unfair dismissal. The investigation must be a genuine open question.
- Tainting the whole board. Circulating allegations to every trustee at the first whiff of trouble leaves no one clean to hear the appeal.
- Suspending by reflex. Automatic suspension on any allegation reads as pre-judgment. Consider alternatives, give reasons, keep it short.
- Running volunteers through the staff procedure. It offers volunteers no rights they hold, wastes formality, and can blur their non-employee status.
- Forgetting the parallel safeguarding track. Handling a safeguarding allegation as a purely internal HR matter can breach LADO arrangements, the DBS referral duty and Commission reporting expectations simultaneously.
- Letting warnings live forever. Warnings without expiry dates, or expired warnings quietly weighed in later decisions, undermine the ladder's fairness.
- Delay. Each formal stage of the ACAS Code is qualified by "without unreasonable delay"; months of drift is itself a Code failure a tribunal can price at up to 25%.
When to review your disciplinary policy
Review the policy every year or two — a light-touch check that names, roles and cross-references are still right takes twenty minutes of a board meeting. Trigger an early review when ACAS revises the Code or its templates, when employment legislation changes (recent years have moved quickly), when you hire your first employee or your staffing structure changes materially, after any disciplinary case that exposed a gap, and after any safeguarding incident touching a staff member. Log the outcome and the next review date in your minutes — a trustee action log or a tool like Trustee Meetings stops the date sliding by unnoticed. If a case is live when the review falls due, finish the case under the existing procedure first; changing the rules mid-match is a fairness problem of its own.
If you have read this far, you are already ahead of most small charities — now download the free template, tailor it, and put it on the next agenda. For the surrounding pieces, see our guides to the charity grievance policy it should be adopted alongside, the volunteer policy that carries the separate problem-solving route for unpaid roles, the safeguarding policy whose referral duties interlock with this one, and how to chair a charity meeting for getting the adoption decision cleanly through the board.