WORRIES about the lack of staff who looked into safeguarding at Oxfam were not heeded, its former head of safeguarding told MPs.

Helen Evans, who is also the shadow member for finance at Oxfordshire County Council, was in charge of safeguarding at the Oxford-based charity from 2012 to 2015.

She was invited to the Houses of Parliament yesterday to address the international development select committee.

Ms Evans said it was 'positive' that the charity had a safeguarding function, something many charities did not have at the time.

She said: "I think when Oxfam invested in that it was probably commensurate in the reports we were getting. I think the challenge was as the number of reports increase, what I didn’t see was the resource to match an increase awareness of the challenges we were facing.

"I took those to the leadership team, I took them to the trustees; I’ve thought a lot about why I didn’t get that. At the time, the reason given was funding constraints, about budgets."

She added the charity had 1.4 full-time staff in her department but others, such as counter fraud, had far more staff to complete its work.