Be charitable
We’re doing what we can, says regulator
The Charity Commission is not having a very good time at the moment. It faces allegations that it failed to investigate 30 charities and community centres with links to the Iranian regime because it feared being accused of racism. And it lost the case I previewed here on Friday.
Iranian charities
The allegations about Iranian charities are made by Lord Walney, the former Labour MP John Woodcock who was appointed independent adviser on political violence and disruption by Boris Johnson in 2020 and then removed from his post by the current government last year.
Walney said in the Sun on Sunday that he would be publishing a report this week into the way “Iran’s cheerleaders have become deeply embedded in the British charity sector”.
He wrote:
They build networks, spread regime narratives and embed sympathetic organisations inside British civil society.
This soft power push is not separate from the violent threat. It systematically excuses and normalises it. And it helps create the environment in which hostile activity can flourish.
So we need to tackle both the violent terror threat and the network of extremist Islamist influence in British society that surrounds it. Ministers should beef up the new foreign influence registration scheme, which is designed to make it an offence to serve a foreign power.
Iran has been placed on the highest tier of the scheme — but the public still cannot see which organisations or individuals are operating under it. They should put a rocket up the sluggish, complacent Charity Commission, who are failing to act against Iranian-linked charities and give the regulator whatever anti-extremist tools it needs to do a proper job.
The Sunday Times reported Walney as saying that the regulator had found it difficult to obtain information from the Home Office and did not have sufficient powers.
Walney had interviewed Sir William Shawcross, chair of the Charity Commission between 2012 and 2018, who said he was met with a “real nervousness about talking about suspicions of Muslim organisations… there’s a widespread fear amongst police, amongst schools, the headmasters and others of being accused of being racist”.
The Sunday Times also reported that Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, had promised to help the Charity Commission speed up existing investigations and disqualify radical trustees.
Nandy said she would “not allow extremists to hijack [the] good name” of the charitable sector.
“By giving the Charity Commission the teeth it needs to act fast and decisively, we will close the door on those who exploit charitable status to spread hate, and open a new chapter that gives the sector the protection it deserves,” she added.
It’s not the first time Nandy has made this pledge. As long ago as last October, the Telegraph reported that she was “drawing up plans for a new law to disqualify anyone who has been convicted of a hate crime from senior positions at charities”. Under the reforms, the regulator would be given greater powers to pursue charity leaders who use their positions to promote violence or hatred.
This is all said to form part of the government’s new social cohesion strategy, which is apparently to be launched today. A draft leaked to the Spectator last week said that ministers would appoint a “special representative on anti-Muslim hostility” whose role would be to “champion efforts across the UK to tackle hostility and hatred directed at Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim”.
The magazine reported:
Alongside that is a new definition of anti-Muslim hatred, which has been watered down to avoid defining Muslims as a race but which will still condemn “the prejudicial stereotyping of Muslims, as part of a collective group with set characteristics, to stir up hatred against them, irrespective of their actual opinions, beliefs or actions as individuals”.
According to Tim Shipman’s report in the Spectator, critics think this will create a blasphemy law by the back door.
He adds:
The paper also goes further than the government has done before to acknowledge that anti-Jewish hatred is a growing problem in the UK. “Antisemitism is being normalised in many corners of society — from our schools and universities to workplaces and the NHS,” it says.
The 47-page paper is called Protecting What Matters.
Responding last week, the Charity Commission told The Times:
As a civil regulator, we use the powers granted to us by parliament to respond robustly to evidence of wrongdoing and make referrals to other agencies where appropriate, including where there is evidence of criminality.
In light of this week’s developments in Iran we have been in direct contact with a number of the charities mentioned in this report to remind the trustees of their legal duties relating to any political activity, proactively warning them of the consequences of breaching charity law.
However, it is not presently open to the commission to remove charitable status as a sanction and in the absence of proscription of the IRGC the commission can only act where there is clear evidence of a breach of charity law.
As the threat from extremism grows, we know our powers must keep pace. We are currently in welcome dialogue with the government to ensure our powers and our corresponding resources are fit for the present and the future.
The commission urged charities to ensure that any political activity in which they were involved furthered their charity’s objects and complied with the regulator’s guidance.
Constitutional conundrum
The case I wrote about last week was a dispute between the Charity Commission and the parliamentary ombudsman, Paula Sussex CBE. The ombudsman had upheld complaints by two individuals about the way the commission had dealt with their cases.
Refusing the commission permission to apply for judicial review, Mr Justice Fordham began by dismissing four detailed points it had made about its powers and duties. But his reason for not letting the case go any further was that it was now “academic”. This concept is explained in the Administrative Court Judicial Review Guide 2025, which is written for litigants-in-person as well as lawyers.
Paragraph 6.3.4 says:
Where a claim is academic, i.e. there is no longer a case to be decided which will directly affect the rights and obligations of the parties to the claim, it will generally not be appropriate to bring judicial review proceedings.
An example is the situation where the defendant has agreed to reconsider the decision challenged. Where the claim has become academic since it was issued, it is generally inappropriate to pursue the claim.
In exceptional circumstances, the court may decide to proceed with a claim even though the outcome has become academic for the claimant.
The court may do so if, for example, a large number of similar cases exist or are anticipated, or at least some other similar cases exist or are anticipated and the decision will not be fact-sensitive.
The commission’s claim was academic, Fordham ruled, because reports by the ombudsman on the two cases had already been laid before parliament. Although the charity commission was challenging the ombudsman’s initial decision to publish the reports using her statutory powers, that plan had been superseded by a decision of the House of Commons to publish them under its own authority.
So the expected constitutional clash never got off the ground. But Fordham would have found it arguable that the ombudsman’s initial decision was “justiciable, at least on some grounds and with limitations as to the remedy which the court would give”.
This is how the court summarised the two complaints at the heart of the case:
Lara Hall raised with the Charity Commission concerns about the charity called Help for Persecuted Christians (charity 1163363) and its former trustee and chair, Wilson Chowdhury. These concerns were referred to the Charity Commission in July 2019. The charity told the commission that Mr Chowdhry had resigned as chair and trustee “due to an extramarital relationship with a volunteer”. That was his narrative.
What Ms Hall described was that she had encountered Mr Chowdhury, as a vulnerable person and a victim of sex trafficking, as a beneficiary who the charity was set up to help and protect; but that Mr Chowdhury created and pursued opportunities for an exploitative and abusive sexual relationship with her; and that it was all under the guise of the promotion of and travel for charitable activities; including on trips and in hotel rooms paid for with charity money…
Damian Murray raised with the Charity Commission concerns about the charity called The Marist Fathers (charity 235412) and the priest Father O’Neill who was headteacher at the associated school, St Mary’s College. These concerns were referred to the Charity Commission in February 2018.
What Mr Murray described included an ongoing cover-up (from 1993-2017) within the charity, concealing sexual abuse of students by Father O’Neill. It also included a description of actions promoted by the charity which publicly honoured Father O’Neill, including by naming a school building after him and holding a public memorial mass in his honour when he died (in 2011), all knowing he was a perpetrator of sexual abuse.
Responding to the judgment, Hall said on Friday:
This has been a long and difficult process. For over seven years I have had to stand up for my rights as a survivor of abuse by a charity trustee. When I reported that abuse to the sector’s only regulator, I expected to be able to trust that organisation. My case was about serious safeguarding failures, including ultimately by the Charity Commission. I have continued to fight and gave evidence to the court because I wanted to establish principles that will protect others from experiencing the harm I faced.
The Charity Commission said in court that our cases were the tip of the iceberg. They claimed they needed this judicial review because there are lots more cases like mine with the [ombudsman’s office]. This is frightening, given the way I have been treated and shows that this regulator is not fit for purpose.
Today’s landmark judgment shows that the Charity Commission does not adhere to the safeguarding standards to which it holds charities and their trustees. I certainly now don’t trust them as a regulator. I cannot see how parliament can leave this Charity Commission with its current powers.
I ask now that parliament holds the Charity Commission to account. My experience and this judgment show that accountability needs to involve truly independent and external intervention. This needs to happen now.
Damian Murray said:
My actual primary concerns about the deliberate concealment of sexual abuse at the former St Mary’s College Blackburn by the Marist Fathers charity have yet to be acknowledged, let alone addressed, by the Charity Commission since I first raised them in 2018…
In my view the commission’s claim did not have a leg to stand on and should never have been brought, especially at such an expense of time and public money…
It is now time for the whole Charity Commission board, including the chief executive, to go — as should the senior executive officers who, together with the board, negligently in my view, failed properly to consider, and instead contemptuously dismissed, my serious and well-founded concerns about governance failures on the part of the Marist Fathers’ registered charity in relation to the deliberate concealment of child sexual abuse.
The ombudsman said:
One of our roles is to hold public bodies to account, acting on behalf of parliament. This is an important principle to uphold and the court’s decision supports that principle by refusing the Charity Commission’s request for permission to judicially review.
Our reports were laid before parliament after failing to reach agreement on compliance with the Charity Commission.
At the heart of what might seem like a matter of process are two people, Miss Hall and Mr Murray, who have suffered significant injustice. Securing resolution for the complainants remains the priority, alongside making sure the lessons identified in our investigations are implemented.
While the Charity Commission has made some changes after our original reports, we hope the commission will now focus on working constructively to fully comply with our reports and provide the assurance that the public are entitled to expect.
The Charity Commission said:
We reiterate our apologies to the two complainants in these sensitive cases. We have long accepted that there were important lessons for the commission to learn from these and we have previously apologised and paid compensation to each complainant.
We brought this case in good faith to get clarity from the courts on the respective remits of the [ombudsman] and commission, to provide certainty to the sector we regulate. While we are disappointed with the decision not to permit a full hearing, the judgment provides a clearer basis on which both organisations can perform the distinct roles parliament has given us.
The court has reaffirmed the commission’s role in regulating charity governance rather than acting as a safeguarding authority and indicated that we cannot be expected to reinvestigate serious criminal allegations made against charity trustees.
We recognise we need to draw further lessons from the court’s decision, particularly in terms of how we record and communicate our assessments of risk, and we will immediately review key aspects of the two cases in question.
Update 10 March: the social cohesion strategy paper has been published.