Articles

Welcome to this month's edition of the Withers Charities team e-alert.  

A little encouragement is something we could all use after the long winter of lockdown. Some is to be found, perhaps, in the oncoming spring, children being back at school and the vaccination data continuing to move in the right direction. 

For those trying to recruit charity trustees, there is also some encouragement in Mrs Justice Falk's very sensible judgment in the Kids Company case.  Philip Reed, a new partner in our Charities & Philanthropy team, shares some thoughts about that judgment and some related issues in this month's edition.

Further positive news comes in the form of the government's response to the Law Commission's Technical Issues in Charity Law report.  The government has released a policy paper setting out that it accepts the 'vast majority' of the Law Commission's recommendations aimed at addressing the technical issues in current charity law and will implement the changes when parliamentary time allows.  Although there is no commitment on timings, this is a significant step towards the simplification of charity law. 

Other contributors this month will touch on the following: the concluding report of the Charity Commission's statutory inquiry into Under Tree Schools and the consequential disqualification of a trustee for 15 years; the Commission's new campaign for trustees to be 'certain in uncertain times'; and interesting statistics on charity tax published by HMRC, which provide some insight into charitable giving in the UK, albeit before the impact of the pandemic was felt.