FakeCharities: important update

When I wrote this post a week ago, I assumed that for a body/activity to qualify as a charity, its main purpose had to be on Lord McNaghten's very short list, to wit:

• The relief of poverty;
• The advancement of education;
• The advancement of religion; or
• Other purposes beneficial to the community.

If you read the original judgement (Income Tax Special Purposes Commissioners v Pemsel), Lord M actually said this through gritted teeth: what he was trying to do was restrict the scope of things that could claim to be charities (from some of his comments, you'd assume he was an atheist, at the very least), but so be it, this was the law as it stood since 1891.

My bad.

As Melanie Phillips (h/t The Purple Scorpion) points out, they chucked this in the bin a year or two ago. The list of charitable purposes is now in Section 2, Charities Act 2006, and includes:
(a) the prevention or relief of poverty;
(b) the advancement of education;
(c) the advancement of religion;
(d) the advancement of health or the saving of lives;
(e) the advancement of citizenship or community development;
(f) the advancement of the arts, culture, heritage or science;
(g) the advancement of amateur sport;
(h) the advancement of human rights, conflict resolution or reconciliation or the promotion of religious or racial harmony or equality and diversity;
(i) the advancement of environmental protection or improvement;
(j) the relief of those in need by reason of youth, age, ill-health, disability, financial hardship or other disadvantage;
(k) the advancement of animal welfare;
(l) the promotion of the efficiency of the armed forces of the Crown, or of the efficiency of the police, fire and rescue services or ambulance services;
(m) any other purposes within subsection (4).

If this weren't bad enough, it's all subject to an overriding requirement for there to be a 'public benefit', as defined in Section 3. Section 4 in turn leaves it up to The Charities Commission to issue guidance on this , in other words, make it up as it goes along (and use it as an excuse to persecute private schools, which was the topic of the original post).

They have cheerfully scrapped the old prohibition on political campaigning*, of course, as Auntie Mel points out, thus leaving the floodgates open to a whole wave of FakeCharities, FakePressureGroups and so on, see this blog and others ad nauseam.

Just sayin', is all.