Registration delays cause problems for charities seeking funds
Howard Lake | 30 September 2019 | News
A legal challenge to the role of the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland is causing charities ‘anxiety’, particularly those seeking funding from charitable trusts, according to the umbrella group NICVA.
The Charity Commission is currently not registering all charitable organisations that have submitted an application due to a High Court ruling which was handed down on 16th May.
The High Court ruled that Commission staff do not have the explicit delegated authority to make decisions on behalf of the Commission. The Commission will therefore not be able to register the same volume of registrations as it had been doing nor give Consents on the same scale.
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The Charity Commission is contesting the High Court ruling in the Court of Appeal but the case is not yet listed and a decision may not be made until around Easter 2020. If the decision of the High Court is upheld, it may need a change in legislation and that would probably require a functioning government at Stormont.
NICVA’s comments
NICVA says that as well as affecting charities who need charitable status to make applications to charitable trusts, the legal case is also hampering charities who need the Commission’s consent to make changes to their charitable purposes.
NICVA has written to all of the funders on their GrantTracker toolkit to make them aware of the situation facing organisations in Northern Ireland and has asked them to consider funding organisations which have charitable tax recognition.
HMRC can grant charitable tax recognition to charitable organisations in Northern Ireland without them having to be first registered with the Charity Commission.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.