Heyday successor won't be paid-for membership scheme

Finance | 26 Feb 2009

The new charity being formed by the merger of Age Concern England and Help the Aged is drawing up a “new, wide-ranging strategy for engaging with older people” to replace Heyday, Age Concern’s troubled membership arm.

ACE will shut Heyday down after a Charity Commission review found its governance to be severely lacking.

The charity set up Heyday in May 2006 as a membership organisation for anyone over 18 but offering benefits available to members aged 50 to 70. It hoped to attract three million members by 2011 but has managed just 40,000, despite the charity and its trading subsidiary, Age Concern Enterprises, spending £22m on it since launch.

In its report published last month, the Commission found that the charity’s trustees could not prove that they “exercised a sufficient oversight and critical challenge in making relevant decisions against a clear and robust risk framework”.

It also found that “the narrative and financial reporting in relation to the Heyday project was not presented in a sufficiently transparent way”.

In a statement, the new charity that ACE will become part of said: “The new charity is developing a new and exciting approach to how it engages with older people from April 2009, including with current Heyday members. This wide-ranging strategy, to be agreed by the new charity’s board in due course, will probably not be a paid membership scheme.”

Directory: Age Concern | Charity Commission

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