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Charity Commission not yet consulted by coalition over public benefit for schools

Governance | Niki May Young | 7 Jun 2010

The Charity Commission has advised that it has not yet been consulted by the government on possible changes to the public benefit clause for independent schools, despite education minister Michael Gove’s assertion last year that the Conservatives would enter immediate talks to soften the rules if they got into power.

In the run up to the election last year Gove claimed he would enter “immediate talks” with the Commission to ask them to “soften its line on reviewing independent schools' charitable status” after two private schools were rejected charitable status applications on account of providing insufficient bursaries for poorer students .

Under the current system, any private school seeking charitable status must be able to prove it provides a ‘public benefit’. But Gove stated last year that “it is wrong to say that [bursaries are] the only way [private schools] can provide public benefit.”

The Sunday Times last week reported that Gove ordered his officials to encourage the Commission to also consider non-financial benefits, such as the provision of facilities to comprehensive schools when deciding on charitable status applications. 

A spokesperson for the Charity Commission however told Civil Society: "We are aware of the Sunday Times article. The coalition government has not asked us for any discussions regarding public benefit to date." 

However the Commission stopped short of advising whether it would expect to be included in any such discussion and today updated its ‘charitable purposes and public benefit’ guidance on its website. 

Meanwhile a spokesperson for the Department for Education dismissed the story as "nothing, just speculation"but advised that if anything of the sort was to be announced, the Department for Education would do so in "one of the many upcoming announcements".

Charity Commission chief executive Dame Suzi Leather has come under fire for her stringent take on the Labour law which introduced the public benefit clause, with many smaller independent schools advising they wouldn’t survive if the tax breaks associated with the charitable status were revoked. 

In its election manifesto in March, the Independent Schools Council called on the Commission to end its "illegal" interpretation of the public benefit clause.

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