Charities should surrender half a per cent of their tax breaks to help fund the Charity Commission, the Treasury Solicitor and the Attorney General’s office, a prominent QC told an audience of charity lawyers yesterday.

Christopher McCall QC (pictured), who has been involved in charity law for more than 20 years and is representing Catholic Care (Diocese of Leeds) in its ongoing case against the Charity Commission, made the call in his opening keynote to the Charity Law Association annual conference last Thursday.

He said the legal environment that charities operated in was much more difficult than it used to be, with cases becoming more complex and expensive all the time.

Charities should always see litigation as a last resort, he said, and should attempt mediation where possible, even if it means agreeing a resolution that involves making a payment to someone who is felt to be undeserving.

This is far better than to risk losing a case and all the reputational damage that entails, he said.

But the best solution to the problem of expensive litigation in the long term, McCall argued, was for charities to sacrifice a “tiny fraction” of their tax advantages to pay for three things: “proper funding of the Law Officers and the Treasury Solicitor; adequate funding for the Charity Commission, and a suitor’s fund”.

The suitor’s fund would be used to “enable the charity sector to distinguish between those cases that are really of general importance and those that are perhaps optional extras and might be referred to mediation”, McCall said.

“It would also be vastly helpful if we saw the Charity Commission and the Treasury Solicitor and the Attorney General relieved of some of their budgetary constraints, which do inevitably restrict their ability to help charities avoid spending a lot of money, possibly to no avail.”

He said that “half of one hundredth” of the sector’s tax advantages would be enough to fund these things.