Islington Council is trying to prevent a charity from selling its £1.3m building, claiming that the Underdog Trust is a “rogue” charity and has been dormant for several years.

The Underdog Trust was registered with the Charity Commission in 1982 with the intention of establishing a community education centre.

It stores a large catalogue of photographs charting disabled access to public buildings that it wants to make available to the public via a new website. The building was bought with a grant from the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Fund in 1977.

The Caledonian Road building is up for sale by auction on 17 July with a guide price of £1.3m.

Labour councillor Paul Convery claims that the charity has “been dormant for a very long time” and that: “The charity has been used by one person exclusively to pursue a hobby which is of no use to anyone and is in clear breach of the Trust’s charitable objectives.”

Convery told Civil Society News that the charity had spent “an extraordinary amount of money putting up barbed wire, security devices and steel shuttering” making it an “eyesore” and that the building is “an absolute shocker” which has been squatted in a number of times.

“It has been like that for 25 years. There has not been any kind of charitable service delivered from that building,” he added.

The council is considering taking legal action against the trustees and having the building declared an asset of community value to prevent it from being sold.  

'Council should have helped us'

Marg McNiel, founder and trustee of the Underdog Trust, said: “The reason for selling the building is to relocate outside of London to enable the charity to create a new website which can fully display this huge survey of buildings throughout England and Wales.”

He told Civil Society News that the new site would be mobile-friendly and suitable for people with disabilities. He said the charity had looked for other sources of funding but had been unable to secure a grant to build the new website and that was why it had decided to sell the building.

“If the council had been trying to help us rather than hinder, then perhaps we would have had help to get funding and not needed to relocate,” he said.

McNiel added that because the charity changed its trust deed in 2011, to give it a national rather than local focus, the Commission is “well aware of our work”.

A Commission spokeswoman confirmed that the regulator has received complaints about the building being put up for sale and said: “Most disposals of charity land should be able to proceed without our involvement, provided that the charity trustees can comply with the provisions of sections 117-123 of the Charities Act 2011.”

But she added that: “We have written to the trustees to seek clarification on whether the charity is active, and on how the proceeds of the sale are to be safeguarded and used for the future benefit of the charity.”