The Charity Commission’s top lawyer stood by the regulator’s decision to refuse charitable status to the Exclusive Brethren this week, and said it was not difficult for religious charities to pass the public benefit test.

Kenneth Dibble, the regulator’s head of legal services, was responding to a question by one of the Brethren elders about why gaining charitable status was proving so onerous for the church, when Ed Miliband, the minister for civil society at the time the Charities Act was passed, had promised it would not be onerous.

The Commission’s chair William Shawcross answered the question by explaining that public benefit was not defined in the Act, so it was left to the Commission to interpret what it meant.  He concluded: “It is not easy, public benefit, especially in the religious sphere. I know it’s not easy and that has been a problem.”

But Dibble appeared to contradict him, saying: “Actually, I am not sure it is difficult to pass the public benefit test for religion. There will always be difficult cases, and the Brethren was one of those cases which we found challenging."

He went on: “But the Commission has to apply the law, it can’t make up the law. The rules on public benefit are difficult because they are different for different types of charity. But for religion generally I don’t think there is difficulty, and that is demonstrated by the large numbers of religious charities already on the register.”

Shawcross: not a judgement on validity of beliefs

Dibble and Shawcross were both addressing a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Civil Society on Wednesday, attended by nine peers and various sector figures.  Earlier in the meeting, Shawcross had insisted that the decision on the Brethren case was not a judgement on the validity of the beliefs of the Preston Down Trust or any other Brethren group, but a decision based on law.

He also sought to dispel fears that the Brethren decision was “part of a Charity Commission plot to secularise Britain”.

“That is absolutely not the case,” he said. “I, nor anyone else at the Commission, has any desire to secularise Britain or to act against the Christian values that have informed British society for so long.”