Society Diary: A long-running fund and a non-running Tube

07 Feb 2014 Voices

Our weekly round-up of outlandish and interesting information collected from the corners of the charity sector

Our weekly round-up of outlandish and interesting information collected from the corners of the charity sector

Not quite there yet

The National Fund, a little-known organisation which is the UK's 29th richest charity by balance sheet, handed in its accounts this week.

The fund was set up in the 1920s to pay off the national debt, and since that time it has done little except pay its management fees and save up, gradually and inexorably, until it has enough money in the bank to pay down the national debt.

So how’s it doing? Well, it now has £370m, and according to this calculator the UK’s national debt currently stands at £1,266 billion. So the fund is 0.3 per cent of the way there.

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A new movement for the Tube?

Brendan O’Keefe, the head of Epic, a youth services community interest company spun out of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, stood up earlier this week at Kensington Town Hall to launch his new organisation. His audience was rather depleted due to the Tube strike, but O’Keefe had stirring words for them, nonetheless.

“I think any type of public organisation can become a mutual,” he said. “I think it might be good for London Underground, in fact. I’m off to tell Bob Crow that after this event.”

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Is the Charity Commission lacking fibre?

The Charity Commission has come in for a lot of different kinds of flak in the last few months, particularly on the question of the Cup Trust, the charity tax avoidance scheme.

But Bernard Jenkin, chair of the Public Administration Select Committee, found a new angle of attack during a session earlier this week to take evidence from Sam Younger, the chief executive of the Commission, and William Shawcross, its chair.

The Commission, Jenkin said, had become “restricted by a rather constipated view of its responsibilities” and as a result lacked the ability to make any movement, as it were, on the Cup Trust inquiry.