The fall of the Tory party

The Law Commission’s eleventh programme of law reform had been looking at technical issues about the amendment of Royal Charters and of the governing documents of charities set up by legislation, and the project’s scope was then widened to pick up a number of issues identified by Lord Hodgson’s review of the operation of the 2006 Charities Act. One of the topics they explored was whether there should be a relaxation of the rules about charities and ex gratia payments (i.e. payments or the forgoing of payments or the transfer of assets where there is a compelling moral obligation but no legal power) so that charities should be able to make such payments in some cases without the approval of the Charity Commission being required. Someone had identified the situation that the BM had been in some years back where they had been willing to deaccession something but the 1963 Act did not allow it. So the Law Commission proposed that charities established by Act of Parliament (like the BM) should not be prevented from making such payments because of anything in their legislation. And so the Charities Act 2022 was passed with a section in it that would have trumped the prohibition in the 1963 Act if the trustees of the BM felt a moral obligation to return a cultural artefact to its “home”. The irony is that the government department that is responsible for the charity legislation is none other than the DCMS which is also the principal regulator and funder of the BM, and yet the relevant people in the department had clearly not spoken to each other about what the Charities Act was going to do. The result was that the relevant sections of the Charities Act 2022 were pulled from the implementation plan and may never be brought into force, despite their being an expression of the will of the people. That’s the short version.