Trusting the Trustees

In the early stages of the Covid pandemic, Captain Tom Moore decided to try to raise £1000 for the NHS by walking up and down his garden in Bedfordshire a hundred times before his hundredth birthday on 30 April 2020. Donations reached the £1000 target on the 10th. The media seized on the story and more and more money poured in. Moore completed his hundredth lap on the 16th. By the time his JustGiving page closed on the 30th, more than 1.5 million people had donated more than £32 million between them. All of that, plus another £7 million or so in Gift Aid, went to NHS Charities Together. Moore’s birthday was marked by an RAF flypast. He sang ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ with Michael Ball and it went to number one. The queen knighted him in July. In December he won a BBC Sports Personality of the Year award and British Airways flew him to Barbados for a holiday. Trains, buses, police dogs, horses and a fireboat were named after him. He was admitted to hospital in January 2021 with Covid and pneumonia, and died a few days afterwards.

Meanwhile, the Captain Tom Foundation was incorporated with Companies House on 5 May 2020 and registered with the Charity Commission a month later. According to the application to register the charity, submitted on 13 May, it was being set up by ‘the family of Captain Tom’. It was a busy day for them: a private family trust was also established on 13 May, and the centenarian Moore handed over all his intellectual property rights to it. The trust, in turn, licensed the IP to a company called Club Nook Limited, which had been incorporated on 24 April, with Moore’s daughter, Hannah Ingram-Moore, and her husband, Colin, as directors and shareholders. The third thing that happened on 13 May 2020 was that Penguin Books signed a four-book deal with Hannah Ingram-Moore, on behalf of her father and Club Nook, for £1.5 million.

A press release went out the following day announcing the imminent publication of Tomorrow Will Be a Good Day and an as yet unnamed children’s book, both by Captain Tom, to ‘support the launch of his newly formed charity’. ‘I am so looking forward to sharing my autobiography with you which will help launch my new Foundation,’ Moore is quoted as saying. ‘I’d better get writing!’ Tomorrow Will Be a Good Day was published on 17 September 2020 and the children’s book, One Hundred Steps, a fortnight later. ‘Given the way the books were advertised and promoted’, in the words of the Charity Commission’s recent inquiry into the Captain Tom Foundation, ‘members of the public are likely to have bought’ the books ‘thinking they were supporting the charity financially by doing so’. ‘To date,’ however, ‘the charity has not received any money from the first publishing agreement.’ The inquiry’s report was published on 21 November this year.

One of the four books from the original deal was dropped – the advance was consequently reduced to £1,466,667 – and a second publishing agreement was signed in June 2021, between Club Nook and Penguin, for a book titled One Hundred Reasons to Hope. (The third book, Captain Tom’s Life Lessons, had come out posthumously in April 2021.) Club Nook got an advance of £30,000. In a separate, three-way contract between Penguin, Club Nook and the Captain Tom Foundation, it was agreed that one pound from the sale of each hardback copy of the book would go to the charity. According to the inquiry report, 17,862 hardback copies of One Hundred Reasons to Hope have been sold and an equivalent number of pounds have been paid to the foundation.

In August 2021, the Ingram-Moores made a planning application for a Captain Tom Foundation Building in their back garden. Six months later, as stories began to appear in the press about the foundation’s accounts (the Daily Mail reported on 8 February 2022 that the charity had paid more in management costs, including to Club Nook and other companies owned by the Ingram-Moores, than it had distributed in grants), they submitted a revised, retrospective planning application without any mention of the charity: the new structure was now called only the Captain Tom Building and included a ‘spa pool’. The application was denied and a demolition notice issued; the building was eventually demolished in February this year, and the TV cameras were there to capture the moment the hot tub was lifted through the roof by crane.*

The Charity Commission inquiry report goes patiently through all these details and many others, looking at the Captain Tom Foundation online store (where ‘limited information … is likely to have confused or misled supporters of the charity’), the sale of Captain Tom barrel-aged gin (mismanagement) and Captain Tom roses (no mismanagement), and Hannah Ingram-Moore’s salary as interim CEO of the charity: the inquiry found that her claim not to have been ‘offered a six-figure salary’ was ‘factually correct’ but ‘disingenuous’ since ‘she was very much involved in the discussions around setting her salary and clearly influenced the initial proposal submitted to the commission to employ her on a salary of £100,000.’ They agreed on £85,000 and she did the job for nine months, from August 2021 to April 2022. During that time she was also personally paid £18,000 to help judge the Virgin Media Captain Tom Foundation Connector Awards while the foundation itself received £2000. ‘Had the unconflicted trustees been aware’ of the agreement, the report says, they could ‘have intervened to ensure that the fee … was received in full by the charity.’ As for the payments that sparked the media backlash in February 2022, however, the commission ‘was satisfied that these specific payments were reasonable reimbursement for expenses incurred and that the conflicts of interest in relation to these third-party payments were adequately identified and managed.’

Overall, ‘there were serious and repeated instances of misconduct and/or mismanagement in the administration of the charity’ by both Hannah and Colin Ingram-Moore, who have been disqualified from being charity trustees or holding senior management positions at a charity for ten years and eight years respectively.

They aren’t the only ones. In September, the Charity Commission published the report of its inquiry into Fashion for Relief, which was registered in January 2015 and removed from the Register of Charities this March. Its three trustees included the supermodel Naomi Campbell. Between 2015 and 2020, Fashion for Relief had a total income of nearly £4.8 million and expenditure of £4.6 million. In May 2018, it organised a runway show in Cannes, during the film festival, as a charity fundraiser. The trustees spent €14,800 on a flight from London to Nice, €9400 on a hotel room for Campbell and €7,939.75 on such necessities as spa treatments, room service and cigarettes. The inquiry decided that not all of these expenses were reasonable.

One of the beneficiaries of the 2018 fundraiser, according to the inquiry, was supposed to be Save the Children. (The only beneficiary mentioned on Fashion for Relief’s own website is Time’s Up, a US non-profit established by Hollywood stars in early 2018 to support victims of sexual harassment; it got into trouble in 2021 after its chair was alleged to have been involved in attempts to discredit one of the women accusing the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, of sexual misconduct. Time’s Up was wound up in 2023.) Fashion for Relief paid £325,361.09 to Save the Children between March 2017 and September 2019, but ‘£147,000 from funds raised for its benefit’ were still owing. The interim managers appointed to run the charity in 2022, ‘to the exclusion of the trustees’, paid the outstanding sum.

Campbell was disqualified from being a trustee or senior manager of a charity for five years. I’m not sure there’s much to be gained from trying to decide who behaved worse, Campbell or the Ingram-Moores, though it may be worth noting that guests at the fundraiser in Cannes, according to Fashion for Relief’s website, included Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner and Prince Azim of Brunei: unlike the unsuspecting souls who bought copies of Captain Tom’s books on the understanding that some of the proceeds would go to a good cause, it’s hard to imagine that many of Campbell’s worldlier guests would have raised an eyebrow at her hotel bill.

It isn’t only the rich and famous who get investigated: the most recent report on the Charity Commission’s website is the result of an inquiry into a charity called Muffin Pug Rescue, founded in 2015 by Kristine Lovelady of Cheshire ‘to relieve the suffering of pugs in need of care and attention’. Between April 2019 and February 2022, the report says, Lovelady and her son, Declan Poole, were the charity’s only trustees. Between 2017 and 2021, despite repeatedly failing to submit its accounts on time, the charity received Gift Aid payments from HMRC of £250,708. ‘Numerous errors’ in completing the returns ‘resulted in the charity owing HMRC £213,567 in Gift Aid that had been claimed in error’. The charity paid the trustees’ rent (£2000 a month), utility bills and Sky TV subscription, and the inquiry found ‘numerous instances of non-charitable expenditure’, including £7000 on a Rolex watch, with total ‘unverified expenditure’ of £361,951. Lovelady and Poole ‘are now disqualified from being a trustee or senior manager of any charity’. The new trustees have changed the charity’s name to Pug Life Rescue, and it’s now up to date with its accounting information, while ‘robust financial controls and policies have been put in place.’

The censuring of a few rogue trustees ought to reassure the public that other charities really are doing the good works they claim to be, though the recent flurry of revelations may also foster distrust of charities generally (the latest ‘UK Giving Report’ by the Charities Aid Foundation found that only 55 per cent of people ‘across the country in 2023 agreed that charities are generally trustworthy’, which is unsurprisingly about the same proportion as donated to one). While some charities provide services that ought to be supplied by the state, others work to mitigate or challenge harm caused by the state, such as those that help victims of police violence or refugees held in immigration detention centres, and it doesn’t require an enormous leap to imagine a malign government looking for ways to legislate them out of existence. The US House of Representatives last month passed a bill that would give the secretary of the Treasury the power to remove the tax-exempt status from any NGO that he considers a ‘terrorist-supporting organisation’. Opponents of the bill (which has yet to pass the Senate) have described it as a ‘death penalty for non-profits’ that Donald Trump could use ‘as a sword against those he views as his political enemies’. What the Charity Commission does in holding charities to account is obviously a very long way from that. But it would be unfortunate if the fog of bad publicity from Naomi Campbell’s extravagant cigarette budget ever drifted far enough to help a government shut down charities whose work it found politically inconvenient. Or, to put it in more charitable terms, it’s OK for an undeserving chancer to get an occasional free lunch if that’s the only way to ensure that nobody goes hungry.