Yesterday, we heard that William Shawcross will appear before the Public Accounts Committee on 7 March to address the issue of the Cup Trust, the £176m tax avoidance scheme that it was unable to shut down.
I suspect the committee will want some explanation of what went wrong. This will be interesting, because the commission, it seems, is still adopting the stance that nothing went wrong.
Its statements on the subject all say that it looked into the Cup Trust, found it couldn’t do anything, and had to go away. No one working at the commission suggested it could or should have done more – that its inability to act constituted any kind of failure.
The charity was legally structured, commission staff say, and in any case, it isn’t its job to tackle tax avoidance. Nothing it could do, QED.
Technically speaking, the bit about tax is true. HMRC is responsible for charity tax affairs. But this doesn’t allow the commission to absolve itself of responsibility. It is one of the commission’s jobs to shut down sham charities that don’t deliver public benefit and do damage public trust and confidence. Tax avoidance schemes fall into this category.
Everyone apart from the commission feels more could have been done.
If nothing else, the commission could have told everyone that this gigantic charity existed, doing next to no good, and that it didn’t have the power to stop it.
It could also have asked for some further authority, or suggested it might be time to tweak the rules so that you couldn’t set up the country’s 77th largest charity but provide almost no public benefit.
I generally have a lot of sympathy for the Charity Commission. It has a vast remit, complex objects, and a large number of difficult and misunderstood rules to enforce. It’s overstretched and has severe budgetary constraints. It takes a lot of flak from Tory politicians who don’t know much about charity, as well as an inordinate number of personal attacks on its staff from the Daily Mail.
I had quite a lot of sympathy for the commission at the start of this scandal, too. I wondered whether it may have been asked to stand aside by HMRC. It didn’t look like any taxpayers’ money had actually been lost. Perhaps the commission had just been pragmatic about its position.
But gradually, with a combination of obstinacy, defensiveness and reluctance to reveal information, the commission has worn that sympathy away. I don’t necessarily think the sector is owed an apology, but I think it’s time for an explanation.
So will William Shawcross go to the committee saying that the commission could and should have done more, but that it needs more staff, more resources, and more powers?
Or will he insist that everything went swimmingly, and that he can’t understand what all the fuss is about?