Trust in us?

The Charity Commission has investigated Arts Council England’s (ACE) practice as a registered charity, after the funding body awarded a grant of £10,165 to one of its own trustees. The Commission’s regulatory case report reveals that although funding trustees in this way is not banned, charities must seek the permission to do so by the Charity Commission itself – a procedure ACE failed to comply with. It came clean about the award only in October 2009, 18 months after the payment had already been made. Neither ACE nor the Commission will name which one of the 10 trustees was involved. It is mandatory, however, for ACE trustees to keep a record of interests during their tenure; the individual in question failed to enter the grant into this record. Lack of diligence was found elsewhere during the course of the investigation: the Charity Commission discovered that another company with links to another ACE trustee had received a grant of £3,000 from the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment programme administered by ACE. A spokesperson from the Commission said, “We undertake a number of regulatory case reports but chose to publish this one due to the high profile of the organisation involved. We felt there would be wider lessons to be learnt by the sector.”