What are the Charity Commission doing?
I'm sure there are very worthy charities out there. Maybe even most of them ... but how can we know?
You know how it is – you buy a red car and suddenly they’re everywhere. You think about going on a walking holiday, and it turns out everyone else did that last year. You write a post pointing to the weakness of the Charity Commission, and the very next day the Telegraph publishes an article that really rams that point home.
The Telegraph article reports that Mermaids – the charity that, against all the evidence, thinks children can be “trans” and should be encouraged to block their puberty and undergo surgery rather than change their minds – has been given large sums of taxpayer money by the government despite its many failings, as well as awards made by other government funded charities.
But Mermaids is the canary in the coalmine pointing to a much bigger problem. We have approaching 170,000 organisations that are endowed with charity status allowing them to benefit from valuable tax breaks and apply for public money that is not available to other organisations.
And as Mermaids demonstrates, the granting of charity status appears to be permanent.
Following a two-year investigation, the Charity Commission concluded that Mermaids did indeed:
give chest binders to 13-year-old girls against their parents’ wishes;
have a deficient complaints procedure;
continue to advocate for the use of puberty blockers despite the findings of the Cass review;
fail to follow its own recruitment policies leading to a paedophile apologist being engaged as a trustee;
fail to implement an appropriate level of organisational and technical security to its internal email systems, leading to private data being publicly searchable.
These failings couldn’t be more serious. This isn’t an organisation that has failed its accounting audit or been found to spend money on objectives outside its stated aims.
The stated purpose of Mermaids is to help troubled children and their parents navigate an extremely contentious area. Many (including me) are convinced that the very existence of Mermaids is feeding a social contagion that is causing considerable harm to those children. But even there was such a thing as “being transgender”, these findings point to real world harms for some of those children that were directly caused by Mermaids.
And what did the Charity Commission do? They made specific recommendations for Mermaids to remediate their failings as if all this happened by accident or through incompetence.
But how could Mermaids not know that binders are damaging, or that puberty blockers are not reversible, or that safeguarding is the number one priority when working with children? Particularly when so many other organisations (and Cass) were making these points.
Did the Charity Commission consider that Mermaids did these things deliberately because their actual purpose is not to help troubled children but to use them to further an ideology?
That the Charity Commission even investigated Mermaids speaks volumes – there were only 23 inquiry reports published in the whole of 2024. I took a look at around half of the others (including The Captain Tom Foundation) which confirmed expectations – they all concerned conflict of interest and the misappropriation of charity funds.
The Charity Commission took action where cash was concerned; trustees were found to be accountable and disqualified from future trusteeships. A couple of cases were referred to the police. But where children were put at risk, no such action was taken, and no one was found to be accountable.
And despite the findings, very few of the charities that I checked were closed down by the Charity Commission.
An exception was JAFLAS which appears to have been the money making project of one Dr Alan Blacker whose actions can really only be described as “taking the piss”. Despite being convicted of an offence of “dishonesty or deception” which automatically disqualified him from being a charity trustee, Blacker appealed and was refused a waiver. Rather than step away from his “charity”, he instead swapped the bank account details associated with it and seemingly retained sole control of the charity funds. Facilitated by the other trustees, donations made through the JAFLAS website went direct to Blacker’s personal bank account.
If the Charity Commission had not closed down JAFLAS and referred the whole sorry story to the police, they might as well all go home. But how many JAFLAS lookalikes are there operating undetected? And why on earth was JAFLAS ever granted charity status in the first place?
One final consideration: the Charity Commission didn’t find in favour of the charity in any of the decisions I looked at. Which suggests that the evidence of wrongdoing must be overwhelming before any investigation is initiated.
We should all be extremely concerned.