Charity solicitors

Yes. Our charity solicitors can advise on whether your organisation meets the legal requirements for registration with the Charity Commission, depending on its structure and status.

If it does, we can prepare the application to the Charity Commission on your charity’s behalf and respond to any enquiries they may have before your organisation is registered as a charity.

The Charity Commission aims to review all applications within 48 hours to make an initial assessment as to whether the application is complete and contains all the necessary information. However, it is common for the Commission to request further information in relation to the application, which we can assist you with.

In our experience the registration process can take between three and six months from application to registration.

Our charity lawyers can assist you with every step of a charity merger. The steps involved typically include:

• Informal initial discussions around the merger
• Agreeing the structure and timing of the merger
• Undertaking due diligence on the other charity
• Negotiating and agreeing the legal documents for the merger
• Transferring property, staff and pension arrangements, if relevant
• Putting new governance arrangements in place following the merger

We can help with making initial decisions about which structure would be best for you, drafting heads of terms, undertaking legal due diligence on the proposed merger and the entities involved, seeking consent from the Charity Commission if required, agreeing transfer documents with the other charity’s solicitors, and registering your merger with the Commission once complete.

Yes. Our charity lawyers can advise on whether a trading subsidiary is right for your charity. A trading subsidiary can be a good way to ringfence risk and/or to undertake activities that a charity might not otherwise undertake, with profits then passed up to the charity.

Charities can carry out some types of trading within charity law, but certain activities may need to be carried out through a trading subsidiary, particularly if they amount to “taxable trading”.

We can advise on the best type of trading subsidiary for you, set it up, and put in place the necessary agreements between the charity and the subsidiary so that profits are passed up to the charity and benefit from relevant tax reliefs. We can also advise on the subsidiary’s governance arrangements so that any potential conflicts of interest are properly managed.

Yes. Our charity solicitors understand the sensitivities involved in dealing with the Charity Commission, and the importance of timely advice. We regularly help charities with:

• Applying for consent to regulated amendments during a review of your governing document
• Seeking Charity Commission consent where required, for example in a merger
• Responding to the Commission’s enquiries during the registration process
• Reporting serious incidents
• Guiding you through regulatory intervention

For more on how good governance can reduce the risk of regulatory intervention, read our article Avoiding regulatory intervention: the role of good governance.

This depends on the size of your charity, but as a general guide, it is best practice to have between five and 12 trustees on the board of a charity. As a minimum, we would recommend always ensuring that your charity has at least three trustees.

Generally, trustees cannot receive a salary for their role as trustees. However, trustees can be remunerated in certain circumstances, including reimbursement for reasonable expenses, and for the provision of goods and services to the charity.

If you are looking to pay a trustee, you must ensure that either the charity has the power to do so (by way of a power contained in the charity’s governing document or the Charities Act), or you must obtain consent to do so from the Charity Commission.

Your organisation is charitable if it has exclusively charitable purposes, within the meaning of charity law, and meets the “public benefit requirement”.

The descriptions of charitable purposes are listed here, and details of the public benefit requirement can be found here.

If your organisation is charitable and its income exceeds £5,000 per year, you must register it as a charity. This will usually be with the Charity Commission, unless it is an exempt charity, in which case it will be regulated by a different body, such as the DfE or the FCA.