ONCE UPON A TIME, I thought that charities were simple beasts. In a state of blissful ignorance, I assumed that do-gooding organizations which didn’t make a profit could roll up to the Charity Commission and register as a charity – and so qualify for a raft of juicy tax-breaks.

But I reckoned without 400 years of English legal history. In law, the term ‘charity’ has been taking on increasingly complex meanings since the reign of Elizabeth I. As a result, it’s remarkably hard to define, in law, what a charity actually is.

The messed-up reality of this hit home last week as I tried to register Intelligent Giving as a charity. I had told the Commission that we wanted to “promote the voluntary sector”, something it regards as a charitable purpose (PDF). It would be easy for us to show that we did that, I thought. But I was wrong.

The reason? Not only did we have to show that we promoted the voluntary sector, but we also had to show that we did it in a particular way.  

At the time, I thought this was loopy. But trawl back over the legal history, and it soon becomes clear why it actually makes perfect sense. Charities-which-promote-other-charities are regarded as charitable, it turns out, because they are a bit like the Yorkshire Agricultural Society.

Yes, really. Back in 1928, Lord Justice Lawrence ruled that the Yorkshire Agricultural Society was charitable. The Commission leapt on this. Charities are a bit like agriculture because they both benefit the whole of society, it reasoned, so if promoting agriculture is charitable, then so is promoting the voluntary sector.

This analogy struck me as rather bold.  And it is also full of quirks. At one point, the Commission told me that our database of charities would have to be comprehensive to count as charitable. Why? Because the Agricultural Society promoted all of agriculture, not just some of it – and because charities are like agriculture, they had to be held to the same standards.

All of which is perfectly logical. But whether you’d call it sensible is perhaps a different matter.

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