EALING Council has been challenged to carry out the ‘urgent action’ called for by the Charity Commission to comply with its legal responsibilities for the Victoria Hall Trust.

This month, the regulator wrote to all local authorities in England and Wales with a list of actions they need to take to ensure compliance with charity law, if like Ealing with the Victoria Hall, they are acting as trustees.

Roger Green, chair of the Friends of the Victoria Hall (FoVH) said: “The letter from Charity Commission CEO David Holdsworth reads like a blow-by-blow account of Ealing’s shortcomings over the Victoria Hall.”

He added: “I have written to the council chief executive to ask him what action he will be taking in response to the letter from Mr Holdsworth and in the light of new guidance for local authorities published this month.”

Issues highlighted in the letter include “not keeping separate accounts by the charity and unknowingly using charity land for its own council purposes.”  

More importantly, those issues include “disposing of charity land without managing conflicts of interest that can arise between its role as trustee and statutory authority.”

A Charity Commission press release about Mr Holdsworth’s letter revealed that, in the past three years, the regulator’s casework teams have dealt with 38 separate cases involving local authorities and charitable land.

“Clearly, Ealing Council is one of these commission cases,” said Mr Green.

“Ealing residents attended a charity tribunal in May 2022.

“We objected to a ’scheme’ proposed by the council and the Commission, which would have destroyed part of the Victoria Hall and severely restricted community use of it.”