Plymouth Brethren Member to Clarify Evidence Given to MPs on Charity Commission Letter

Garth Christie, a member of the Plymouth Brethren from Leeds, has said he will clarify evidence he gave to MPs on the Public Administration Select Committee about the Charity Commission. Christie had read to the committee what he described as a quotation from a letter the commission sent to lawyers acting for the Preston Down Trust, which runs a Brethren meeting hall in Devon. The letter stated that the trust’s application for charitable status had been refused.

The commission has since sent the full text of that letter to the committee. It said the last three sentences that Christie read out were not in the letter. It also said the first sentence, which Christie presented as referring to the Preston Down decision, in fact referred to the Upper Tribunal’s decision in last year’s case concerning fee-charging schools and public benefit.

Christie told Third Sector: “It was clear in my draft that it was two quotes, but I accept it does come over as one. When I submit the revised transcript to the PASC I will make it clear that this was two separate quotes and I will give the source. If there’s any other confusion I will be making it clear – there was no intention at all to mislead.”

A spokeswoman for the select committee said any further information from Christie would be considered by the members and was likely to be published as further written evidence. She said an explanatory footnote could be added to the hearing transcript, but the record itself could not be changed, except to correct errors of spelling or punctuation.

Christie gave the evidence at a session on 30 October. He told the committee: “Could I just read out to you what was included in the refusal letter we got from Kenneth Dibble. This was the letter when our charitable status test case was refused.” He then read a passage that included the sentences the commission has since disputed as coming from that letter, including the statement that “there was no presumption that religion generally, or at any more specific level, is for the public benefit, even in the case of Christianity or the Church of England.”

The commission’s sentences that Christie read were drawn, according to the source, from remarks Dibble made to a hearing of the committee in 2007. Those remarks described the definition of charity drawn from case law as “rather ambiguous and dated,” and said that “religion is accepted as a charitable purpose; it is our job to define it adequately and to define the public benefit to go with it.” Christie’s clarification concerns how those passages were attributed in the earlier evidence, and the source does not say whether the committee will take further action beyond considering his submission (Proverbs 18:17).

Source: Read the original report