An open letter to the Charity Commission

Dear Charity Commission, we are writing to you from Wild Justice, a nearly-six-year old not-for-profit company whose objects are:

• Nature conservation, primarily in UK.
• Advocacy to make UK laws, policies and practices more wildlife-friendly.
• Use of UK legal system to further nature conservation objectives.
• Encourage public participation in nature conservation issues.

We may seek charitable status at some stage in the future and your response may inform that decision.

Now the general election is over, we can look back on this period and assess the performance of environmental charities. As a generalisation, we feel that, as usual during general election periods, and formerly during European elections, and most certainly during the Brexit Referendum, environmental charities are timid and hardly say boo to any geese. We feel, in Wild Justice, that the party in power after parliamentary elections has a major, almost defining, role in determining how the country is run and therefore the environmental outcomes we will face now, and into the future. Climate change, pollution, habitat loss, planning controls, pesticide use, investment in nature recovery, investment in regulatory bodies and a host of other factors are determined by government policies, which are manifestly not the same policies under different political parties. 

So surely our environmental charities should be speaking out at these times – instead they are (as a generalisation) very quiet. They are quiet deliberately not accidentally. There appears to be a landscape of fear amongst our friends in the charity sector that they might say or do the wrong thing. As the regulator of charities in England and Wales the Charity Commission has a role to play in making sure that environmental charities do not silence themselves in a mistaken fear of doing the wrong thing if it is in the interests of their charitable objects that they take a more active role.

We would like to put two examples to you and ask for your response to them.

First, Wild Justice (remember we are not a charity) published a guide to what environmental bodies can and can’t say and do in election periods, Fighting Fearlessly: campaigning for the environment in the 2024 general election, click here.  This guide was produced by ourselves and our lawyers at Leigh Day. Circumstances, bereavement in our very small team and the earlier than expected announcement of a general election, conspired to make the period between publication and the general election very short, shorter than ideal, which limited our ability to make this a talking point. However, we did receive private responses from a variety of trustees and staff working in environmental charities that their organisations did not see things in the way that we, and our lawyers, saw them. Where we were able to push back and suggest that people checked the legal position and the Charity Commission guidelines we never heard from those people again. Therefore, we invite the Charity Commission to assess our report. If it contains errors, then please point them out and we will update the report online. If it is correct then it should be used by environmental charities to inform their actions in future election periods.

Second, Wild Justice (remember we are not a charity) published a series of blog posts which were mostly individual assessments of the environmental aspects of the manifestos of political parties. In all we published just under 50 of these and they can be found through this index – click here. None of these represented Wild Justice’s views – we provided, essentially, a noticeboard for others’ views. We did not stipulate which political parties the authors should cover but we were keen to cover a range of UK-wide and national political parties. Given that the last of the reviewed manifestos were published only a week before election day, and the first major party, the LibDems, published their manifesto only weeks before election day, then this was a difficult task to coordinate and deliver. We had approached potential authors before Christmas but of course neither they nor we had any firm idea of the election date. Some of our intended authors had to back out and we looked to recruit others at short notice. We invited subscribers to our newsletter to have a go themselves and several of these were published. It would be very difficult to provide a balance of equal numbers of pro- and anti- of any particular party’s manifesto because until the manifestos are written one doesn’t know whether they will be good or bad, and most people are quite tight-lipped about for whom they might vote. We don’t think this matters. 

Our question to the Charity Commission is ‘If Wild Justice were a charity, could we have published this collection of opinions without attracting censure from you, the regulator?‘.  The feedback responses of the public to these blog posts were overwhelmingly (almost unanimously) positive – people said that this was a valuable resource and that they had spent far more time thinking about how to vote with the environment in mind than ever before. Some told us they had never read an election manifesto before but now had read several. Our index had (still has) links to the election manifestos and was regularly updated as they appeared and that simple resource was welcomed by many (bizarrely, traditional news outlets rarely  provide links to the party manifestos in their news or opinion pieces).

We await your response with interest.

Wild Justice: Directors; Mark Avery, Chris Packham, Ruth Tingay