Fresh concerns have been raised about the charitable status of more than 100 academic presses, literature organisations and religious publishers and retailers in the wake of stringent new Charity Commission (CC) guidelines.
Last week the CC published initial guidelines on its changes to charitable status, the result of a three-month public consultation on the Charities Act 2006. The rules define how charities must show a "public benefit", which should be a "identifiable, clear, related to each of the charity's aims, and not just a by-product". The act comes into effect in March this year, with charities required to start reporting on the public benefit requirement in March 2009.
Religious charities were previously assumed to be of inherent public benefit, but will now be required to demonstrate it explicitly. One m.d. of a Christian publisher with charitable status said the review was "hanging over [his] head like the Sword of Damocles". He added: "If you take their strict definition of public benefit, we are pretty exclusive with books that benefit just Christians. It may change the way we do business."
The act also throws scrutiny on the commercial activities of the larger university presses: tax-exempt Oxford University Press, in year-end results to March 2007, had a turnover of £453 million with net profits of £71.1 million. But Dave Gillard, OUP group finance director, said OUP had no separate legal status from Oxford University. He added: "As long as the university as a whole continues to meet the requirements of that Act, including the public benefit test, the university, and therefore OUP, will continue to have charitable status."
However, Andrew Malcolm, a former OUP author who has held a long-running campaign against the press' charitable status, said OUP had a "nakedly commercial" publishing programme. He added: "We wouldn't say that a Kentucky Fried Chicken on campus that gave some of its proceeds to the university was non-commercial. It's harder and harder to see OUP as a charity."
Peter Davison, CUP's director of corporate affairs, said he "recognised the justice" of the CC guidelinesand was comfortable that CUP meets public benefit targets. He added: "We don't publish fiction or books on gardening or cookery. Our list is a mainly for the scholarly community."
Jonathan Taylor, chair of the Man Booker Trust, the charity that runs the Booker Prize, believes the trust's focus on education, including its programme of working with public libraries, fulfils its requirement. He said: "We benefit the public both by these charitable activities and the prize's larger mission of promoting the reading and writing of good literature."
Dear Sir,
In the news article on "charitable" publishers (Charity Squeeze Begins, 25th January), Oxford University officer Dave Gillard states: "As long as the university as a whole continues to meet the requirements of the [Charities] Act, including the public benefit test, the university, and therefore OUP, will continue to have charitable status."
I wonder if he can tell us where this revolutionary new principle that he casually enunciates appears in any of OUP's Charity Law textbooks. In fact, all such a statement does is demonstrate, yet again, how Oxford's errant Press has come to corrupt and compromise its university's (i.e. its law faculty's) academic integrity.
He also asserts that OUP has "no separate legal status from the university", but what has this got to do with anything? A charity can run a tax-liable trading operation if it chooses to do so. Oxford University ran one until 1978; it is called OUP, and in none of the six failed applications for tax-exemption it made (along with CUP) in the 1940s and '50s did it raise this "legal identity" point.
When the two UP wheedlers did finally get their way in the late 1970s, it was on condition, among others, that they plough their profits - all of their profits - back into non-commercial publishing. So, given that I believe both presses have ever since been in breach of these undertakings, with OUP now extravagantly so, it can be argued that they already owe 30 years' back tax anyway, never mind the new "public benefit" test.
All of which leads one to ask not just whether the university presses any longer provide public benefit or deserve tax-exemption, but whether their universities themselves do. For example, are these corporations charging commercial or "charitable" rents to the tens of thousands of tenants of the two ancient universities and their 76 colleges, in and around the two cities and up and down the country, for the use of their agricultural land, forests, docks, shopping centres, office complexes, retail and residential properties, student accommodation and so forth? If they are charging commercial rents, where in this is there any public benefit?
Andrew Malcolm
Akme Publications
Brighton