Friends of the Dales still fail to understand charity law as its Chair continues to stoke hostilities towards rural communities

Watching last night's Friends of the Dales webinar on "Eyes on the Skies", it was hard to escape the conclusion that the charity's Chair of Trustees, Jonathan Riley, has either not read the Charity Commission's guidance on campaigning and political activity, or has read it and decided it doesn't apply to him.

In his opening remarks, Mr Riley assured viewers that what Friends of the Dales is doing is "a legitimate part of campaigning under the Charity Commission rules, and perfectly acceptable for an independent campaigning charity like us to seek changes to legislation and regulation from the government of the day."

The first half of that sentence is correct. The second half misrepresents what CC9 actually says.

The Charity Commission's guidance — Speaking Out: Guidance on Campaigning and Political Activity by Charities (CC9) — is clear that charities can campaign for changes in law and policy. But it sets boundaries that trustees are legally obliged to respect:

• A charity cannot have a political purpose. Political activity must be ancillary to, and a genuinely effective means of furthering, the charity's charitable purposes.

• Trustees must not allow the charity to be used as a vehicle for the personal views of any trustee or staff member.

• Emotive or controversial material is only permissible where it is factually accurate, evidence-based, and balanced.

• Trustees must weigh costs, risks and reputational impact - including the risk that campaigning damages the charity's independence or public trust in the wider sector.

  
  

Mr Riley invoked the Commission's rules as if they were a green light. They are not. They are a set of duties - and on the evidence of the "Eyes on the Skies" campaign, those duties are being treated as decorative.

Friends of the Dales' charitable purposes relate to the conservation, enhancement and enjoyment of the Yorkshire Dales. A campaign to make wildlife crime notifiable, or to introduce sentencing guidelines, could plausibly sit within those purposes if pursued on the basis of accurate, proportionate evidence. That is not what is happening.

The keynote speaker invited to headline the campaign was Dr Ruth Tingay - a campaigner whose explicit objective, as set out repeatedly on her own blog and in the webinar itself, is a ban on driven grouse shooting. Her presentation was not a balanced overview of raptor conservation. It was a forty-minute case for licensing as a stepping stone to prohibition, delivered to a charity audience under the imprimatur of a Yorkshire Dales conservation body.

When Mr Riley described Dr Tingay's blog this week as "brilliant" and praised her for "exposing some of the issues", he was not chairing a balanced discussion. He was endorsing one side of a contested policy debate - one in which the rural communities Friends of the Dales purports to serve overwhelmingly take a different view.

CC9 is explicit: trustees must not allow a charity to become a vehicle for personal views, and emotive campaigning material must be balanced and evidence-based. A webinar built around a single campaigner whose stated end-goal is the abolition of a lawful rural industry does not meet that test.

Stoking hostility, then disclaiming responsibility

The more serious problem is the campaign's effect on the ground.

"Eyes on the Skies" actively encourages members of the public to treat their neighbours - gamekeepers, farmers, estate workers, shoot employees - as suspects to be watched, photographed and reported. The webinar's question-and-answer session moved seamlessly from raptor crime to covert surveillance, to the difficulty of prosecuting "all eleven or twelve employees" on a grouse moor, to insinuations about landowners hiding behind overseas trusts.

Dr Tingay was candid about who she sees as the enemy: the "influential dark forces at the heart of the Scottish Government", the "criminals within" the shooting industry, the gamekeepers "sticking up two fingers to society". Mr Riley closed the session by congratulating her on her "resilience" and lamenting how "aggressive" and "intimidatory" the shooting community had been towards her.

The framing is consistent throughout: rural workers are not neighbours with whom dialogue is possible. They are an organised criminal class to be policed by the watchful eye of the public, and any pushback is reframed as intimidation.

This is not balanced campaigning material. It is a campaign that foreseeably incites suspicion and hostility towards an identifiable rural workforce, many of whom live and work inside the Yorkshire Dales National Park, and many of whom would, until recently, have been considered part of the community Friends of the Dales exists to serve.

CC9 places the duty squarely on trustees. They must satisfy themselves that the campaign is an effective means of furthering charitable purposes, that material is accurate and balanced, that costs and reputational risks have been weighed, and that the charity is not being used as a vehicle for the personal views of those running it.

It is not obvious, from anything Mr Riley said in his opening remarks, that any of those tests has been applied with the rigour CC9 demands. Citing the Charity Commission's rules is not the same as following them.

Friends of the Dales has every right to campaign. It does not have the right to do so in a way that treats the rural community as suspects, dresses up advocacy as education, and waves away the Charity Commission's framework with a single sentence of reassurance.