Sheffield Council warned by Charity Commission that it is acting in breach of law

A letter to the council from the Charity Commission warns that the council has been acting in breach of the Charities Act 2011. The council is sole trustee for the charity that owns the city’s biggest park and its charity trustee sub-committee acts on its behalf in decision-making.

A letter to the council said: “The trustee has in effect, been acting in breach of… the Charities Act 2011.”

A meeting of the sub-committee today (July 16) considered how it should respond to the commission’s questioning of its actions in disposing of the park tennis courts to a private operator through granting a 25-year lease and on its current use of the disused Norton Nurseries and future plans.

The Friends of Graves Park raised those issues with the commission, which is now urgently seeking answers. The group is concerned that the council as trustee is not acting in the best interests of the charity and may be breaching its covenants – the rules governing the charity’s use of the land, which was given to the city by Alderman J G Graves to create the park.

The friends group has carried out a long-running battle with the council to enable it to bring more of the nurseries site back into use as parkland. The council currently uses the old nurseries for equipment storage and to store waste collected from many city parks before it is taken for disposal.

Privatisation

The council maintains this means the nursery cannot be returned to parkland for many years and favours using the old glasshouses for food growing.

The friends group argues that allowing a private operator to take over the tennis courts operation amounts to privatisation, which it opposes.

The Charity Commission letter asked for details of decisions made on all three issues, giving the council until Friday (July 19) to respond. It pointed out that the council should have been paying a fee to the charity for any non-park use of the nurseries since 2009, which is how it says the council is breaching charity legislation.

Get a bespoke headline round-up, as well as breaking updates, when you sign up to The Star’s free emails

Ruth Bell, head of parks and countryside, stressed that the payments issue needs to be regularised quickly, with appropriate backdating, so that the charity can benefit from the council’s use of the nurseries.

Coun Fran Belbin said she was satisfied with the response the council plans to make to the Charity Commission about the tennis courts and glasshouses, which she said were considered properly by the sub-committee.

However, the deputy leader of the council said she was concerned about how the response refers to the nurseries being returned to parkland. She said some wording was “a little blunt and cut off”.

Guarantee

Coun Belbin said that the sub-committee needs to look at any alternative sites for storage to allow proper consideration of the friends’ group’s return to parkland request. She said a report must come back to the sub-committee by November.

Coun Belbin also recommended that council officers should look at other city parks that are charitable trusts to ensure there are no similar issues.

Councillors agreed that key members of the sub-committee should work on reconsidering the wording of the letter to the Charity Commission.

Coun Kurtis Crossland said: “There has to be a guarantee that this has the park’s best interests at heart.”