A Charity Commission inquiry into a Hereford and Worcester-based charity has found a series of failures in the way the charity was run, amounting to misconduct and mismanagement. Three of the trustees have since resigned.

The Jalalabad Association’s objects are to advance Islam in the areas around Hereford and Worcester.

The charity was initially entered into a class inquiry in November 2017, along with several other charities, for failing to submit their financial information, for four years. The Commission issued guidance to the charity on their financial responsibilities and directed them to submit all outstanding information.

The charity failed again to submit the required financial information to the Commission, amounting to 5 consecutive years without accounts and so, in December 2018, a separate inquiry was opened to examine wider concerns at the Jalalabad Association.

Following the opening of the inquiry and engagement with the Commission, the three founder trustees all resigned their posts. The inquiry found there were 3 further trustees, who had never been registered with the Commission, nor did they know they were trustees, despite legally holding this position.

The inquiry found that no one had taken overall responsibility for the administration of the charity, which included their safeguarding and financial arrangements.

Until 2017 the charity had been providing after school education at the mosque, however, the trustees could not show that any safeguarding measures, such as DBS checks, had been carried out or considered. This could have put the charity and its beneficiaries at risk.

In addition, the Commission found:

• three of the former trustees had been in post since the charity was founded, without ever standing for re-election

• the former trustees had not read the constitution and the charity was operating with an insufficient number of trustees.

• apart from bank statements, there was little evidence of the details of the charity’s income or expenditure

• the trustees did not oversee the accounts and as a result they were late from April 2013 to April 2019

• most money was collected in cash, with no formal records kept to account for all of the charity’s income

The charity did not implement guidance provided by the Commission when it was subject to a class inquiry and failed to comply with a legal direction requiring them to submit their accounts in 2017. Failure to comply with a direction is misconduct and mismanagement on the part of all of the charity’s trustees.

On 13 June 2019 the Commission issued an order under section 84(2) of the Act, directing the charity’s executive committee to undertake a series of actions by December 2019. This includes a direction on safeguarding, and the current trustees have already implemented a new policy, which includes the requirement for DBS checks.

Amy Spiller, Head of Investigations Team, said:

Being a charity means something and trustees, when setting up an organisation to do good work, should take their responsibilities towards their charity seriously.

Instead, our inquiry found that the founder trustees of the Jalalabad Association lacked the skills to cope with their responsibilities and the trust people placed in them. This included failing to account for the money donated to them and worryingly they operated an after-school club, without safeguarding arrangements being in place. It’s therefore right that the founder trustees – those most responsible – have resigned.

The action plan we have issued to the current trustees will ensure they are held to account for introducing the significant changes now needed at the Jalalabad Association – including in the area of safeguarding. The current trustees have already made some important changes to their charity and we expect the charity to continue to learn and improve from our engagement.

The Commission requested and obtained a written undertaking from the 3 founder trustees on 12 September 2019 that they will not take on any future trustee roles for this or any other charity for a period of 10 years.

The full report is available on GOV.UK.

Ends

A new independent report highlights the wide-ranging benefits the UK enjoys from the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) programme, which has generated an additional £11 billion of income for the UK’s growing space sector over the past decade.

ARTES is an ESA initiative that supports the research and development of innovative technology for telecommunications. The UK is Europe’s leading investor in the programme and is looking forward to continuing its commitment in November during the ESA Council of Ministers meeting, Space19+ in Seville, Spain.

The report, carried out by Technopolis, reveals the positive impacts the programme has delivered for the UK, including strengthened partnerships between companies, increased visibility and reputation of UK capabilities, and the encouragement of more UK companies to get involved in the space sector.

Every £1 million won in contracts by UK industry has led to £14.4 million in additional income, as well as the creation or safeguarding of 15 high-skilled jobs.

UK Space Agency CEO Graham Turnock said:

The UK is leading the charge across Europe for commercially-focused space programmes which deliver significant value for money and develop our national capabilities.

This report shows the value of the ARTES programme to the UK, which has involved more than 200 organisations across the country and led to the establishment of ESA’s facility in Harwell. We will make ambitious new investments in ESA space programmes later this year as part of the government’s wider ambitions to increase research and development spending and play a leading role in the new space age.

The vast majority of companies which contributed to the report also said the ARTES programme benefitted the UK’s economy as well as end-users of telecommunications technology, both in the UK and abroad.

The benefits to society of the resultant technology are extremely wide-ranging, the report says, and include using satellite data to improve cycle routes, increasing online connectivity in hard-to-reach places and improving the monitoring of people’s health with wearable devices.

Around the world, the systems produced through ARTES also provide back-up communications channels in disasters, allow farmers to track crop growth and impact upon many other areas.

The UK is a founding member of ESA, which is independent of the EU. The European Centre for Space Applications and Telecommunications (ECSAT), which opened in 2009 in Harwell, is ESA’s first UK facility. It focuses on telecommunications and business applications and also supports international teams working on climate change, technology and science.

For more information, you can read the report.

Work starts this week at Narborough Bogs Nature Reserve to test natural ways of managing flood waters.

The Environment Agency have teamed up with Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust, Natural England and Heriot-Watt University to pilot innovative Natural Flood Management (NFM) measures to slow and store water at Narborough Bogs Nature Reserve in Leicestershire.

As part of the works, and in keeping with the regular woodland management on site 10 trees will be felled to create openings in the woodland canopy. The wood will be orientated across the woodland floor in a way that it blocks the flow route of flood water from the River Soar and holds it in the wet woodland area for longer. Wood piles will be used to block up old withy beds that transfer water through the woodland and a wooden bund will be created at the end of an old oxbow lake. All features have been designed to have the maximum ecological benefit and compliment the nature reserve setting.

The project is part of a £15 million national NFM programme which in addition to delivering flood risk and environmental enhancements, aims to contribute to the growing evidence base for NFM.

As these natural flood management techniques are relatively new there will also be a PhD opportunity at Heriot-Watt University to evidence the effectiveness and also to help develop guidance on how larger NFM schemes can be designed and optimised.

Narborough Bogs is one of four sites in the Leicester area where this approach is being piloted. At the other sites ponds are being created to store water and tree planting used to slow overland flows. Each site will be monitored with changes in water levels and ecology closely scrutinised to see how effective the NFM measures are.

Environment Agency Project Manager, Alex McDonald said:

This is a great opportunity to pilot natural flood management and to really understand the multiple benefits it can deliver. We’ve been working closely with our partners to make sure our designs marry with the ethos of the nature reserve and we hope that we will be able to show through our monitoring that we have been able to benefit the ecology of the reserve as well as reducing flood risk downstream.

Leicestershire & Rutland Wildlife Trust Conservation Officer Ben Devine said:

As a result of historic changes in hydrology and pressures from surrounding development such as roads and railway lines, Narborough Bog has dried-up significantly over the years. We are delighted to be working with the Environment Agency and others to improve the watercourse for the benefit of wetland wildlife and local communities downstream.

Natural England Freshwater Advisor Martin Banham said:

Narborough Bog Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) contains some amazing wet woodland and reed-bed. Wild, transient, boggy and rare – wet woodlands are now some of our least common wooded habitats. This project is helping the wet woodlands thrive by absorbing more water, whilst keeping the sensitive flower meadows free of fertile river mud.

Atkins Project Manager Ian Morrissey said:

We’re very excited about this project as it will allow us to apply learning and innovation from previous NFM schemes to deliver multiple benefits that align with the landowner’s needs.

Heriot-Watt Associate Professor in Physical Geography, Dr Ian Pattison said:

Although becoming increasing popular, NFM is still a fairly new approach, and we are pleased to be working with the Environment Agency and its partners on the Soar NFM project, to build up the evidence for the effectiveness of different types of NFM interventions. Furthermore, we hope to develop models which can be used to bring more strategy and design to the approach when applied at the catchment scale.

Good morning, a big thank you to Dean and Policy Exchange for putting together what I am sure will be a fascinating event.

It is a chance to talk about something that is close to all of our hearts and should be close to the forefront of our minds in terms of the security of our country at every level. When we talk about security we often focus on counter-terrorism and the challenges we see that are particularly brought to the forefront when we see tragedies as we have done in Grays last week.

We have to think about what more we can do to be ready for the challenge and pressures of serious and organised crime and how that affects us every single day, particularly in a fast changing environment as the technology is changing and allowing to criminals to attack us in terms of fraud and cyber-crime.

I would argue that we here in the UK have been trailblazing in technological, operational progress when it comes to how we protect our citizens, for a very long time.

From Operation Mincemeat and cracking the enigma code in WW2 to the Global Coalition against Daesh, we in the UK can proudly say we have shown the world that we have a first-class global security capability. That’s something we should be proud of, but we should also be ready to challenge ourselves about what’s next, and how we continue to make sure that we are world leading in protecting our citizens.

We cannot be complacent. I have the honour to every day have the ability to work with our security services to see what they do. I am determined to make it my mission to keep the UK at the forefront of keeping our citizens safe. I am very clear about the amazing work our agencies, like the NCA and all our law enforcement agencies, do in that regard.

And so what does Brexit mean for this? Against all the odds and what many said wasn’t possible, the Prime Minister has gone to Europe and secured a fresh deal, and secured one that managed to pass second reading in the House of Commons. One that delivers on the result of the referendum. One that delivers an opportunity for UK security.

This morning I am going to outline my vision for the future security of the UK. This has 3 key messages that I would like to share: we will be international, we will be on the cutting-edge, and we will be clear that we want to hit criminals where it hurts.

We will be international.

Terrorists and criminals know no boundaries. We had that brought into clear perspective with the tragedy in Grays just last week. Although we are leaving the EU, we are not leaving Europe, and we will continue to work closely with our partners there, focusing our efforts where there is genuine mutual benefit, seeking deeper, more effective relationships.

We will harness the UK’s role as a leader in this area to pursue an ambitious and close security relationship with the EU. Brexit gives us the chance to develop an even stronger and closer global relationship with our partners as well. Brexit creates an opportunity to look beyond our traditional methods and to take a global approach to security.

To do this we need to go further in investing in our international relationships, such as with our partners in 5 Eyes, with Interpol, and with countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan and India, to name but a few. Just this month I laid in Parliament our new data access agreement with the USA, a global first that will allow us to target child exploitation and terrorism online. It will help us ensure that there is no safe place for those that seek to do us harm.

Our approach to organised crime and counter-terrorism is world-class. We will continue to project UK influence, through capacity building work in areas such as Anti-Corruption, and collaborative action with overseas partners to tackle international illicit financial flows, to ensure global prosperity and the protection of UK assets.

We will also collaborate to combat terrorism and organised crime as a global problem. Our counter-terror CONTEST strategy is the basis for the UN’s global doctrine and we will carry on supporting activity to combat terrorist groups of any ideology that threaten our way of life.

We will be cutting-edge, because the threat we face is increasingly sophisticated, and with technological change, fast moving.

Organised crime gangs, paedophiles, terrorists and hostile states all use technology to conduct their crimes and to hide from justice. But we must not let them. We have set up cyber-crime units in each of the 43 police forces in England and Wales and announced 30 million pounds to bolster law enforcement capabilities to tackle child abuse offenders who operate on the dark web.

We mustn’t be afraid to call out changes that are coming that can threaten the safety of people as well. We want technology itself to be part of the solution. We want to work with industry to reduce the availability of terrorist and child abuse content online.

There is just too much ease with which that kind of material can currently go online, and the speed of which we’re able to deal with that is not as good as it can be. We want to work with work with industry to make sure that goes faster and better. To make sure we are clear about the risks of things like the encryption work that Facebook are talking about moving to. The fact that it could mean that we see what is effectively now restricted to the dark web, coming into the open web. That’s not in their interest and its certainly not in any national interest. But that collaboration work pays dividends.

Earlier this month the Metropolitan Police set up an innovative project with Facebook to train algorithms to identify and remove live streaming of terrorist content. We cannot allow the online world to become a safe haven for terrorists or sex offenders.

Vital to this is the continued engagement of companies such as Facebook on issues such as end to end encryption is that fact that we can work together and find a way through, and we must. Things like end to end encryption would be hugely detrimental to the work of our law enforcement, and to the safety and security of our citizens.

Last week I announced our new drone strategy, another global first. Drone technology provides enormous opportunities for leisure and industry. But it also provides new opportunities to criminal organisations and terrorists. Our strategy is about minimising the threat from malicious use of drones and to strike a balance that allows us to ensure we can reap the fullest rewards of incorporating drone technology into society.

To launch this strategy I visited QinetiQ in Farnborough and saw another example of the UK’s technological expertise in the security field. In a way that can be good for our economy and economic opportunities. We’ve got to make sure that we’ve got the regulatory framework right, and get the balance right between economic opportunity and keeping people safe.

And finally, making sure we are unashamedly hitting criminals where it hurts, because toughening up our criminal justice system has to go beyond prison sentences.

These criminal organisations are businesses. They are criminal businesses, but they are businesses, and the finance matters to them. We must stop weapons and drugs from reaching our streets and ensure that criminals cannot become rich from their ill-gotten gains.

In the past couple of months Border Force and NCA investigations have led to 2 record seizures of heroin and firearms being smuggled across our border. We have stopped these from reaching our streets and prevented the horrific crimes that they enable.

And in the last year we have seized 217 million pounds from criminals, using this money to compensate victims and fund further law enforcement. This is an increase of 22% on last year and reflects fantastic work across government to ensure that crime does not pay.

Underpinning all of this is the brilliant work of the National Crime Agency, and I’m delighted that Lynne Owens, Director General of the NCA, is here today. Yesterday I visited the NCA to announce the launch of the Serious and Organised Crime review. This will be an ambitious review to consider how we turbo charge our efforts in this field. I am delighted that Sir Craig Mackey, QPM, has agreed to lead this. His wide experience in the world of law enforcement is the perfect foundation to address these challenges.

The review will build on the Strategy that we published a year ago, looking at the system, and the laws and powers and governance structures that we have in place. To be able to inform us not just how we preserve what we have, but how we are ready to change and meet the challenges of the future. So we continue to have and go further in having a world class law enforcement system.

In particular the review must focus on criminal activity that is on the rise – such as fraud and county lines, as well as important issues such as immigration crime as illustrated by the tragic incident in Essex last week. And we will consider how we position ourselves to close the gaps that give space for such criminal activity to take place. We will draw on good ideas from other countries and suggest how those ideas can be adapted to work in a uniquely UK context.

Craig will propose what long term investments might be needed to carry us into the second half of the 21st century with the right capabilities, skills and structures to leave no space for serious and organised criminals to operate. This will feedback ahead of the Spending Review next year and we will ensure that we have the resources to support innovative solutions.

We are the only party committed to cracking down on crime. Successive Conservative Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries have made that a priority, and we should be proud of that fact. Criminals must not be allowed to enjoy the profits from their offending at the expense of law-abiding citizens. They need to be clear that this is a country that they should be fearful of trying to operate in.

It is our responsibility to keep the UK safe and to strike fear into those that would do us harm at any level. I take the weight of that responsibility very seriously.

We as a government will continue to take it seriously, and we want to make sure that we are ready to deal with those challenges.

To meet them, match them and move beyond them, over the next few years.

Efforts to boost the appeal of the magistracy, to current incumbents and potential applicants, will focus on ensuring that magistrates roles are rewarding and meaningful. In order to attract more new applicants, the Ministry of Justice will work closely with the magistracy to develop a new recruitment strategy that aims to streamline the process and encourage greater diversity.

The move follows a report by the Justice Select Committee recommending a series of measures designed to make working as a magistrate more appealing. 

The government has worked since 2015 to increase recruitment of magistrates. According to a survey carried out by the Judicial Office in 2017, 80% of respondents said they had a strong feeling of satisfaction with their role; 89% said they had a strong personal attachment to the role; and 91% said they would recommend the role to friends or colleagues.

Diversity has also improved. The most recent statistics, published in July 2019, show that 12% of magistrates declared themselves as being from a BAME background – an increase of four percentage points since 2012 – and 56% of magistrates were female – an increase of five percentage points since 2012.

Justice Secretary & Lord Chancellor Rt Hon Robert Buckland QC MP said:

More than 1,000 new magistrates were recruited in 2018 alone but we are aware there is more to be done. That is why we are working closely with the judiciary to ensure an easier and faster recruitment process as well as improving diversity and, importantly, boosting morale.

Magistrates continue to be a central pillar of our world-class justice system, sacrificing their valuable time to give back to their local communities. I would encourage anybody interested in the role to consider applying.

Work will include establishing a Magistrates Recruitment and Attraction Steering Group, jointly headed by the Ministry of Justice and leadership magistrates, to drive this activity – promoting the magistracy and increasing recruitment, with a particular focus on increasing diversity.

Potential candidates will receive better and clearer information on what the role entails, what the application process involves and the vacancies that are available in a particular area. Research will be carried out to understand what recruitment activity has been successful and ensure that good ideas and best practice are shared across the magistracy, including in areas that struggle to attract sufficient candidates.

Work with communications and marketing experts will help to target marketing and recruitment activity more effectively, and there will be more work to promote the benefits to employers. This work will raise the profile of the magistracy with the aim of recruiting more diverse members.

The implications of a change to the retirement age for all judicial office holders, including magistrates, will also be consulted on publicly in due course. A new tool is being developed to plan more effectively for long-term recruitment needs, bringing together data and analysis about magistrates in post, expected resignations and retirement rates.

The government also committed to begin a review of magistrates’ expenses in 2019 and work has now begun.

Who can apply to become a magistrate?

• People over the age of 18 and under 65.

• Applications may be considered for those aged between 65 and 70 but all magistrates must retire at 70.

• People must be aware of social issues, have sound judgement and be of good character (which means they cannot have been convicted of a serious crime or a number of minor offences, have been banned from driving in the last ten years or have been declared bankrupt).

• They must be reliable and mature and be able to listen and communicate with others.

• For further details about eligibility visit www.judiciary.uk/publications/advisory-committees-justices-peace or www.gov.uk/become-magistrate