Charity Commission warnings over unvetted event speakers

A pattern the regulator keeps coming back to

Over the past decade, the Charity Commission for England and Wales has repeatedly found itself investigating charities not for financial mismanagement, but for who they allowed to speak at their events. In several recent cases, trustees had no effective process for reviewing a speaker's background before handing them a platform — and the consequences ranged from official warnings to a full statutory inquiry.

The details differ, but the underlying failure is consistent: charities that host talks, sermons, youth camps or public events without a documented process for screening speakers are exposing themselves to significant regulatory and reputational risk.

Islamic Centre of England: from warning to a Section 84 order

The most serious and most current example is the Islamic Centre of England (ICE). According to the Charity Commission, the charity hosted two events in 2020 that eulogised Qasem Soleimani, a sanctioned Iranian military figure. The Commission issued an Official Warning, and a 2021 follow-up review found only partial compliance, prompting an Action Plan that also flagged website content and trustee conflicts of interest.

The Commission opened a statutory inquiry under section 46 of the Charities Act 2011 on 14 November 2022, citing continued failure to comply with the Action Plan. An Interim Manager was appointed in May 2023, and the charity's premises closed temporarily while the inquiry continued.

On 16 May 2025, the Commission went further, issuing a direction under section 84 of the Charities Act requiring trustees to 'provide rigorous oversight of future speakers and online activity' and to ensure 'all religious services, speakers and events further the objects of the charity.' According to reporting by the Jewish Chronicle, this followed continued online material praising Ayatollah Khamenei and events involving speakers described in Iranian state media in terms the Commission considered incompatible with the charity's purposes.

Central Oxford Mosque Society and Mosque and Islamic Centre of Brent

In May and June 2025 the Commission issued Official Warnings to two further charities over speaker and content management. At the Mosque and Islamic Centre of Brent, the Commission reviewed five speeches delivered in November and December 2023 and found four contained content it described as 'inflammatory and divisive,' with two allegedly encouraging support for Hamas, a proscribed organisation, and one discouraging democratic participation. The Commission's warning noted the charity had no effective speaker-management policies in place.

Separately, Central Oxford Mosque Society was warned over social media content posted in October and November 2023, around the 7 October Hamas attack, which the Commission judged 'divisive and inflammatory' and outside the charity's purposes, in the absence of any social media policy.

Both charities were required to adopt and implement speaker-management and social-media policies, which they reportedly did. Stephen Roake, an Assistant Director at the Commission, said: 'Charities are expected to bring people together, not to stoke further division.'

Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh UK: an unscreened camp speaker

An older but instructive case involves Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh UK (HSS UK). ITV's 2015 documentary 'Charities Behaving Badly' filmed a speaker at one of the charity's youth camps, attended by beneficiaries as young as 13, making remarks the Commission described as 'particularly objectionable and anti-Islamic.'

A subsequent Commission inquiry found that trustees had 'failed to follow their own procedures and had not properly screened speakers' — the charity had a screening process on paper, but it was not applied in practice. The inquiry closed without formal sanction after trustees reviewed and strengthened their policies, but the finding illustrates that having a policy is not enough if it is not actually followed for every speaker and every event.

Historical context: Global Aid Trust and Finsbury Park Mosque

The same 2015 ITV documentary prompted an inquiry into Global Aid Trust, after its then acting chief executive was filmed making comments that could be construed as antisemitic. He resigned as chief executive and trustee before the broadcast, and the Commission's inquiry went on to find mismanagement by the trustees, including failures to oversee employees, volunteers and external speakers and to follow the charity's own policies.

Further back, Finsbury Park Mosque's association with Abu Hamza al-Masri in the late 1990s and early 2000s involved Commission action alongside separate police and High Court proceedings, including the suspension of his preaching activity and, eventually, closure and reopening of the mosque under new trustees. Exact dates and mechanisms from this period are less consistently documented in current official Commission records than the more recent cases above, but it remains a widely cited historical example of what can happen when a charity's platform is captured by an individual with extremist associations.

What the Commission's own guidance says

The Commission's compliance toolkit sets out expectations well beyond the cases above. Chapter 5, 'Protecting charities from abuse for extremist purposes,' updated in November 2018 specifically to help charities that host events, advises trustees to have a clear risk-assessment and decision-making policy for inviting speakers, defined criteria for flagging a speaker as a cause for concern, due diligence checks on speakers and partner organisations, and checks against the Home Office list of proscribed organisations and the OFSI list of designated persons and entities. In higher-risk cases, the guidance recommends obtaining and reviewing the substance of a speech in advance, and documenting the reasoning behind speaker decisions, particularly where a speaker is controversial.

What trustees should take from this

Across every documented case, the common thread is not malice but the absence of a working process. Charities that avoided serious sanction were the ones that, once challenged, could show — or quickly put in place — a documented policy for assessing speakers before an event took place. Charities that were warned or investigated typically had either no such policy, or a policy that existed on paper but was not consistently applied.

Trustees planning any public event, sermon, youth activity or speaker series should, at minimum, be able to answer: who checked this speaker's background, against what criteria, and is that decision written down? A structured, documented approach to speaker due diligence — however it is carried out — is what the Commission's own cases and guidance consistently point to as the difference between a well-governed charity and one facing an Official Warning.