Announced today, the Charity Commission (the organisation that regulates charities in England and Wales) has changed its guidance on controversial speakers and freedom of speech for UK charities, and therefore Students' Unions. This has come after criticism of their previous risk averse advice which was being used to provide reasons for Universities and Students' Union to ban lawful and relevant meetings of societies as it seemed to break charity law. Aarti Thakor, Director of Legal Services at the Charity Commission wrote today in WonkHE  "...we have recognised that our guidance in this area has not always been read in the manner in which it was intended and has not done enough to highlight the centrality of freedom of speech to charities with purposes to advance education. We acknowledge that this may have caused difficulty in decision-making for some trustees".  

The Charity Commission advice has changed after criticism from the UK Parliment's Joint Committee On Human Rights (JCHR) who recently investigated claims of freedom of speech being threatened on campus. Whilst initially drawn to the question after news reports regarding safe space and no platform policies being a threat to free speech on campus, their eventual report found that actually the guidance of the Charity Commission around avoiding risk on campus was actually more likely to be a threat to free speech than the actions of student activists. Previous Charity Commission guidance put a heavy duty on Trustees of charities to rish assess all meetings they hosted, and to make sure that the meeting were directly relevant to the charity. 

SOAS Students' Union submitted a significant amount of evidence to the JCHR regarding issues it had been having with the Charity Commission, who had sent a number of letters asking why the Union had allowed various events by the Islamic Society and Palestine Society to go ahead. The SU argued that these meetings were properly risk assessed, but also were part of our educational charitable aim to have talks and debates on topics which our student groups wanted to put on. The SU has not banned a meeting in twenty years, and felt that our reputation is built on having a variety of politcal voices heard. The issue was brought up by the Chair of the JCHR Harriet Harman MP who felt that the correspondance seemed to be trying to shut down these societies ability to meet, and that the Charity Commission guidance on political campaigning would have ruled out many of their own significant political activites at University such as campaigning for the end of Apartheid.

The SU welcomes the new guidance as it seems to soften the line and reduce red tape and the burden on union Trustee bodies - nevertheless after having received over six regulatory letters in the last two years, we will be interested to see how the guidance is applied in practice. This guidance still operates in the context of Prevent, which the Union opposes, and so we wait to see how that is effected.

The updated guidance can be read here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/protecting-charities-from-abuse-for-extremist-purposes/chapter-5-protecting-charities-from-abuse-for-extremist-purposes#charity-events-and-speakers