Dear Kevin
All the best with your conversion process – I shall send you some of our documentation which might help including TUPE of staff if you have any
With regard to your questions
We are a Private Registered Provider (“PRP”) with RSH and have two historic improvement grants from Homes England and so are embarking on the following steps:
1. Homes England
As a registered provider you have to contact Homes England to check that you have not had any grants from them in the past. If you have you have to send them a letter asking them to approve the transfer to the CIO (- I will send you the one we are using.) They discovered more grants that we were not aware of. Due to problems this has taken 2 years so far – the main being our slow solicitors plus the fact that we need permission from the Charity Commission to release the permanent endowment of one of the charities under section 105 the other almshouses have been transferred under a vesting declaration whereby The Charity Trustee makes this declaration under section 310 of the Charities Act 2011 (as modified by regulation 61 of the Charitable Incorporated Organisations (General) Regulations 2012 (SI 2012/3012)) to vest all the Property of the Transferors in the Transferee.
2. Regulator of Social Housing
We have registered the CIO with the Regulator of Social Housing – it was an easy process once we explained we were moving to becoming a CIO contact Alison Lamb – Alison.Lamb@rsh.gov.uk who is dealing with our case
We now have 2 registrations with RSH for the old charity and the CIO
However, due to us having received grants from Housing England’s predecessor we cannot dissolve the old charity until we have permission from Homes England to transfer the Almshouses to the CIO (see above). So despite the old charity now being a linked charity to the CIO and so effectively not existing we are waiting on the Charity Commission. Housing England also want the Almshouses to be transferred to the CIO at the land registry
3. Bank Accounts – has anyone managed to get their Bank (CPH bank with Lloyds) to novate the existing bank accounts to the new CIO to save setting up new Mandates, Users, DDs Payment profiles, etc?
Sadly Lloyds Bank will not do this. Once the CIO is constituted then you have to open a new bank account. It took us 7 months to do this with Lloyds as they kept losing the paperwork – we ended up with ÂŁ140 compensation).
We have had to inform all residents etc of the new bank account and its taken us over 2 years to finally close the old account
TUPE – if you have staff then they will need to be TUPE’d across from the old charity to the CIO. If you do have staff its worth thinking about the date you choose to transfer all of the assets and liabilities from the old charity to the CIO
We did this at 11.59 pm on 30 September 2023. The result is that since the CIO has to register as a new entity with HMRC we obtained 2 lots of the Employment Allowance that year -so we gained ÂŁ5000 from becoming a CIO (the figure is now ÂŁ10,500 which will help pay your legal costs)
William Clemmey
chiefofficer@municipal-charities.org.uk