The daughter of Captain Sir Tom Moore was paid thousands of pounds for a personal appearance to hand over an award to a youth club in South Bristol, while she was the chief executive of the foundation set up in her father’s name, kept the money and the charity received only a fraction of the amount.
The visit to Ashton Vale Club for Young People, which happened in January 2022, forms a key part of a report published today by the Charities Commission following a lengthy statutory inquiry into the Captain Sir Tom Moore Foundation and Captain Tom’s daughter Hannah Ingram-Moore and the family, which has concluded that the family made around £1 million in total from their association with the charity set up after his efforts to raise tens of millions for NHS charities at the start of the Covid pandemic.
Then 99, Captain Tom did a daily sponsored walk around his garden to raise money for the NHS, and as the Covid pandemic lockdown continued, donations flooded in. Tens of millions were raised through a fundraising page and all of that money went directly to NHS charities, and there is no suggestion of impropriety connected with that money.
But after Captain Tom’s fundraising exploits went viral, a separate foundation was set up by his family to continue his work and, after he died aged 100, to continue his legacy. It is this foundation charity that has been the subject of the Charities Commission investigation.
Mrs Ingram-Moore acknowledged she was paid £18,000 for several appearances to hand over awards, including the presentation to the Ashton Vale Club for Young People in January 2022, while the foundation received only £2,000. The club itself received £5,000 of tech equipment from Virgin Media, after it was named as the third recipient nationally of an award called the ‘Virgin Media O2 Captain Tom Foundation Connector Award’.
The Charities Commission inquiry report highlighted the visits and the money Mrs Ingram-Moore received, as one of several ‘failings’, which also included making a fortune from sales of a book by Captain Tom, including his name in an application for a spa to be built at their home, and other matters.
The commission’s report found a “repeated pattern of behaviour” which saw the couple make private gains and which the watchdog said will have left the public feeling “misled”. The commission has called on the Ingram-Moores to make a “suitable donation” – declining to say how much – from the book advance deal, to “honour the commitment that Captain Tom, in his own words in his first book, stated in the foreword about the money benefiting the foundation set up in his name”.
The pair were asked by the commission on two occasions in 2022 to “rectify matters by making a donation to the charity” but declined both times. A spokesperson for the foundation said they are “pleased with the Charity Commission’s unequivocal findings regarding the Ingram-Moores’ misconduct”.
They added: “We join the Charity Commission in imploring the Ingram-Moores to rectify matters by returning the funds due to the Foundation, so that they can be donated to well-deserving charities as intended by the late Captain Sir Tom Moore. We hope they do so immediately and without the need for further action”.
The foundation declined to comment when asked how much should be returned. The Ingram-Moores have already been banned from being charity trustees, but a 30-page report published on Thursday, after a two-year inquiry, set out their failings in detail. These include:
- “Disingenuous” statements from Mrs Ingram-Moore about not being offered a six-figure sum to become the charity’s chief executive, when she had in fact set out expectations for a £150,000 remuneration package before taking on the role.
- A misleading implication that donations from book sales would be made to the foundation. An advance of almost £1.5 million was paid to Club Nook, a company of which the Ingram-Moores are directors, for a three-book deal and none of that has gone to the foundation, the watchdog said.
- A claim by Mrs Ingram-Moore that an appearance to make the Virgin Media awards – including the one in Ashton Vale – for which she was paid £18,000 was undertaken in a personal capacity. The commission disagreed, saying there was no evidence to support this, and the charity received just £2,000, separately to her fee.
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Use of the foundation’s name in an initial planning application for a spa pool block at their home, something the couple said had been an error while they were both “busy undertaking ‘global media work’”. The block was demolished earlier this year, after the family lost an appeal against Central Bedfordshire Council’s order for it to be torn down.
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Confusion over handling of intellectual property rights, which the commission said were owned by the family but offered to the foundation to use without appropriate agreements in place, leading to possible financial losses to the charity.
Ms Ingram-Moore has acknowledged she was paid a total of £18,000 by Virgin Media for being a judge for the award prize project, and for making a small number of appearances, including the one to Ashton Vale, while she was the interim chief executive of the Captain Sir Tom Moore Foundation, while the foundation itself received £2,000.
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The appearance in January 2022 came as part of a link up with Virgin Media and O2. Those two businesses ran an award programme which gave grants to community groups and organisations and, from 2021, the awards were called ‘The Virgin Media O2 Captain Tom Foundation Connector Award’, with Virgin O2 saying the award scheme was ‘inspired’ by the late Sir Captain Tom. Ashton Vale Club for Young People was just the third winner of that award, and was given £5,000 worth of tech equipment, after it was decided the club’s work with young people during the pandemic was worthy of recognition.
At the time, Captain Sir Tom’s daughter Hannah was a judge for the award scheme and said it was ‘an honour’ to come to South Bristol to present the award, which took the form of a plaque as well as the equipment like iPads that the youth club said would make the young people in Ashton Vale better connected.
Virgin and O2’s publicity for the award included photos and video of a visit to Ashton Vale Club for Young People that Hannah Ingram-Moore made. At the time, she was quoted as saying: “It is an honour to be announcing the third winner of the Virgin Media O2 Captain Tom Foundation Connector Award.
“Ashton Vale Club for Young People is so deserving of this award as they proved to be a vital lifeline during the pandemic. At such a distressing time for many, they ensured a community remained as one. We can’t wait to see what this vital injection of gigabit broadband and tech prizes can do for future projects,” she added.
The visit was one of the topics covered when Hannah Ingram-Moore and her husband were grilled by Piers Morgan, and she denied wrongdoing, but said it was a mix-up.
“They were the Captain Tom Awards. I worked with Virgin Media to ensure the charity got some money and recognition, because I knew that they would get huge recognition through social media, and hopefully real engagement with the charity, for seeing how the charity was becoming involved through the awards.
“I think that it’s all very easy to look back and think I should have made different decisions, but I hadn’t planned on being the CEO, and I was only ever there for three months at a time, so I didn’t know if I would have employment past those three months, and I’m not in a position where I can not work, so for me, when we were planning all those dates, they may well have fallen in a period of time when I wasn’t the CEO, but that’s how it landed. And I absolutely ensured that the charity got a donation.
“The better thing to have done was to push those awards to outside that period of time, because I was only ever going to be there for nine months, so I should’ve just pushed them forward or brought them in advance.
“The reality is that I have to work for a living, and that relationship with them was an ongoing relationship. Absolutely in hindsight the two things should have been separated, but that’s not how it landed. It was done with love and with trying to ensure that the community benefited, and the Captain Tom Foundation benefited, and yes I got paid,” she added.
A Virgin Media spokesperson said: “We worked directly with the late Sir Captain Tom to recognise community groups and charities that went above and beyond during the Covid-19 pandemic. When payment was made, we were not aware of any concerns about Ms Ingram-Moore’s family companies or the Captain Tom Foundation that have since come to light after our campaign and relationship with Captain Tom finished.”
The Charity Commission opened a case into the foundation in March 2021, escalating it to become a statutory inquiry in June 2022, amid concerns about the charity’s management and independence from Sir Tom’s family. In July, the Ingram-Moores released a statement saying they had been banned from being charity trustees, describing the commission’s investigation as a “harrowing and debilitating ordeal” and a “relentless pursuit”.
In an interview with the PA news agency, David Holdsworth, commission chief executive, insisted the inquiry has been fair and balanced, saying: “We are relentless as a regulator and, yes, we will follow wrongdoing where where we find it in the sector.” The disqualification orders against both – meaning Mrs Ingram-Moore cannot be a trustee or hold a senior management role in any charity in England and Wales for 10 years, nor Mr Ingram-Moore for eight years – were issued in May and came into effect on June 25.
Mr Holdsworth said disqualification is rare, with only 140 people disqualified out of around 900,000 trustees since 2019. “The fact we’ve disqualified Hannah and Colin Ingram-Moore shows the serious nature of the issues we found,” he said. Asked to put a figure on how much the Ingram-Moores had made from their association with the charity, he declined to give a total but said the public “can draw their own conclusions” from the details in the report.
He told the Press Association: “As the report sets out, there was a book deal agreed for £1.4 million which the Ingram-Moores benefited from. There was the payment of a fee for an award ceremony for £18,000 which Mrs Ingram Moore received directly, not the charity. And so I think if you read the report, the public can draw their own conclusions about the total amount of private benefit the Ingram-Moores have achieved through their association with the charity.”