The Bookseller.com

19th July 2008

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Publishers fear charity squeeze

23.01.08 Tom Tivnan

Fresh concerns have been raised about the charitable status of over 100 academic presses, literature organisations and religious publishers and retailers in the wake of stringent new Charity Commission (CC) guidelines. Last week the CC published initial guidelines on its changes to charitable status, the result of a three-month public consultation on the Charities Act 2006. The rules define how charities must show a "public benefit", which should be "identifiable, clear, related to each of the charity’s aims, and not just a by-product". The Act goes into effect in March this year, with charities required to start reporting on the public benefit requirement in March 2009.

Religious charities were previously assumed to be of public benefit, but will now be required to demonstrate it explicitly. One m.d. of a Christian publisher with charitable status said the review was "hanging over [his] head like the sword of Damocles". He added: "If you take their strict definition of public benefit, we are pretty exclusive with books that benefit just Christians. It may change the way we do business."

The act also throws scrutiny on the commercial activities of the larger university presses: tax-exempt Oxford University Press, in year-end results to March 2007, had a turnover of £453m with net profits of £71.1m. But Dave Gillard, OUP group finance director, said OUP had no separate legal status from Oxford University. He added: "As long as the university as a whole continues to meet the requirements of that Act, including the public benefit test, the university, and therefore OUP, will continue to have charitable status."

However, Andrew Malcolm, a former OUP author who has held a long-running campaign against the press's charitable status, said OUP had a "nakedly commercial" publishing programme. He added: "We wouldn't say that a Kentucky Fried Chicken on campus that gave some of its proceeds to the university was non-commercial. It’s harder and harder to see OUP as charity."

Peter Davison, CUP's director of corporate affairs, said he "recognised the justice" of the CC guidelines and was comfortable that CUP met public benefit targets. He added: "We don't publish fiction or books on gardening or cookery. Our list is mainly for the scholarly community."

Jonathan Taylor, chair of the Man Booker Trust, the charity that runs the Booker Prize, believes the trust's focus on eduction, including its programme of working with public libraries, helped it fulfil the requirement. He said: "We benefit the public both by these charitable activities and the prize’s larger mission of promoting the reading and writing of good literature."

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