Captain Sir Tom Moore’s daughter has defended setting up the charity named after the fundraising hero and said she would never hurt his legacy.
It comes after the publication of the first annual accounts of the Captain Tom Foundation, which showed the charity incurred £240,000 in costs and gave £160,000 to good causes.
The Charity Commission is reviewing the set-up and governance arrangements of the organisation.
Sir Tom raised £38.9 million for the NHS, including Gift Aid, by walking 100 laps of his garden before his 100th birthday at the height of the first national Covid-19 lockdown in April 2020.
His daughter Hannah Ingram-Moore said that the full amount, £38.9 million, went to NHS Charities Together.
She said the Captain Tom Foundation was separate to this.
Sir Tom died in February 2021 after contracting coronavirus, and the first annual accounts of the charity were published last month.
Ms Ingram-Moore, speaking to ITV’s This Morning, denied reports that the Captain Tom Foundation had at one stage planned to appoint her as chief executive on a salary of £150,000.
I think we’ve been incredibly naive but I don’t think that that means we’re bad. I think that we’re wholesome, good people and we run businesses we understand
“The £150,000, it’s absolutely not true,” she said.
“What the trustees did was ask for a benchmarking, ‘if we were to employ a CEO what’s the highest, what’s the lowest’, the highest happened to be £150,000, the lowest was about £60,000, depending on the charity, so it’s simply not true.”
Addressing reports that the charity paid more than £50,000 to companies run by her and her husband, she said they had loaned money from her business to the charity and it was reimbursed.
“We published our first annual accounts and they are independently audited and in that first year of the charity, my business loaned the foundation some money because we didn’t want to eat into the first donation we had – which was £100,000 from a corporate donator,” she said.
“And that’s all we had, and we didn’t want to take that money for costs, so we loaned it on the basis that we were lending money from my business that was also suffering during the pandemic, so we need to have it reimbursed.
“So, very straightforward – when the charity had a bit more money, we were reimbursed those costs and that landed us a headline, that I had essentially paid myself £50,000 into my own business, which was absolutely not the case.”
My whole life I’ve wanted to be held accountable, that’s what my father taught me - stand up, be counted and be accountable
She continued: “I think we’ve been incredibly naive but I don’t think that that means we’re bad.
“I think that we’re wholesome, good people and we run businesses we understand.
“But I think we stepped into this for love, for humanity, for allowing as many as people as possible access to his legacy.
“We never thought of the darkness – it never, never crossed our minds.”
She described accusations that she was “milking her father’s legacy” as “devastating”.
“My whole life I’ve wanted to be held accountable, that’s what my father taught me – stand up, be counted and be accountable,” she said.
I am guarding my father’s legacy, we would never hurt it
“We’ve never shied away from regulation.
“Hold me accountable, hold my feet to the flame.
“I am guarding my father’s legacy, we would never hurt it.
“But I would never be able to sit on here and tell you something that’s not true.”
She said that her 13-year-old daughter said to her “mum, why do people hate you, after all that you’ve done?” and that the teenager “doesn’t understand”.
“I recognise we can’t possibly make everybody happy,” Ms Ingram-Moore said.
Our engagement with the trustees of the Captain Tom Foundation on its set-up and governance arrangements continues
“We would love to think that we could but even my father got hated, remember.
“People were even trolling my father, we just never told him.
“We recognise this beacon of hope to the world can attract negativity.
“This has just been a shocking amount of negativity that’s been really honed directly at me personally but this is not about me and actually you know what, it wasn’t about the money, it was about humanity.”
The first Captain Tom Day, due to be held in June, has been postponed.
A Charity Commission spokesperson said: “Our engagement with the trustees of the Captain Tom Foundation on its set-up and governance arrangements continues.
“We cannot comment further at this time.”
