Vindicated: Kids Company wins landmark legal battle against the Charity Commission

We are delighted to announce that Kids’ Company’s judicial review of the Charity Commission, supported by Good Law Project, has succeeded.

In a landmark decision, Mr Justice Sheldon found that conclusions in the Charity Commission’s inquiry report into the collapse of Kids Company were “irrational” and “unbalanced and one-sided” and he criticised the “extremely unfair” innuendo of the Charity Commission. The report wrongly perpetuated the stigma around Kids Company.

The decision follows an excoriating 2022 judgment of the High Court concluding that allegations of financial mismanagement were unfounded, and a robust rejection by the Metropolitan Police in 2016 of allegations of safeguarding failings by Kids Company which the BBC chose to air.

Questions must now be asked about why the Charity Commission chose to waste huge sums of public money producing and defending a flawed report following the 2022 High Court decision.

Good Law Project is extremely proud to have worked with Kids Company. Before she died, Camila Batmanghelidjh and Jolyon Maugham, founders of their respective organisations, corresponded about the case. Maugham later wrote of what the failure of Kids Company meant:

“We don’t talk much about what kids without parents really need. Somewhere safe to live, yes, but also love. To be cherished, to be told their lives have value, to understand that they matter just as ‘normal’ children do.

And, for a sliver of time, kids in England who learned from bitter experience that their lives were measured only in cost got something different. They learned what it was to be loved. They learned this under the remarkable care of a remarkable woman: Camila Batmanghelidjh and the charity, Kids Company, that she founded…

But, on 7 July 2015, Kids Company was told the Metropolitan Police was investigating allegations of financial mismanagement and sexual impropriety at the charity. Those allegations had been passed to it by a journalist. That night, the BBC went public with the story. The publicity made it impossible for Kids Company to continue.

I had been homeless as a teenager – and a victim of repeated sexual assault – so I know what her work meant to kids like me. I wrote in my memoir of how I had been put back together by a woman, someone like Camila, who saw, in the broken teenager that I was, someone of value, who deserved love.”

It’s important to fight for justice for the children this scandal left high and dry. And we’re proud that we have.