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News story
Scottish Secretary responds to Scottish GDP figures for October 2020
Commenting on today’s Scottish GDP figures for October 2020, Scottish Secretary Alister Jack said:
Today’s figures show again the significant challenge we face to recover from the economic shock of the covid pandemic.
The UK Government continues to take unprecedented action to support jobs and business in Scotland. Yesterday, the Chancellor announced a further extension of furlough and business loan schemes, and we continue to support self-employed people and hardest-hit sectors with VAT cuts. The direct support is on top of £9.5 billion in additional funding from the UK Government to the Scottish Government.
As we look ahead to the new year, we will continue investing billions in our Plan for Jobs, supporting City and Region growth deals in Scotland, and driving green recovery and jobs.
The strength of the Union and the support offered by the UK Treasury have never been more important. Together, we will continue to get through these challenging times.
Background:
The UK Government furlough scheme, paying 80 per cent of wages, will run UK-wide until the end of April. The scheme also offers employers flexibility to bring employers back to work part time with the UK Government continuing to pay 80% of salaries for the hours they do not work.
The self-employed support scheme will run till the of March, paying 80% of average profits up to £7,500.
At their peak in the summer the UK Government furlough and self-employed support schemes were supporting more than 930,000 jobs in Scotland. They will continue to provide a vital safety net for businesses and their employees over coming months.
More than 76,000 businesses in Scotland have benefitted from UK Government loan schemes, worth more than £2.9 billion.
The Scottish Government has been allocated an additional £9.5 billion from the UK Government for its COVID-19 response. This is on top of the block grant and in addition to direct UK Government support to people and businesses in Scotland.
The UK Government is investing billions to help people back into work, including through our £2 billion Kickstart scheme to get young people into jobs, expansion of our sector-based work academy programme, and recruitment of thousands of Work Coaches in Jobcentres helping unemployed people of all ages back into work.
At the Budget in March the Chancellor will outline the next phase of our plan to provide certainty and growth in the months ahead.
The UK Government is providing the bulk of covid testing in Scotland including drive through and walk through test centres and providing the Scottish Government with one million lateral flow tests for mass community and student testing.
The UK was the first country in the world to approve Pzifer/BioNTech vaccine with 40 million doses secured by the UK Government for distribution across all parts of the UK.
Published 18 December 2020
The Commission has concluded its inquiry into Christ Apostolic Church World Soul Winning and Evangelistic Ministry (registered charity number 1014992), which also saw the disqualification of the charity’s former Chair, Pastor Paul Obadare, for a period of 10 years.
The inquiry revealed serious regulatory concerns, including failings in the charity’s financial management, and wider misconduct and/or mismanagement.
An inquiry was launched in 2015 when concerns were raised in connection with the repossession of the charity’s land and property and subsequent litigation costs incurred by the trustees.
The trustees of Christ Apostolic obtained a bridging loan for £250,000 purportedly to fund maintenance work for their church building. The former Chair (Mr Obadare) told the inquiry they discovered that solicitors, who were acting on their behalf, received £188,858 of the loan funds and the majority of this was paid to five companies they had not previously heard of. £35,000 of this is believed to have been used to repair the church roof, however, the inquiry found that it was not possible to establish the end use of the remainder of the loan funds that were drawn down.
The inquiry was told that the former trustees failed to carry out background checks on a broker they relied on for financial advice. Two former trustees said they signed the bridging loan agreement, which included the church as collateral, without seeing the terms and conditions. The former trustees defaulted on repayments of the loan and the property was repossessed by the loan company.
A fire destroyed the building and the land was then sold by the loan company. Legal proceedings undertaken by the charity to dispute the repossession had increased their liability with the loan company to more than £1.5 million. The charity then received none of the £1.2 million proceeds from the sale of the land.
The official report is also critical of the trustees’ failure to submit timely serious incident reports to the Charity Commission, notably when the charity’s property was repossessed.
The inquiry concluded that there had been mismanagement and/or misconduct in the administration of the charity by its former trustees and it found that a lack of sound judgement by the former trustees led to them taking inappropriate risks. As a result of his particular role in the failings, the former Chair of trustees has been disqualified from being a charity trustee or from holding senior management positions in charities in England and Wales for a period of 10 years.
Amy Spiller, Head of Investigations at the Charity Commission, said:
The public expects each charity to show that it is doing its bit to uphold trust in charity more generally, and this expectation starts with the Chair and trustees. The former trustees failed in this expectation, allowing a catalogue of serious mistakes and misjudgements to occur. Their mismanagement had a direct and profound impact on the charity resulting in the loss of its largest asset – its property.
Our inquiry found the trustees had not acted in their charity’s best interests or that of its beneficiaries. Their actions and oversights ultimately exposed the charity to undue and avoidable risk. This case should send a clear message to other charities about the need for financial controls, due diligence and correct conduct and the potential impact should these not be in place.
A new board of trustees has been appointed and the Commission has issued them with an action plan to help protect the charity going forward. It is satisfied that the new trustees are now acting in the charity’s best interests and have made significant progress.
News story
The RPC have been re-appointed by the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy as the independent verification body (IVB).
The RPC is pleased to have been re-appointed by the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy as the independent verification body (IVB) for the current parliament (from December 2019). We are pleased to continue our role supporting effective regulatory decision making through independent scrutiny of government impact assessments.
The Government have also set a business impact target (BIT) of zero for the current parliament and have carried forward the BIT exclusions and metric (equivalent annual net direct cost to business – EANDCB) from the previous parliament. The opinions that we have issued since this parliament started made clear that, at the time of issue, neither our appointment as the IVB nor the BIT exclusions or metric had been confirmed. We nevertheless verified the BIT status and estimates of the impacts on business on the assumption that these might be confirmed. Now that this is the case, we are content that the BIT status and EANDCB figures set out in opinions issued between 13 December 2019 and 15 December 2020 should be considered as confirmed and formally verified by the RPC as the IVB for the current parliament.
Published 18 December 2020