Converting from a charitable company to a trust

grayme-m

It seems there is lots of information about incorporating, but I cannot find anything about going the other way.

I am a treasurer of a small (<£10k income pa) charity which is a limited company with three trustees. All we want to do is change to an unincorporated trust and change two trustees (with me being one of the new ones).

Ideally I'd just tell Companies House the company is closing, and let the Charities Commission, the bank, and HMRC know of the name change (losing the 'ltd') and change in legal status.

I'm going to have to go into the bank to convert the account as we won't have a company, hopefully keeping the same bank account number as we exist to collect standing orders from donors (and gift aid from HMRC).

After contacting the Charities Commission, they appear to need me to set up a new charity then transfer the assets over, I'm still waiting on HMRC; does it really need to be this complicated?

Savvy_Sue

I don't know, so I'd strongly recommend getting advice. If you can get some pro bono locally, fantastic (ask through your local volunteer body), or there may be some information on the AFVS website - I don't know if that will help at all.

What I wonder though is why you need to do this? Have you had advice about the advantages? I know that being a ltd company gives the trustees some protection if things go wrong ...

grayme-m

Thanks for the link, I'll take a look.

The reason is to reduce the overheads and red tape. We don't need the protection of a limited company as we are not trading or operating other than to collect funds to transfer to the cause.

It may only be £12 or £13 to submit an annual return, but I do everything I can to reduce costs so everything else goes to the cause. Hence paying for advice would be rather counter productive.