A FEW years ago I was invited to lunch, with a few others, by the people who run the RSPCA. A measure of the unworldliness of the occasion was that it had been arranged on budget day.
As coffee was served, the head of the world’s oldest and largest animal welfare charity rose to speak. The newspapermen present realised the chancellor would soon be on his feet too, so they left. If the lunch was intended to prove that the society’s top brass were worldly and competent managers of an organisation founded by the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, among others, it was a dismal failure.
I couldn’t help remembering that lunch when it was announced last week that the Charity Commission had instructed the RSPCA to hire auditors and conduct an inquiry into its structure and governance. This followed the resignation of two trustees, one of whom, Christopher Laurence, said in his damning resignation letter that membership of the society’s ruling council had become a risk to his reputation as a trustee of several other charities.
The chill wind blowing after the collapse of Kids Company — rather than decades of criticism by MPs and campaigners of its politically motivated, high-handed and money-grubbing behaviour — is what seems to have prompted action by the Charity Commission and its chairman, William Shawcross. Either way, it is high time.
This is the charity whose uniformed inspectors seized and “euthanised” Claude, an elderly cat, in 2013 against its owners’ wishes because its hair was matted and it was thin and in poor physical condition. In 2007 inspectors put down a sacred cow from a Hindu temple, without reference to the vet who was treating it. When inspectors rightly succeeded in convicting two teenagers for throwing a kitten round a bedroom, the society put out the news with a request for donations.
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Responsibility for all this behaviour lies at the top. What concerned the other RSPCA trustee who resigned, Sally Phillips, was the conduct of the officers of the society and the selection group of trustees charged with finding a new chief executive. She criticised as “appalling” the society’s decision to allow a trustee to continue as acting chief executive for two years.
That itself is probably permissible in the right circumstances, but the larger suspicion she raised was that it had taken so long to find a new chief executive because no sensible person capable of running a charity with a £130m- a-year income would submit to being told what to do by RSPCA trustees — many with a strong animal rights agenda.
Any strong candidate would see that the RSPCA needs radical reform. The roles it has taken on in running animal shelters, prosecuting cruelty, developing farm assurance schemes and campaigning against hunting and badger-culling are potentially in conflict with one another. With or without a complaints procedure — which it has only just instigated — no prosecutions brought by such an organisation are going to be perceived as fair. The society has prosecuted hunt followers with staggering vindictiveness, cost and ineffectiveness.
The core problem is that the RSPCA is the only big non- governmental organisation that still mounts private prosecutions. The RSPB and the NSPCC gave it up after the creation of the Crown Prosecution Service in 1985. They work with police and let the CPS decide whether to prosecute, as the RSPCA should. Instead it hangs on to its ability to prosecute as a kind of weapon.
In an effort to address its damaged reputation, the RSPCA says it will no longer prosecute “red coat” hunts (an absurd term, for what if they wear green?), farmers or animal sanctuaries because of its vested interests. That is the wrong choice and shows how confused the organisation has become. No crime against an animal should go unpunished if there is strong evidence one has been committed.
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The way for an animal welfare charity to be perceived as impartial is not to give up pursuing certain classes of crime — or, another loopy RSPCA idea, for its inspectors to become a statutory police force — but for it to hand over its evidence for the CPS to evaluate before a case is brought.
It may be a while yet before light dawns, so mind you brush the cat.
charles.clover@sunday-times.co.uk