This week, Helen Earner, Director of Regulatory Services at the Charity Commission, accused journalists like me of spreading “online misinformation” by accurately reporting on the activities of the charity City of Sanctuary UK.
To recap, in late 2025 I covered the fact that the charity had been encouraging children to make Valentine’s cards for asylum seekers. After it received multiple complaints from MPs and others worried about the scheme, the Charity Commission launched a compliance case into City of Sanctuary’s activities – ultimately concluding that there was nothing to see here.
As a statement by the regulator put it, these Valentine’s Day cards were merely “heart-shaped general messages of welcome to refugees” (as if that’s any better) to be displayed in schools and at a “separate charity supporting refugees for display in its premises”. In reality, City of Sanctuary’s literature shows the charity suggesting that “cards” could be passed on to “people seeking sanctuary” (the trendy new term for asylum seeker/ immigrant), thus proving that mine and others’ claim that children were being encouraged to send Valentine’s cards to asylum seekers was entirely correct.
Not only did the Charity Commission fail to address people’s concerns about the charity – acting as if the only claim to address was whether children were writing “cards to individual adult asylum seekers or refugees” – but it tried to make journalists’ reporting look sinister and dangerous. In Helen Earner’s statement about the compliance case, she said “concerns about the charity’s work were fuelled by online misinformation,
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Earner is a classic public sector example of failing upwards and in the process becoming a ‘nice little Earner’ herself. Scrap the whole thing and reinstate a body who will examine charitable status forensically.
Not one penny of our taxes should go to charity.
City of Sanctuary Means Mass Immigration
I wonder what her salary, bonus, pension and benefits package looks like. Eye watering I expect.
Ah. A nice little earner.
£105,000 according to website
Sanctuary for Who ? Not The indigenous ! On & on it goes – relentless bullsh1t rhetoric !
Helen Earner … the Head of Asylum Performance and Improvement in 2009
The job title is an interesting way of framing her job. It looks like that, essentially, she was a government agent charged with furthering the invasion of our country, and the destruction of our people.
Also, isn’t having our children send “Valentines cards” to the invaders a method of hinting to said invaders that our children are sexually available to them?
Absolutely. It’s horrific.
Well done to Charlotte Gill for exposing this!
The Charity Commission, yet another organisation that should be defunded and disbanded. If that happened I doubt that most people would notice.
Charities should not be the recipients of government (taxpayer) largesse, they should have to raise their own income.
Abolish charitable status. Another thing that the left have screwed up.
I used to run a charity. It was the local amateur dramatic society. The status of ‘charity’ has been damaged by some of the biggest charities moving away from providing something – we provided drama productions – to just campaigning which requires a lot less effort. They also started paying bigger and bigger salaries. Charities should not be political and the problem with refugees – or more correctly migrants – is that this is a highly political issue.
Almost every major charity I can think of has become political. We give to our local Air Ambulance (or more specifically we do their lottery) – they seem fairly sound.
They haven’t screwed anything up – they knew exactly what they were doing – politicise the sector to further their agenda.
Indeed – I guess I meant that there are genuine charities that actually help people which are not political, but who may ultimately pay the price for the sector being taken over by people with an agenda
Charity commission? More like yet another act of vandalism….
We need to know now how Reform UK intends to defund and depoliticise the charitable industrial sector.