Tardy Filing at the Trust…

Dartington Hall Trust has delayed further scrutiny of its financial position after announcing it will miss the legal deadline for filing its latest accounts by up to six weeks.

The state of Dartington’s finances has attracted attention after the trust announced in the summer of last year it was close to insolvency, despite its trustees and auditor having been relatively upbeat about its financial health just months earlier.

The 92-year-old charity runs the sprawling Dartington estate near Totnes and is pioneer in novel thinking in a range of arts activities, sustainability and education. In recent years it has struggled financially, suffering a series of losses and being forced to sell off land to stay afloat.

Turned a corner ?

Having introduced last year crisis measures including the loss of some 160 jobs, Dartington now says it has turned the corner and is on course to break even by the end of the year.

Under government rules, the trust should have sent its annual report and accounts for the year ending August 31 2023 to the Charity Commission by the end of June.  Acording to the normal schedule, the document would have appeared on the commission’s website soon afterwards.

In explaining why the document has yet to be published, the trust said it was planning to file the report “in the next four to six weeks” but gave no reason for missing the deadline.

The commission confirmed that Dartington had been in touch about the delay. While pointing out that providing the accounts on time is a legal requirement, the commission is unlikely to take any action over the late filing.

Warnings

Persistent tardiness on this point can however sometimes lead to a public warning for the offending organisation. In 2021, Dartington was two months late in filing its 2019/20 accounts, but without receiving any apparent sanction. In the 1990s, the trust was subject to a long inquiry by the commission into concerns over conflicts of interest in its board of trustees.

The new accounts – when they become public – may provide new insights into the circumstances behind the trust deciding last year it was in deep financial difficulty, even though the accounts for 2021/22 had provided few hints of any imminent implosion. The 2021/22 report was signed off by the trustees at the end of January 2023 and published in May of that year.

In the 2021/22 document, trustees acknowledged the charity faced financial challenges but said that due to a “planned approach” to cost control and organising new activities, they had a “reasonable expectation that the trust has adequate resources to continue in operational existence for the foreseeable future”.

The charity’s auditor – the Plymouth office of accountancy firm Bishop Fleming – said in the same document it had failed to identify any “material uncertainties” that would stop the organisation functioning as a going concern “for a period of at least 12 months” from early 2023.

Painful decisions

Yet in June of that year, Lord David Triesman, who had taken over as Dartington’s new chair three months earlier, sounded the first warnings of “painful decisions” needed to prevent financial meltdown. Robert Fedder, interim chief executive, has said that around that time the trust was “very close to a cliff edge” with a severe risk of bankruptcy.

In a recent update in the form of an “open letter”, Triesman and Fedder painted an upbeat picture of the trust’s current position, saying its “turnround team” was making “good progress” in pushing through new plans to achieve “financial stability” and a “sustainable future”, helped in some cases by partnerships with external organisations.

In moves connected to the financial difficulties, the trust was hit in October last year by the sudden resignation of three of its trustees, about the time when it was deciding on a new set of plans for Dartington’s long running summer school and music festival.