Press Release

Statement in response to Westminster Council claims over 'chugger contract'

August 19 2009

Contrary to the claims of councillor Daniel Astaire that Westminster City Council is about to bring out a "new contact" controlling the use of street fundraisers, the PFRA wishes to clarify that this is not the case.

The PFRA and Westminster City Council have been in dialogue about formalising our existing relationship with Westminster into a 'site management agreement' (SMA) – similar to those we have with a number of other London boroughs, such as Hillingdon, Sutton and Bromley.

We have run an informal site management agreement with Westminster Council for the past year. This was established under Cllr Astaire's predecessor Audrey Lewis. As with our formal SMAs, this sets conditions, such as limiting the number of fundraisers and specifying the number of days they can attend. Adherence to the informal SMA has been enforced by PFRA to the apparent satisfaction of Westminster's licensing officer and Cllr Lewis and there were no issues or problems reported to us while Cllr Lewis was in office.

As no details of the formal SMA have yet been mutually agreed and no implementation date has been set, Cllr Astaire is premature in announcing that the SMA is about to be brought into force and what conditions it will place on charities fundraising in Westminster. For the immediate future, no charity or fundraising organisation that exceeds the 'conditions' reported in the story will face expulsion from the PFRA nor any other kind of disciplinary measure, provided they adhere to the terms of the informal SMA.

PFRA also has an informal private site agreement with Shaftesbury Estates, the owner of Carnaby Street, which has functioned extremely well since November 2004.

In response to the unsupported claims of "intimidation" by fundraisers, we have asked Westminster Council for details of complaints they have received about charity fundraisers but the council has so far not been able to share whatever details they might hold.

The PFRA itself has received no complaints about the behaviour of street fundraisers in Westminster while during 2008, there were just 379 complaints about UK-wide street fundraising logged by the Fundraising Standards Board (FRSB), out of a total of 26,379 complaints about all types of fundraising.