March 4, 2008 - By Simon Bennett

Burnley Labour Party is facing growing demands that it repay the estimated £100,000, plus compound interest, it has allegedly claimed in rates relief on its Burnley headquarters for the last 20 years.

Back in 1990 local Labour Party chiefs applied to Labour controlled Burnley council for charitable status – claiming a 75% rates reduction on their town centre Victoria Street offices.

Political opponents, quite rightly, explain that the Labour Party should never have qualified as a charity and are, reasonably enough, demanding that the rates relief, which has now been withdrawn by the council, is repaid in full.

Labour’s Burnley MP, Kitty Ussher, who is now, according to the media, the lead tenant in the building, said she was unaware of the arrangement. But she has pledged to repay the relief the premises have incurred since she entered Parliament in 2005 but, as far as we are aware, has said nothing about the fifteen year period prior to 2005.

The relief row was triggered after Liberal Democrat cllr Darren Reynolds raised the issue at a meeting of Burnley full council. At first it was believed that the rates relief had been offered for eight or nine years but it later emerged that it had been in place since 1990.

It is estimated that the total saved by the Labour Party, going back to when they were first granted charity status by the then Labour controlled council, is in the region of £100,000.

Lib-Dem Council leader Coun Gordon Birtwistle said: “They should never have claimed this relief in the first place and I hope that they will repay the money. Effectively the taxpayers of Burnley have been subsidising the Labour Party so I hope they will accept their error and find the money that they have claimed. There is no way that they have ever been a charitable trust.”

The rates relief scandal emerged when Liberal Democrats tried to make a similar application on their new political offices – but were turned down!

An inquiry was made by Burnley Lib Dems to the council about their base in Rosegrove but the party was told that it did not qualify.

Cllr. Sharon Wilkinson, British National Party leader in Burnley, added: “I don’t know how they have got away with it for so long. I think that they should pay this money back because they have effectively got it under false pretences. They are making all these statements about council tax rises and the budget and they have been doing this all the time. That office of theirs is a business and it is open every day – can you imagine what would happen if the BNP did this – they would have us locked up.”

In the opinion of your news team, this is a matter that should be the subject of a formal complaint to Burnley police. Quite apart from paying these outstanding monies in full, together with accrued interest, the public need to be reassured, through a police investigation,that there was no collusion between the Labour Party and the Labour controlled Council at the time that the Labour Party’s “charitable status” was approved!

As an aside perhaps Burnley Labour Party could tell us what their registered charity number is – as we are having difficulty in locating their charity on the website of the Charity Commission. The Charity Commission database came into being in 1991 and comprised all the charities then operating as the following extract from their wensite explains:

“This gives the date the charity was registered with the Charity Commission. If the charity has been removed from the Register it will also include details of when this happened. When the Register was first computerised in 1991, the many thousands of charities that existed prior to 1960 were given a registration date of 1 January 1961. Most of these entries have now been updated to show the true date but a few still remain.”