A climate change-sceptic charity is to launch a campaigning arm as a result of ongoing discussions with the Charity Commission over its charitable activities.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation, which was launched by former Conservative chancellor Lord Lawson, is to launch a campaigning arm in September which will conduct campaigns and activities which “do not fall squarely within the educational remit of the charity”.

This follows a complaint made by Bob Ward, head of policy at Lord Stern’s Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at LSE, to the Charity Commission last year. Ward accused the charity of being primarily political, not charitable, and of “continually disseminating inaccurate and misleading information”.

A spokeswoman at the Charity Commission said that it began engaging with the charity after receiving a complaint relating to its statements and published material.

She said: “The key issue for us was whether GWPF was a charity given that its purpose was the furtherance of education and we had questions about whether all of its material could be considered educational (by the meaning in charity law). It would be a secondary question as to whether those activities were political.

“We concluded that some of the activities breached what is expected of an educational charity, namely that the material lacked balance and promoted a particular line of opinion designed to elicit debate.”

The Commission told the Global Warming Policy Foundation that it needed to separate these activities from the charity and pursue them in an “entirely separate” organisation.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the charity said that its new arrangement reflected other organisations with dual structures, such as Amnesty International UK and Greenpeace UK.

It said: “The Global Warming Policy Foundation will continue to advance its charitable objects by commissioning and publishing reports and papers and by organising lectures and debates on key matters relating to climate science and policy.”

The charity’s trustees will establish the new organisation under the name Global Warming Policy Forum.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation was launched by Lord Lawson and Dr Benny Peiser in 2009 with the aim to “advance the public understanding of global warming and of its possible consequences, and also of the measures taken or proposed to be taken in response to it”.