The charity chaired by new Charity Commission chair William Shawcross failed to submit its annual update to the regulator within the recommended ten-month period for four out of the last five years, the Commission’s website shows.

In fact, the charity only brought its filing up-to-date five days before Shawcross was announced as preferred candidate for the Commission job.

As a charity with less than £10,000 income a year, Response was not required to provide the regulator with accounts or a Trustees’ Annual Return, but it was required to submit an annual update confirming changes to the charity’s details including income and expenditure.

Although there is no statutory deadline for submitting an annual update, the Register nevertheless still shows any charity that hasn’t filed within ten months as having ‘Documents overdue’ until the information is received.

This means that Response’s page on the online Register of Charities would have sported a red border and the words ‘Documents overdue’ for at least the last four years up until 24 August 2012, the date that the 2011 and 2012 updates were filed together.

The Register shows that the update for the year to 31 March 2008 was filed on 8 June 2009, five months ‘late’; while the 2009, 2010, and 2011 updates were all filed at various times this year. This year’s was the first to be submitted within the ten-month period.

Shawcross was announced as preferred candidate for Charity Commission chair on 29 August – five days after Response submitted its annual updates for 2011 and 2012.

Shawcross is shown on the Register as the only trustee of the charity, which has as its objects the relief of poverty of people who suffer as a result of their religious or political beliefs, and the promotion of knowledge of the British constitution and human rights laws.  Shawcross has chaired the charity since it was founded in 1978.

Shawcross: it's a tiny charity

Asked this morning whether the entry had a red border for the last four years, Shawcross told civilsociety.co.uk: “I’m afraid that’s probably true.  Anyway it’s all up-to-date now though.”

He offered no explanation for not filing within the recommended period, other than to say: “It’s just a tiny thing.”

He set Response up with a £10,000 insurance payment that he received after his mother died in an accident.  Over the years, he said, the charity has handled about £100,000.

Although the Register lists Shawcross as the only trustee, he said it has had two other trustees throughout its lifespan – Anthony Smith, the former head of Magdalen College, Oxford, and a French friend of theirs.

He said the charity raised its income from “contributions from people I knew and Tony Smith knew”, and gave out “tiny grants of £500 or even less”, to, for example, refugees who had suffered for their political views or students who needed money to buy books. Asked how applicants knew to apply, he said a lot of applications came from the Leeds Students’ Union, whom he got to know when he set the charity up.

“But obviously I am not going to remain chairman of it now,” he added. “My sister, who’s a doctor working in hospices in Uganda, or my son or both of them, will probably take it on. And someone from the outside as well.

“My sister will probably be able to find new people who would benefit from the charity and its trust.”