Captain Sir Tom Moore‘s daughter was not ‘strictly accurate’ when answering questions about her salary in television interviews, a damning report found today.
The charities watchdog accused Hannah Ingram-Moore of making ‘disingenuous’ public statements while on ITV‘s This Morning and Piers Morgan‘s TalkTV show.
Sir Tom rose to fame during the pandemic, raising millions for NHS charities by walking laps of his garden in lockdown before he died in February 2021 aged 100.
But the Charity Commission has now found that the veteran’s family made more than a million pounds through their association with the charity set up in his name.
The report referred to two interviews given by Mrs Ingram-Moore suggesting she had not been offered a six-figure sum to become the Captain Tom Foundation’s chief executive, when she had actually requested a £150,000 remuneration package.
This figure was rejected by the Charity Commission and she ended up receiving the equivalent of £85,000 per annum. Today, the watchdog concluded there had been repeated instances of misconduct by Mrs Ingram-Moore and her husband, Colin.
On the TV interviews, the report said she ‘appears to have not been strictly accurate in her representation of her involvement in the setting of her salary and subsequent application for consent from the Commission regarding her salary as interim CEO’.
When businesswoman Mrs Ingram-Moore appeared on ITV’s This Morning in March 2022, the report stated that she ‘denied ever having been offered a six figure salary (£150,000) to be the charity’s CEO and stated that this was simply not true’.
Hannah Ingram-Moore appeared on ITV’s This Morning in March 2022. The Charity Commission report stated that during the interview she ‘denied ever having been offered a six figure salary (£150,000) to be the charity’s CEO and stated that this was simply not true’
Hannah Ingram-Moore also spoke to Piers Morgan on TalkTV in an interview in November 2023 in which she was ‘asked about the circumstances around her becoming CEO of the charity’
Captain Sir Tom Moore with his daughter Hannah Ingram-Moore at his home in Marston Moretaine, Bedfordshire, in April 2020. The fundraising hero died in February 2021 aged 100
More recently during a televised interview with Piers Morgan on TalkTV which was broadcast on November 30, 2023, the report said Mrs Ingram-Moore was ‘asked about the circumstances around her becoming CEO of the charity’.
It added that she ‘stated that she was never offered a salary of £100,000 but only what was finally agreed by the Commission’.
Mrs Ingram-Moore also said in the interview her family kept £800,000 in profits from three of Captain Sir Tom’s books because it was ‘what he wanted’.
The report later confirmed an advance of almost £1.5million was paid to Club Nook, a company of which the Ingram-Moores are directors, for the three-book deal and none of that has gone to the foundation.
In the TalkTV interview, Mrs Ingram-Moore said her father wanted them to keep the money from the books in Club Nook, and said there was no suggestion anyone buying the books thought they were donating to charity.
Mrs Ingram-Moore also accepted she had been paid £18,000 for attending the Virgin Media O2 Captain Tom Foundation Connector Awards in 2021.
The commission’s report later found that while she was paid £18,000, a separate sum of just £2,000 was paid to the charity.
Reacting to a MailOnline article about the report today, Mr Morgan tweeted: ‘First exposed by @PiersUncensored in that shocking interview with the family – but now revealed to be a lot worse than was imagined/admitted. Shameful.’
As for Mrs Ingram-Moore salary, the report stated that she had provided correspondence to the inquiry which made it ‘clear that there was an assumption that Mrs Ingram-Moore would resign as a trustee and immediately take up the role of CEO even before an application to employ Mrs Ingram-Moore had been submitted to the Commission’.
It added: ‘The tone of the emails seen by the inquiry suggests that Mrs Ingram-Moore initiated the process to secure her appointment as the charity’s paid CEO.’
The inquiry also saw an email from April 2021 from charity trustee Stephen Jones to Mrs Ingram-Moore which ‘updates her as to the benchmarking exercise taking place for the CEO salary’.
The report said; ‘In this email it is clear that Mrs Ingram-Moore had stated to Mr Jones that her salary expectations for the role of CEO were in the region of £150,000 per annum.’
It continued: ‘The benchmarking exercise undertaken by an independent company in April 2021 advises that the salary for the CEO should initially be in the region of £80-90,000 increasing to £110-120,000 depending on the charity’s performance and growth.
‘The initial application to the Commission sets Mrs Ingram-Moore’s salary at £100,000. This application was refused by the Commission.’
In July 2021, the report said Mr Jones wrote to Mrs Ingram-Moore, her husband and trustee Simon DeMaid by email ‘setting out a draft response to the Commission which explained why Mrs Ingram-Moore is the most suitable person to undertake the interim CEO role’.
It added: ‘The proposed salary is set at £85,000 per annum which it is suggested the Commission might be amenable to.’
Concluding its findings relating to her interviews, the report said: ‘Mrs Ingram-Moore confirming in both television interviews that she was not offered a six-figure salary is factually correct as the Commission only authorised an annual salary of £85,000 and no offer was formally made until that authorisation had been provided.
‘However, it is disingenuous, as the evidence demonstrates she was very much involved in the discussions around setting her salary and clearly influenced the initial proposal submitted to the Commission to employ her on a salary of £100,000.’
In the interview with Piers Morgan in November 2023, Mrs Ingram-Moore said her family kept £800,000 in profits from three of her father’s books because it was ‘what he wanted’
The family of Captain Sir Tom Moore were interviewed by Piers Morgan in November 2023
The commission’s report also found a ‘repeated pattern of behaviour’ which saw the couple make private gains and which the watchdog said will have left the public feeling ‘misled’.
The commission has called on the Ingram-Moores to make a ‘suitable donation’ – declining to say how much – from the book advance deal, to ‘honour the commitment that Captain Tom, in his own words in his first book, stated in the foreword about the money benefiting the foundation set up in his name’.
The pair were asked by the commission on two occasions in 2022 to ‘rectify matters by making a donation to the charity’ but declined both times.
A spokesperson for the foundation said they are ‘pleased with the Charity Commission’s unequivocal findings regarding the Ingram-Moores’ misconduct’.
They added: ‘We join the Charity Commission in imploring the Ingram-Moores to rectify matters by returning the funds due to the Foundation, so that they can be donated to well-deserving charities as intended by the late Captain Sir Tom Moore.
‘We hope they do so immediately and without the need for further action’.
The foundation declined to comment when asked how much should be returned.
The Ingram-Moores have already been banned from being charity trustees, but the 30-page report published today, after a two-year inquiry, set out their failings in detail.
These include:
- ‘Disingenuous’ statements from Mrs Ingram-Moore about not being offered a six-figure sum to become the charity’s chief executive, when she had in fact set out expectations for a £150,000 remuneration package before taking on the role.
- A misleading implication that donations from book sales would be made to the foundation. An advance of almost £1.5 million was paid to Club Nook, a company of which the Ingram-Moores are directors, for a three-book deal and none of that has gone to the foundation, the watchdog said.
- A claim by Mrs Ingram-Moore that an appearance at an awards ceremony for which she was paid £18,000 was undertaken in a personal capacity. The commission disagreed, saying there was no evidence to support this, and the charity received just £2,000, separately to her fee.
- Use of the foundation’s name in an initial planning application for a spa pool block at their home, something the couple said had been an error while they were both ‘busy undertaking ‘global media work”. The block was demolished earlier this year, after the family lost an appeal against Central Bedfordshire Council’s order for it to be torn down.
- Confusion over handling of intellectual property rights, which the commission said were owned by the family but offered to the foundation to use without appropriate agreements in place, leading to possible financial losses to the charity.
The Charity Commission opened a case into the foundation in March 2021, escalating it to become a statutory inquiry in June 2022, amid concerns about the charity’s management and independence from Sir Tom’s family.
The watchdog concluded there had been repeated instances of misconduct by the veteran’s daughter, Hannah Ingram-Moore and her husband, Colin (pictured in November 2021)
The home of Mrs Ingram-Moore and her husband in Bedfordshire is pictured next to their unauthorised home spa (right) in their garden, which was demolished after a planning row
The unauthorised spa pool block at the home in Bedfordshire before and after its demolition
In July, the Ingram-Moores released a statement saying they had been banned from being charity trustees, describing the commission’s investigation as a ‘harrowing and debilitating ordeal’ and a ‘relentless pursuit’.
In an interview with the PA news agency, David Holdsworth, commission chief executive, insisted the inquiry has been fair and balanced, saying: ‘We are relentless as a regulator and, yes, we will follow wrongdoing where where we find it in the sector.’
The disqualification orders against both – meaning Mrs Ingram-Moore cannot be a trustee or hold a senior management role in any charity in England and Wales for 10 years, nor Mr Ingram-Moore for eight years – were issued in May and came into effect on June 25.
Mr Holdsworth said disqualification is rare, with only 140 people disqualified out of around 900,000 trustees since 2019.
‘The fact we’ve disqualified Hannah and Colin Ingram-Moore shows the serious nature of the issues we found,’ he said.
Asked to put a figure on how much the Ingram-Moores had made from their association with the charity, he declined to give a total but said the public ‘can draw their own conclusions’ from the details in the report.
He told PA: ‘As the report sets out, there was a book deal agreed for £1.4 million which the Ingram-Moores benefited from. There was the payment of a fee for an award ceremony for £18,000 which Mrs Ingram Moore received directly, not the charity.
‘And so I think if you read the report, the public can draw their own conclusions about the total amount of private benefit the Ingram-Moores have achieved through their association with the charity.’
Captain Sir Thomas Moore is knighted by Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle in July 2010
An aerial view of the home of Hannah Ingram-Moore in Marston Moretaine, Bedfordshire
Mr Holdsworth said the foundation had ‘not lived up to that legacy of others before self, which is central to charity’.
He added: ‘The public, and the law, rightly expect those involved in charities to make an unambiguous distinction between their personal interests and those of the charity and the beneficiaries they are there to serve.
‘This did not happen in the case of The Captain Tom Foundation. We found repeated instances of a blurring of boundaries between private and charitable interests, with Mr and Mrs Ingram-Moore receiving significant personal benefit. Together the failings amount to misconduct and/or mismanagement.’
But the Ingram-Moores said they felt ‘unfairly and unjustly’ treated and accused the commission of ‘selective storytelling’.
In a statement, they said: ‘A credible regulatory body would provide the full truth, rather than misrepresenting, and conflating facts and timelines that align with a predetermined agenda.
‘True accountability demands transparency, not selective storytelling.
‘We remain dedicated to upholding Captain Sir Tom’s legacy and want the public to know, that there has never been any misappropriation of funds or unauthorised payments from the charity’s bank account, by any member of our family.’
They said the inquiry had taken a ‘serious toll on our family’s mental and physical health, unfairly tarnishing our name and affecting our ability to carry on Captain Sir Tom’s legacy’.
Captain Sir Tom Moore at home on the publication day of his autobiography Tomorrow Will Be A Good Day, in September 2020. The commission’s report found the Ingram-Moores issued misleading suggestions that donations from book sales would be paid to the foundation
David Holdsworth, the Charity Commission’s chief executive, insisted the inquiry has been fair and balanced, saying: ‘We will follow wrongdoing where where we find it in the sector’
The Ingram-Moores have also argued it was a ‘breach of privacy’ for the book deal to have been ‘publicly disclosed’ by the Charity Commission.
They went on: ‘Such an action raises serious concerns about privacy protections.
‘If a confidential contract, complete with privacy clauses, can be so casually released, what does this mean for the privacy of others, public figures or otherwise?
‘The publisher paid Captain Sir Tom a fee, it was his and he decided what to do with it.’
The family added that ‘significant fees’ from the book deal were paid to the literary agent, legal and PR professionals, with portions of the money used to support the Captain Tom Foundation.
A lawyer for the family has previously indicated the charity might shut down, and the foundation stopped taking donations in summer 2023.
The commission cannot order the closure of a foundation, the watchdog chief said, adding that such a decision is ‘a matter for the trustees to consider’.
The Ingram-Moore family also said that they ‘never took a penny’ from public donations when Sir Tom raised millions for NHS charities by walking laps of his garden during the coronavirus lockdown.
They said it is ‘deeply painful’ for them to think people might believe otherwise.
The millions raised by the late Sir Tom and donated to NHS Charities Together before the foundation was formed were not part of the commission’s inquiry.