At a time of significant change for our Area Meeting structures, the former Clerk of Six Weeks Meeting reflects on a previous period of transition: when Six Weeks Meeting became London Quakers Property Trust.
Six Weeks Meeting (SWM) was registered as a company limited by guarantee in 2009, and the name was changed to London Quakers Property Trust (LQPT) in 2017. The trustees of SWM chose this legal framework because there was no other option at the time; registering it as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation wasn’t possible until 2013. This was also the clear advice of our solicitors, Russell Cooke.
SWM had been set up by George Fox in 1671 and continued for over 300 years with no legal status. Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM), like many old-established religious bodies, had excepted charitable status and had no charity number. Because several religious bodies and charities misused their funds in the 1980s, the government rightly decided that all religious bodies and charities had to be legally established, registered, and under the eye of the Charity Commission, so BYM itself, all our Area Meetings, and SWM, had to regularise their status. Setting up LQPT took years of work from trustees and staff – days in the Library checking all the historic deeds of every meeting house, many many meetings with solicitors, letters and phone calls to and from the Charity Commission, consultations with AMs, trustee meetings, and hours and hours drafting snd re-drafting minutes so that the new Trust was soundly based. We felt that whatever changes might come to LQPT in the future, this gave it a solid foundation.
If now in 2026, we in London had decided to set up a CIO from scratch, we would have been asking for years of voluntary work and high solicitors fees. The Charity Commission was fairly slow in my time; it now has more work and fewer staff, so the process would be even slower. It will be for QiL and QiL trustees to discern whether changing the legal status to become a CIO is worth the effort at some time in the future, recognising that it will be a long-drawn-out process.
Submitted by a Former Clerk to Six Weeks Meeting