Charity reorganisation schemes
There are three types of charity reorganisation scheme.
- A variation of the terms of your charity's constitution (whether or not in relation to its purposes).
- A transfer of your charity's property (after satisfaction of liabilities) to another charity (whether or not involving a change to the purposes of the other charity).
- An amalgamation of your charity with another charity. You can find more information about this on our Amalgamating Your Charity page.
The timescale for reorganisation applications depends on the size of the charity, as charity law gives us the discretion to treat smaller charities in a simpler way according to the following thresholds:
- 'large charity' means a charity with a gross annual income of £250,000 or more
- 'small charity' means a charity with a gross annual income of less than £250,000: and
- 'very small charity' means a small charity whose assets do not include any heritable property or shares in a private limited company, and with a gross annual income of less than £1,000.
Applications to reorganise 'large' and 'small' charities take an average of 6 months to complete. You should allow for this when preparing your application.
For applications to reorganise 'very small' charities, OSCR must make a decision within 13 weeks of receiving the application.