Why Kids Company deserved to close

To escape tougher regulation, charities such as Kids Company, must run themselves like businesses. Emily Hohler reports.

attends the 'Kids Company: Heart Of Gold' fundraising dinner at the Porchester Hall on March 6, 2014 in London, England.
(Image credit: David M. Benett/Getty Images)

Until the publication of my article in February this year, "not a single bad word" about the now-defunct Kids Company or its chief executive, Camila Batmanghelidjh, had appeared in the mainstream media for the best part of 20 years, says Miles Goslett in The Spectator.

When I began investigating the charity in 2013, I was struck by the "improbable statistics" quoted in the newspapers about the number of children it helped: a figure of 16,500 in 2010 jumped to 36,000 in 2011, a number "obediently repeated" by every publication thereafter. That the charity was helping a group larger than Newbury's population, in London alone, seemed "incredible".

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Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.