Why did Children in Need fund a charity linked to a paedophile scandal?

Last week the BBC announced that the 2024 Children in Need appeal had raised more than £39 million for charity. With such large sums of money, comes great responsibility – which charities are worthy of funding, and which ones should be kept at the end of the proverbial bargepole? 

This week, Rosie Millard has resigned as chair of Children in Need, she says, because of an ‘institutional failure’ that led to almost £500,000 being paid out to LGBT Youth Scotland (LGBTYS). Payments only stopped, Millard says, when she alerted Children in Need of the history of the charity it was funding. In 2009, James Rennie – chief executive of LGBTYS from 2003 to 2008 – was jailed for life after being revealed as part of one of Britain’s worst paedophile rings. LGBTYS received its first grant from Children in Need seven months after Rennie was convicted.

It is not as if LGBTYS has become a force for good in the lives of young people since.