There are approximately 200 charities in the UK linked to the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church. The majority operate with five trustees. The majority of those charities are meeting room trusts — there are over 140 of them — along with 20 or more educational trusts, and a number of central Brethren charities including The Grace Trust, OneSchool Global UK and the Rapid Relief Team.

Our research uncovered that there is not one female trustee for any of these charities.

Not one. In 200 charities. Across more than 600 named individuals holding trustee positions within an organisation that collectively controls hundreds of millions in assets and receives significant public benefit status in return.

There are Plymouth Brethren men named as a trustee for more than one charity. In total we believe there are over 600 individual named trustees for the charities linked to this community — and they are all men.

The Companies Tell the Same Story

It does not end with the charities. We have also struggled to find a female managing director in any Brethren member company. We believe there are more than 800 trading companies operated by PBCC members in the UK. The boardrooms of those companies are, as far as our research has been able to establish, exclusively male.

What we did find was a high number of women working as unpaid volunteers — for Campus & Co, the PBCC's members-only grocery chain, and for the Rapid Relief Team, the PBCC's disaster catering and public relations operation. In both cases, the labour is provided by women. The leadership, governance and legal responsibility is held by men.

The Question That Needs Asking

The PBCC presents itself publicly as a modern, community-minded church that plays a positive role in society. Its representatives have appeared before parliamentary committees, spoken to journalists and issued polished press statements emphasising their charitable work and community contribution.

But the data from the Charity Commission register tells a different story about how power is distributed within the community. If women were genuinely equal participants in PBCC life — if they held authority, exercised governance and made decisions — you would expect to find some of them among the 600+ trustees of the community's charities, or the directors of its 800+ companies.

You do not find them there. You find them volunteering in grocery stores and serving food at disaster sites.

In a modern society you have to question how women are being treated within the Plymouth Brethren community. The PBCC's own documents describing their women members as running Campus & Co stores confirm the picture: they are the workforce, not the leadership. Are they just for breeding and volunteering?

It is a question the Charity Commission, which grants public benefit status to these organisations, might reasonably be expected to ask.