RCN confirms status

Members of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) have voted by 96% in favour of confirming the organisation’s status as a trade union by agreeing that it is no longer a charity.

The change was necessary for the RCN to comply with a Charity Commission requirement that all the objectives of a charity have to be charitable. The RCN’s trade union objective is not charitable, which meant members had to agree that the organisation as a whole was a union rather than a charity.