Captain Tom's daughter Hannah Ingram-Moore denies charity planned to pay her six-figure salary

• Watch Hannah Ingram-Moore's exclusive interview on This Morning

Captain Sir Tom Moore's daughter has defended her charity's set-up after it became the focus of a spending probe.

Speaking exclusively to ITV's This Morning, Hannah Ingram-Moore denied reports that the charity set up in her late father's honour had at one stage planned to appoint her chief executive on a six-figure salary.

The Captain Tom Foundation was set up in the memory of the Bedfordshire veteran, who had raised millions for the NHS with his high-profile fundraiser walking laps of his garden on his zimmer frame during the UK's first Covid lockdown.

The charity watchdog has launched an investigation into charity after it paid more than £50,000 to companies run by Mrs Ingram-Moore and her husband.

They were both appointed trustees of the charity in February 2021, though Mrs Ingram-Moore resigned six weeks later, while her husband remains as one of three trustees.

The Charity Commission recently confirmed it was investigating the foundation over its governance and spending, leading to the inaugural Captain Tom Day to be postponed.Mrs Ingram-Moore had not personally addressed the reports until now, with the foundation instead releasing statements saying it was cooperating with the watchdog's probe.She broke her silence on Thursday to address the claims - telling This Morning co-hosts Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield she had been "naive" about what it took to set up a charity.

A tearful Mrs Ingram-Moore said she had been the victim of trolling since reports of the probe had emerged, and her children had asked her: “Mum, why do people hate you?”

“I think we’ve been incredibly naive but I don’t think that that means we’re bad.

“I think that we’re wholesome, good people and we run businesses we understand.

“But I think we stepped into this for love, for humanity, for allowing as many as people as possible access to his legacy.

“We never thought of the darkness - it never, never crossed our minds.”

Revisiting the foundation's creation, she said: “When we challenged my father to walk up and down for a pound a lap, that three and a half weeks raised £38.9m and that entire £38.9m went to NHS Charities Together and they distributed it.” 

On how the charity was created, she said her PR business had loaned the foundation money to get it started.

She said: “We published our first annual accounts and they are independently audited and in that first year of the charity, my business loaned the foundation some money because we didn’t want to eat into the first donation we had - which was £100,000 from a corporate donor.

"And that's all we had, and we didn’t want to take that money for costs, so we loaned it and we were lending money from my business that was also suffering during the pandemic, so we need to have it reimbursed.

"So, very straight-forward - when the charity had a bit more money, we were reimbursed those costs and that landed us a headline, that I had essentially paid myself £50,000 into my own business, which was absolutely not true.”

When asked if there was any truth on the reports of a six-figure salary, Mrs Ingram-Moore said: “Absolutely none. It’s absolutely not true, what the trustees did was ask for a benchmarking and asked ‘if we were to employ a CEO what’s the highest, what’s the lowest’, so it’s simply not true.” 

She said her focus had been to protect her father's memory.

“I am guarding my father’s legacy, we would never hurt it. But I would never be able to sit on here and tell you something that’s not true," she said.

"It’s clear, our accounts are there to be seen. But we are not hiding anything. There’s nothing wrong, we haven’t made any false action and I genuinely think that the vast majority of people know that.

"But those clickbait headlines have been destructive and have put the foundation in peril.”

How has the Captain Tom Foundation been spending donations?

Captain Tom's fundraising raised nearly £39m - all of which was paid directly to NHS Charities Together.

He was knighted by the Queen in the summer of 2020 before dying with coronavirus in February 2021.

The Captain Tom Foundation was set up as a separate charity to receive further donations.

In its first year, the foundation received charitable donations of nearly £1.1m, of which it spent less than half.

It paid out grants of £160,000 to good causes while spending £240,000 on management and fundraising costs, according to its audited accounts.

In a recent statement, the Captain Tom Foundation said it had been "working closely with the Charity Commission since we launched, and we welcome their input".

The statement posted on its website seeking to clarify the charity's spending said the payments itemised in the accounts "relate to the reimbursement of costs paid for by companies owned or controlled by the Ingram-Moore family during the foundation's start-up phase".

"These costs were reviewed by the independent trustees and payment was authorised by them," it added.

The statement also pointed out that the £39m raised directly by Capt Sir Tom's fundraising walk was paid directly to NHS Charities Together.

A date had not been set for the first Captain Tom Day before it was postponed, but it was due to be held in June of this year.

•  Watch the full exclusive ITV Morning report here.