The information follows the publication on Friday of a letter from the commission’s chair Geraldine Peacock and Charities Minister Fiona Mactaggart, which announced that they had found a solution to the controversial issue.

In a joint letter to Alan Milburn, chair of the scrutiny committee, the two parties wrote that their departments had a “unified position regarding the particularly complex legal point”, with the commission seeming to go back on evidence it originally presented to the joint parliamentary committee.

The Charity Commission had said that if the bill was enacted as it currently lies, case law would prevent private schools from having to demonstrate public benefit. However, Fiona Mactaggart pledged that private schools would qualify for the checks, causing a row to break out which threatened to stalemate the progress of the bill.

Amongst other details, the letter states that “an organisation which wholly excluded poor people from any benefits, direct or indirect, would not be established and operate for the public benefit and therefore would not be a charity”, and that the commission would not be prevented from carrying out public benefit checks on schools – meaning that private schools unable to prove their public benefit could be stripped of charitable status.

Geraldine Peacock said: “We have found a way that we both feel comfortable with and it may result in guidance being attached to the bill. The bill will also bring with it a tribunal and if there are any concerns about the way the public benefit test has been applied then people can challenge it. We are quite confident that what we have is robust.”

The letter to the joint committee can be found at www.publications.parliament.uk while Public benefit checks – how will we carry them out? is available from www.charitycommission.gov.uk