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Captain Tom's daughter insists controversial spa was just 'large hot tub' as she admits 'mistakes were made'
7 March 2025, 16:35 | Updated: 7 March 2025, 16:50
Captain Tom Moore's daughter speaks to Tom Swarbrick
Captain Tom Moore's daughter has told LBC that the spa building she built and was forced to tear down was really just a "large hot tub".
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Hannah Ingram-Moore admitted to LBC's Tom Swarbrick that she had made mistakes in her handling of the legacy of her father, the NHS lockdown hero.
But she insisted that she never had "any intent to mislead or harm" in any of her actions.
Captain Tom became a household name during the pandemic, raising millions for the NHS by walking around his garden.
Ms Ingram-Moore and her husband Colin became directors of the Captain Tom Foundation, but a subsequent inquiry found they benefitted personally from the charity. They were subsequently banned from running charities for ten and eight years respectively.
Read more: Captain Tom Moore's daughter's £2m house goes up for sale again
The Charity Commission said the family refused to donate any of the £1.47m received for three Captain Sir Tom books, despite assurances some of it would go to the charity.
In a separate controversy, last February the Ingram-Moores were forced to demolish a spa building in the garden of their Bedfordshire home.
They had been given permission to make a Captain Tom Foundation Building in their garden to store cards and gifts sent by admirers, but they added a sauna and spa, which were not part of the original plans.
Ms Ingram-Moore said that her mistake with the facility was to include a reference to the Captain Tom Foundation on the planning application.
She told Tom: "It should never have had the word 'foundation' on. It was the Captain Tom building. We always held our hands up and said, didn't mean to do that. It happened. We were very busy. As soon as we knew, we corrected it...
"The charity was not used in any way. It was a private family building".
Ms Ingram-Moore told Tom that she had wanted to let the local "aging population" come round and look at the memorabilia, before using the spa facilities.
"It was a large hot tub, by the way," she said. "It wasn't a spa."
She said that helping the elderly was "everything [her] father stood for. Longevity."
Ms Ingram-Moore has been heavily criticised in the media and online for her handling of the charity and for the spa building - in contrast to the adulation given to her father, who raised millions for NHS charities in lockdown before his death.
She said she had "made peace with a lot of what's happened over the last few years" because "ultimately we own the truth."
Ms Ingram-Moore admitted she would not be able to persuade many people of her point of view.
"I have to accept that people... can look at this in a different way, but we, and my family, and I, and my father, if he was around this table, would say they own the truth. And the thing is, you get stuff wrong."
She said "the building was a mistake... but nobody, nobody lost except us. Nobody lost.
"So, yes, we can absolutely see that if you look back in hindsight... it's easy to say that things went wrong.
"And of course, in hindsight, you can look back and say, 'oh, well, I would have done it that way. And I would have done it that way.
"So, of course, we recognised that not everything was right, but none of it was done with any intent to mislead or harm."
This year, Ms Ingram-Moore has released a self-published book called Grief: Public Face, Private Loss.
