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Charities Bill [HL]

My Lords, I apologise. I am going mad. I meant the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours. He does not even look like the noble Lord, Lord Corbett. The reason that I do not support him is that he remarked that he did not trust the Charity Commission. I certainly do not trust Secretaries of State from one party to the next to issue directions on this sensitive issue. We could have a zig-zag course as we have had over central policies over decades between the two main parties and, who knows, my own party. I find the notion that a Secretary of State can simply weigh in and give directions on management and other matters very unsatisfactory, more unsatisfactory than leaving the matter to the Charity Commission in whom I have more faith than the noble Lord. He was wrong in saying that commission members had no educational experience; they have a lot by now. It is true that they took over educational charities only 20 or 25 years ago, but they have a lot of experience. They will have to engage people with the necessary experience in order to undertake the consultation that is cast upon them under the Bill. I sit down an unhappy man, but one who will look closely at what happens, particularly if we have been sold a pup by the independent schools. We all talk about them as if they were a single monolithic group; they are not. We have heard here and in Committee from the best of them—the high master of Manchester Grammar School, Jonathan Shephard of the Independent Schools Council. They genuinely, I have no doubt, want to pursue the public interest path, and they have done that—admittedly, under the prospect of legislation of which they were wary. If it is the case that, once they have the Bill more or less in the shape that they want, they rest on their oars and the schools that have done nothing thus far do even less tomorrow, we will have cause to question our deliberations on this part of the Bill and we should return to the issue and seek to do something about it.