---

Charities Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 17:"Page 48, line 33, leave out ““whereby”” and insert ““in connection with which””" The noble Lord said: My Lords, in moving Amendment No. 17 I shall also speak to Amendments Nos. 18 to 23, which are grouped with it. Clause 44 is designed to make certain types of merger between charities easier. It does so with two legal devices: one is the vesting declaration, to make the transfer of property from a transferor charity to a transferee charity easier, and the other is a device to ensure that gifts to a transferor charity that take effect on or after the date of registration of the merger belong automatically to the transferee charity, unless they are excluded gifts. The Bill provides for the Charity Commission to keep a register of mergers. It allows for any relevant charity mergers to be notified to the commission and requires the commission to enter in the register every relevant charity merger that is notified to it. A relevant charity is defined in subsection (4) of the new Section 75C which is inserted through Clause 44 of the Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Phillips, identified at an earlier stage what he considered to be shortcomings in the relevant charity merger definition. It is these shortcomings that this group of amendments seek to address. The effect of the amendments is to make it clearer than the existing words do that a relevant charity merger includes a merger in which the transferring charities have already gone out of existence on the transfer of their property to the merged charity and the merger in which the transferring charities are in future to go out of existence. In other words it clarifies that a merger in which a transferring charity or charities have transferred all their property and are intending to go out of existence but have not yet done so counts as a relevant charity merger and thus can be notified to and registered by the commission. I beg to move. On Question, amendment agreed to.