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Charities Bill

I am not sure that I was talking about any kind of nightmare at all. I was saying that there is a great opportunity for the voluntary and charity sectors. The problem is that seven out of 13 Departments still do not even keep records of whether funding is agreed before the beginning of the financial year, or of whether their contracts run for more than one year, despite the advice of the Public Accounts Committee. Of those Departments that kept records, the Northern Ireland Office was best—I congratulate it on that—but the Home Office, which was the sponsoring Department for the voluntary sector, was worst. The Bill is important for the charity sector and the people and purposes that that sector serves. It has already been thoroughly scrutinised. It was one of the first Bills to be subject to pre-legislative scrutiny and it has twice been rigorously examined in another place. However, several provisions remain that will need to be debated and, perhaps, amended in Committee if the Bill is to allow the sector to meet its potential. The most contentious matter is clearly the public benefit test. Since the 17th century—and in codified form since 1891—there has been a requirement to demonstrate public benefit for most charitable purposes. However, as the Minister said, there has been a presumption of public benefit for the relief of poverty, the advancement of religion and the advancement of education. The Bill will abolish that presumption, so any organisation with a charitable purpose will have to demonstrate a public benefit. The Bill provides for a tortuous and near-incomprehensible formula. Ministers have reassured Parliament that although that will mean that our case law will be allowed to develop, the public benefit test will remain unchanged. Three groups seem to want to the public benefit test to become more onerous. The first is represented by the Charity Commission, the NCVO and, rather surprisingly, the British Red Cross. The second is a group of lawyers and other who think that although the law on charities has never been the same in England as in Scotland, there should be a post-devolution situation in which Scotland drives England. I was grateful to the Minister for pointing out the objective that the three legal systems should be compatible, but not identical. The third group is the few Government Back Benchers who are chaffing at their failure to maintain the iron grip of mediocrity on Britain’s state schools, with the support, for some reason, of the illiberal democrats to my left. Their motive is essentially to strike down independent schools, which have shown that pupils can get a better education than they could have done from the state. They ignore the damage done to voluntary hospitals and to charitable retirement homes. They do not seem to have thought of the effect on universities, all of which have always charged fees.