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Charities Bill

I shall resist the temptation to name them. However, 1601 was also the year when charities legislation was first codified. Perhaps understandably given the huge amount of case law covering the work, the purposes and so on of charitable organisations, that legislation requires modernisation, and it is not surprising that the National Council for Voluntary Organisations has called the current law, ““complex and inconsistent””. Secondly, today’s charitable sector would be completely unrecognisable to those who set out the first framework for charitable law, and it is characterised by its huge diversity and enormous size. As my right hon. Friend the Minister has said, there are about 200,000 charities, which have an income of almost £40 billion a year. Charities, from the smallest to the largest, play a hugely important role in our country and, indeed, in each of our constituencies. Taken together, charities and the wider voluntary sector employ more people than the national health service, which makes them as big, if not bigger, than the Chinese red army or the Indian Railways, although they are hopefully more enlightened and efficient. Although the mainstay of the sector remains small, volunteer-led, locally run charitable organisations, we have seen some formidable and fundamental changes in the nature of what charities do and in the way in which they look in recent years. Organisations such as Turning Point, the British Red Cross and the Royal National Institute for Deaf People belie the image of an amateur, poorly run, volunteer-led organisation. Such organisations are extremely successful, extremely large and extremely professional, and they make a real difference—for example, housing associations are the main providers of affordable homes in our country nowadays. Organisations such as Christian Aid, Oxfam, Save the Children and the Red Cross play an important role in development. Most instructively, voluntary hospices have not only become the main providers of care for the terminally ill, but given birth to a new branch of modern medicine in this country and throughout the world.