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Charities Bill

The hon. Gentleman might want to put that point to the provost of Eton rather than to me. The Bill’s answer is to introduce a public benefit test, which all charities will have to pass in order to gain charitable status. Unlike the Conservative Front-Bench spokesman, I very much welcome the introduction of that test. We must concede, however, that it is by far the most controversial aspect of the Bill, particularly when it applies to private hospitals and private schools. It was certainly the issue that took up most time on the Joint Committee, with many different points of view represented, and it sparked sometimes fierce debates in the other place. The Committee concluded:"““Since the purpose of the Bill, according to the Minister, is to protect the charity brand, it is important that any new law on charity must properly deal with the issue of public benefit.””" For some, this is deeply ideological terrain. There is antipathy in some quarters— even, I guess, among those on these Labour Benches—towards private education per se. That is not my starting point. For me, politics is not about taking things away from people, or levelling down, but about giving things to people—levelling up. That is why I support the proposition that we should have more choice, not less. It is also why I am a long-term advocate of partnerships between the public and private sectors. The widespread recognition nowadays that the old divide does nobody any good is welcome. In the national health service, for example, partnerships between public and private sectors are now commonplace and, for most patients, welcome. As the briefing that all Members received recently from the Independent Schools Council demonstrated, many enlightened private schools have made a great effort to open their doors to the wider community. Partnerships with state schools to teach minority subjects, to develop distance learning materials, to undertake summer schools and even to prepare pupils for university have been fostered. Therefore, we know that partnership can deliver the goods. The creation of both city academies and trust schools provides further opportunities to make partnerships between private and state schools even more meaningful and to help to bring an end to the educational apartheid that has in the view of many been so damaging to schooling in our country. Where private schools engage in such partnerships, they make a good case for providing genuine and direct benefit to the wider public. The argument that we heard on the Joint Committee that private schools deserve charitable status because they save the taxpayer money by educating children who would otherwise have to go to the local state school, however, is not helpful to their case. That is both a fallacious and deeply complacent argument. On the same basis, private gyms, I presume, might become charities, as it could be argued that they dampen demand for local authority facilities and so reduce the cost to the public purse. Charitable status should not be a given; it should have to be proven. While many private schools make their facilities available to state schools, the latest report by the Independent Schools Council—““Good Neighbours””, published in 2003, which is about relationships between state and private schools—says that the majority do not, and that"““absence of charitable status makes little difference to… a school’s willingness to make its facilities available.””" When, according to the Independent Schools Council’s own report, 48 per cent. of private schools that are charitable never make any of their facilities available to state schools, people are bound to ask what the public get back for the £100 million of public expenditure that such schools enjoy in tax benefit earned as a direct consequence of their charitable status. At present, only some can answer that question. In future, all will have to be able to answer it, because the Bill removes the automatic presumption that every educational venture is, by dint of being educational, also charitable. Instead, it introduces the much-decried public benefit test. Public expenditure is not, and cannot be, a free good. It rightly comes with strings attached: it must be a something-for-something deal—in this case, tax advantage in exchange for public benefit. I have no objection to that principle. Indeed, I think it is a principle that we should enshrine far more fairly than we do at present, and that applies as much to private charitable hospitals as to private schools.