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Charities Bill

Again, I am grateful to the Minister. I suspect that we may be citing different parts of what the Charity Commission has said. I was not citing guidance relating to the effects of the Bill; I was referring to guidance advising charities on whether there is clarity in the current situation, which there is not. I still support taking the opportunity to add clarity. In case there is any doubt about the effect that our amendments would have, or in case any party is thinking of caricaturing them as intending some kind of bonfire of charitable status, I should say that we will aim to table amendments in Committee that will make it absolutely clear that, just as fee-charging special schools or carers support charities should not be caught by a stiffer test, nor should independent educational establishments that follow the ISC’s guidance on imaginatively seeking ways to increase their public benefit. As the first ever friend of the country’s leading independent specialist college for disabled young people, the National Star college, based in and next to my constituency, I would be in trouble if I suggested any measure that threatened its charitable status. The last area that I will touch on are the role and powers of the new improved Charity Commission established by the Bill and of its new overseer, the charity tribunal. I use this opportunity to restore a measure of consensus on this side of the House by supporting the comments of the hon. Member for Isle of Wight when he suggested the establishment of a suitors’ fund to reduce the risk to charitable funds in approaching the charity tribunal. There is much to recommend that and I support it. Hon. Members should pay tribute to the outstanding individuals, such as Geraldine Peacock, who have led or served as charity commissioners, but we must also acknowledge the dissatisfaction with the practical results of the Charity Commission’s action—and occasionally inaction—which has occasionally run high. I am afraid that I have my own examples of that from personal experience. While I was the director of fundraising of the Alzheimer’s Society, a new charity called the Alzheimer’s Foundation was set up. It was registered by the Charity Commission, but it had no background in Alzheimer’s research, no volunteer or supporter base and no donor base. However, it suddenly started running an extremely large and—to us—threatening fundraising campaign through which it sought large amounts of public funds. It turned out that the charity had a close association with an American direct marketing agency. We believed that that agency loaned the trustees of the charity the money to establish the fundraising campaign, and that the donations that resulted from it were used to pay back the American agency. That was obviously good business for the American agency, but extremely poor value for the donors whose money had overwhelmingly been used to pay a business, rather than for Alzheimer’s research, as they believed. At the time, we approached the Advertising Standards Authority, the Charity Commission and, on the side, the Daily Mirror. The most useful of the three was the ASA, which came down on the organisation like a ton of bricks and stopped the misleading claims that it was making in the public arena. The Daily Mirror was pretty useful, too, but I am afraid that the Charity Commission considered the matter for a long time before deciding that there was no problem. It was only when we approached the then Minister, the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), and she took up the matter—I am grateful to her—that we miraculously got a result from the Charity Commission. There are thus weaknesses in the regulatory regime. While there is such disquiet about the role of the charity commissioners at present, the Government want to extend the number of charities to be registered, add a new status of charitable incorporated organisations, which will be regulated by the Charity Commission, rather than by Companies House, and add new powers and responsibilities to advise and guide charities. A Government who want to do that without suggesting how the organisation will cope with its expanded responsibilities are pretty brave. Each of those measures is welcome in itself, but nothing will damage faster the critically important public confidence and trust to which the Minister rightly referred than the creation of a regulatory regime that—however accidentally—turns out to be less effective than the one we have at present. We will have to pay careful attention to that matter in Committee, but it should not disturb the healthy cross-party consensus in support of such a worthwhile and long-overdue Bill.