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Charities Bill

It is always a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan). We have many interests in common; unfortunately, class war is not one of them, so I will return later to see where we disagree on the issue of public benefit. I rise as the chair of the all party group on the community and voluntary sector, a Home Office-appointed chair of the Community Development Foundation, and a former trustee of a major national charity, to welcome the Bill, which has had more than its fair share of scrutiny over quite a long time, as a number of hon. Members have said. But it is a little rich to hear protestations from Opposition Members about the time that the Bill has taken. They will recall that before the 2005 general election, the Bill was one of those that the Opposition was asked to co-operate with in order to give it a fair wind to complete its parliamentary stages before that election, on the ground that it was relatively uncontroversial. They declined, and that was their right as an Opposition, but that meant that the process had to start again. That is why it is now some six years since the strategy unit report was commissioned to consider the relationship with the voluntary sector in its wider sense. That is why it has taken six years for us to reach this point. Clearly, we are now approaching the end of the process, and I am sure that we will come out with a Bill that we will all be pleased to work with and see implemented. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Mr. Milburn) has said—I think that I have read the same report as him—the public strongly support the work of the voluntary sector. For example, 88 per cent. of people believe that charities are well managed and spend their funds wisely, while 84 per cent. of people claim that they have implicit trust in the activities of the best known charities. The public misunderstand some aspects of the sector. My right hon. Friend the Member for Darlington has referred to the statistic that while 97 per cent. of people know that Oxfam is a charity, only 15 per cent. of people know that Tate Modern is a charity. The Charity Commission report also states that 90 per cent. of people say that they have received no assistance or advice from a charity, although 75 per cent. of them actually have received assistance or advice. I suspect that that is because people have received what they regard as professional and sound advice, which they do not believe could come from a charity.