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Charities Bill

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. I am sure that for some small charities that is the right way to go, although I would not include the Nepal Children’s Trust, which was delivering on a very specific aim. However, this debate is not about telling the voluntary sector what to do but about giving it its head and finding out what works. They may well coalesce, by a process of organic growth, into being fundraisers for larger bodies as the most practical way of achieving what they set out to do, but that is for them to discover for themselves. There was a time when we could talk about the public sector, the private sector and the voluntary sector as three points of a triangle, but today they are three points on a circle, with every sort of organisation in between. In any ward in the constituency of any hon. Member here tonight, we will probably see a plethora of voluntary sector organisations. In one of my local wards, an active residents’ association elects representatives to the arm’s length management organisation that looks after their social housing. We would also find housing associations, the neighbourhood watch, various sports groups, older people’s groups, local history groups, and guides and scouts. Tomorrow, I will be pleased to welcome the retiring commissioner of the Pennine guides as my guest at the older volunteer of the year awards, here in the House. The University of the Third Age is a huge organisation in my constituency. We also have the furniture project. This weekend, I asked the people at that organisation whether it was still a charity—a voluntary organisation—or had become a social enterprise. It collects second-hand furniture and trains people to repair and build furniture and to recycle furnishing materials. It is an accredited training organisation and a not-for-profit company, and in just a few years it has earned the title of a social enterprise. We will find community transport and volunteer car schemes, branches of large organisations such as Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth, and groups such as the one that I spoke to this morning—the local domestic abuse reduction partnership. All those organisations are dedicated to the public benefit of improving the communities in which they work. That is not to mention the trade unions, which represent public benefit in the workplace, and political parties. If those of us in political parties are not here in order to promote the public benefit, then what are we here for? Although it is not a matter for this debate, I hope that we will seriously consider the possibility of casting political parties in the same mould as voluntary sector organisations and charities as regards their treatment for tax purposes. That would be one way of stimulating a healthy democracy. The issue that took up much of the time in the Lords, as it has today, is that of public benefit. I am pleased that the Bill tightens the definition of public benefit, not least by abolishing the presumption that certain organisations automatically qualify for charitable status because they are involved in education, for example. Nevertheless, it is important that we allow for the necessary flexibility and do not tie ourselves down by agreeing on a definition that tries to anticipate all future examples of where public benefit may or may not be demonstrated. Many charitable organisations have commercial arms. An educational charity should not be banned from having a commercial arm attached to it, as long as the public benefit can be demonstrated by the charitable part of the organisation. I feel the same as some of my Back-Bench colleagues about the ethos of independent and fee-paying private education. I believe that the best way of ensuring that we have no need for it is to make the state sector so good that people will not want to pay. However, it is a fact of life that such schools and institutions exist. Some of them are special schools providing services that are not provided in the state sector. Those organisations should not have their credibility drawn into question when the public are paying those fees through sending children to use their facilities. As I mentioned in an earlier intervention, we are now seeing a growing tendency of independent schools to make their facilities—their drama halls, sports equipment, field study facilities—and their time, in the sense of sixth-form preparation, pre-university courses and so forth, available to state sector schools that have not been fortunate enough to provide the same facilities. I believe that those are good partnerships. Schools in the state sector do not receive any benefit from some teachers who were trained in that sector, so let us build a relationship with those teachers, even though they are working in the independent sector. If facilities benefit only some children, let us make them available to all children by developing partnerships with independent schools. I do not believe that a provision to deprive independent schools of only 4.5 per cent. of their total income will be for the wider public benefit when we can already see the tendency for more of their facilities being made available to more children—[Interruption.] I note that my hon. Friend the Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan) is itching to intervene.