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Charities Bill [Lords]

It is always a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) in debate. As her contribution and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan) have demonstrated, the issue of public benefit goes to the heart of what the Bill is about. The measure under discussion is easily the most significant change made by the legislation, and I also think that it is the most controversial. It is certainly the topic on which the House and the other place have expended most energy during the tortuous passage of the Bill over the past few years. Therefore, it is the issue that demands the greatest clarity. As the Joint Committee that I chaired to examine the Bill in draft form put it:"““Since the purpose of the Bill, according to the Minister””—" at that time, that was my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart)—"““is to protect the charity brand, it is important that any new law on charity must properly deal with the issue of public benefit.””" Amendment No. 1, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Selby, is an honest attempt to do just that—to clarify what is meant by public benefit in the Bill. However, I do not think that his amendment is right or workable. My hon. Friend the Minister, who has already gone some way toward addressing the concerns not just of Labour Members or Members of this House as a whole, but of both Houses, will need to go a bit further in his concluding remarks. He will need to set out how the Government intend the public benefit test to operate in practice. This is a significant change not just for religion, but for the whole of the charitable sector. What is not in dispute—among Labour Members, at least—is the positive benefit that accrues from the introduction of such a test. I have to say, with all due respect to the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner), that I am at a loss to understand what the Opposition’s position is on public benefit, having listened at length—I also listened to him at length on Second Reading—to his somewhat tortuous and occasionally toe-curlingly embarrassing attempt to avoid the question of whether the Opposition support the concept. If he gets an opportunity to do so, perhaps he will clarify the Opposition’s position. If I may, I shall offer a small piece of political advice. I should have expected a party that nowadays seeks to claim that mantle of modernity—notwithstanding the concerns of the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald about the modern world—to welcome with no ambiguity what most people think is a long overdue modernisation of charity law. If we can get the public benefit test right, as I believe we can, it could clarify an area of charity law that every Member knows fine well has been greatly disputed for many centuries, including in the courts. Perhaps even more importantly, it would introduce a healthy dose of common sense into a complex area of charity law. We have to face a very simple fact: what the public think of as a charity and what we define in law as a charity are sometimes at variance. That is why, when asked, only 15 per cent. of the public believe, for example, that a charity such as Tate Modern is indeed a charity. Even fewer believe that Eton is, or indeed should be, a charity—but it is. So there are issues that we must address, not least in order to sustain what my hon. Friend the Member for Slough rightly called the charity brand, and its reputation now and in future. To be frank, it is in any case right that charitable status, since it accrues significant benefits, should be earned and not simply assumed. After all, organisations that are charities enjoy high levels of public support precisely because they are assumed to provide a meaningful benefit to the public. So in that sense, the good name of charities is at least as important as their good works. There is a further important consideration—a financial consideration—which my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) touched on in an intervention a moment ago. Charities do not just receive generous donations from the public individually; they also receive pretty generous financial support from the public collectively. For example, in the latest tax year charities attracted tax relief worth almost £1.9 billion, which is a pretty significant pot of public expenditure. Nowadays, nobody—perhaps with the exception of the hon. Member for Isle of Wight; I do not know—expects public money to be doled out like a free good. It rightly comes with some strings attached. The public have the right to know what they are getting out for what they are putting in. Charities cannot be exempt from those disciplines.