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Charities Bill [Lords]

I am not sure that it is my job any more to reassure anyone. That is my hon. Friend the Minister’s job, and it is a question for him. I do not know whether he feels reassured by my contribution. In passing, I remember—I do not know whether this reassures the hon. Gentleman—that the Joint Committee took evidence from a variety of Army-related and military-related charities, and we tried to address some of the concerns that they expressed in our recommendations to Government. Incidentally, the Government addressed many of our recommendations in the Bill. Although much of the debate has centred on the issue of religion, I think that the trickiest issue, certainly politically, has been that of charitable private schools and hospitals, which sit in the middle of a pretty uncomfortable triangle. On one side, they are bound by their obligations as charities, because they have charitable status. On another side, obviously, they owe obligations to the fee-paying parents and patients who provide the overwhelming bulk of their income. On the third side, they have wider obligations to taxpayers, who fund the estimated £100 million-worth, I think, of tax relief that they enjoy as a consequence of their charitable status. Some may have seen the Bill as an opportunity to resolve those tensions by exacting some sort of ideological revenge on such private schools and hospitals by stripping them of both their financial benefits and their charitable status. I do not think that that is the intention of my hon. Friend the Member for Selby, and it certainly is not mine. I am a long-term advocate of partnerships between the public and private sectors. It is true, however, that charities that charge fees for their services have a special obligation to prove that they can none the less provide a wider public benefit. I, for one, very much welcome the initiatives that many private schools, for example, have taken in recent years to develop meaningful partnerships with state schools. The problem is that while some have an exemplary record, others, sadly, do not. Under the current law, however, all benefit equally from charitable status. That, as Mr. Jonathan Shepherd of the Independent Schools Council—which represents more than 1,000 private schools in this country—wrote in a letter to me dated 22 June,"““has sheltered lazy charities because they did not have to demonstrate public benefit.””" If we get the new public benefit test right, rather than using it to drive a wedge between public and state schools, I believe that it could help drive them still closer together. The worry that some have, including my hon. Friend the Member for Selby and those who have put their names to his amendment—to some extent I share it—is that without a clear definition, public benefit could end up being interpreted as requiring nothing more from private schools or hospitals than the offer of some form of indirect or tokenistic public benefit. For example, they could argue that they save the taxpayer money by educating children or treating patients who would otherwise be taught in state schools or treated in NHS hospitals. Surely meaningful public benefit must be more than that—and I would argue that it must also be more than the odd sharing of a classroom here or a playing field there. Ideally, it should be a lasting partnership that enables many more state school pupils, regardless of background, aptitude or ability, to benefit from the expertise and resources that private schools often, although not always, have at their disposal. That, after all, is the declared purpose of both Government policy and private schools, as represented by the Independent Schools Council.