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Charities Bill [Lords]

As the right hon. Member for Darlington (Mr. Milburn) has just said, this is a very good Bill and the concept of public benefit is central to it. Rather than citing older Charity Commission reports, it is more useful to consider the commission’s current guidance on how it plans to implement the Bill in future. The commission’s website, which is a fertile source of material for this debate, contains a briefing, issued this month, on the approach to public benefit and how it will be treated. The commission promises to apply the public benefit test robustly, and that is welcome. Perhaps I detect the hand of the Minister in that form of words, which is welcome. The guidance also contains some slightly more alarming words, which underline the fact that the issue is a moveable feast—a slippery concept, as the right hon. Gentleman put it. For example, the briefing contains what appears to be an entirely new concept of the need for continuing improvement. It states:"““Our aim will be to ensure both that charities demonstrate public benefit in what they do and, beyond that, continue to increase the value they bring to the communities they serve.””" That seems to go beyond the Bill and add a dangerous new dimension, because it puts an obligation on any charity to prove that it has satisfied the public benefit test and later to prove that it has increased the public benefit. That is perhaps a similar example to the one cited by the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) on modern laws, with the Charity Commission going a little further than the Bill, and also perhaps failing to issue the best possible guidance. The Minister with responsibility for the third sector will have to be on his mettle in managing the implementation of the public benefit test. The concept is slippery. As the right hon. Member for Darlington also noted, there are areas of spectacular confusion, not least in respect of whether the Bill changes the law on public benefit at all. Many people—including Liberal Democrats in this House and the other place—argue that it does, but my noble Friend Lord Phillips said, in a letter today to The Guardian:"““Many leading charity lawyers beg to differ. Without some leverage in the bill, the judges are not free to innovate, especially as the leading case law endorses the status quo, where the school or hospital can claim charitable status if it saves the taxpayer money or provides extra facilities unavailable in the state sector.””" I confess that I am not a lawyer. Although my interpretation does not entirely match his, my noble Friend is an extremely eminent charity lawyer and the fact that he thinks that that is an arguable case shows that the Bill in its current state leaves matters very unclear. The hon. Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan) said that the NCVO and the Charity Commission appear to be shifting their ground slightly about whether further clarification is needed. Earlier this year, the NCVO issued a briefing that stated:"““According to Guidance published by the Charity Commission, charities that charge high fees for their services merely have to show that ‘the less well-off are not wholly excluded from any possible benefits, direct or indirect’.""NCVO does not believe this goes far enough … However, the Charity Commission itself has said that this is a complex area of the law and it would like further clarification from Government on this issue and particularly in relation to fee-paying charities.””"