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Charities Bill [HL]

My Lords, this is a useful discussion to have, and I am sure that at the end I shall in part agree—personally—with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Shutt. How much difference it will make is not for me to estimate, but it is an important question to raise. The matter revolves around the question why we should not make all sport charitable instead of requiring a link to health improvement. That is the kernel of the debate. Charity is based on the requirement to show public benefit. To qualify as a charity, a sports club would have to be able to show that the facilities and opportunities that it provided for participants led to a public benefit. The most obvious form of benefit from public participation in sport—I would claim, without discounting the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson—is the health benefit. It is true that there are many sports in which you can suffer an injury, including even innocent sports such as cricket, which is my favourite sport, or running, which I do to try to sustain a level of fitness. So of course it is possible to have a disbenefit, although you are a pursuing a healthy lifestyle, but there is overall a benefit from public participation in sport. I think that we would all acknowledge that—which is why we have thought it right to define sport in terms of its potential to improve health. However, a sports organisation that could show that its activities resulted in another form of public benefit could also qualify as a charity under one of the other charitable categories, rather than the amateur sport category. There are, for example, charities that use sports, such as riding, or target shooting, to help those with a disability. There are others that use sports or games, such as chess—perhaps even sudoku, for all I know—to achieve an educational objective. However, a real alternative exists for clubs that cannot show an identifiable public benefit in a charitable sense, or that do not want to be charities: the Community Amateur Sports Club, or CASC, scheme. That scheme is for clubs which are open to the whole community; are organised on an amateur basis; and have as their main purpose providing facilities for, and promoting participation in, one or more eligible sports. An eligible sport for the purpose of the CASC scheme means any sport which is on SportEngland’s list of recognised sports. The underlying purposeof the CASC scheme is to promote grassroots participation in sport. A club registered in the CASC scheme is entitled to many, if not quite all, of the tax reliefs that charities enjoy. So, one way or another, there is encouragement for virtually every type of amateur sports organisation. For those that can demonstrate a public benefit in the charitable sense, there are two potential routes. One is through the charitable heading of advancement of amateur sport for those that meet the new definition of sport; the second is through some other charitable heading, such as the advancement of education, or the relief of those in need by reason of disability. For those that cannot demonstrate a public benefit in the charitable sense, or simply do not want charitable status, there is the CASC scheme. The inclusion of an express health requirement is in our view the most transparent way in which to proceed. Let us consider the effect of leaving out any reference to health. A sports club applying to register with the commission under the advancement of amateur sport heading would have to do two things. First, it would have to show that the activities it promoted qualified as a sport under the definition of sport. With the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson’s amendment, a range of activities that made no contribution to health would be able to do that. On the physical side, the noble Lord would admit pie-throwing, for example, or perhaps even dangerous sports such as tobogganing down Ben Nevis on a piano, or being launched from a catapult as a human projectile. On the mental side he would admit, for example, arcade games, poker, pub quizzes and so on. What is unsatisfactory about that is not that we disapprove of those activities per se. It is simply that some activities, of which those I have mentioned might be examples, have little or no chance of demonstrating the required public benefit or, consequently, of acquiring charitable status. In considering the public benefit aspect of a sports club applying to register as a charity for the advancement of sport, the Charity Commission would look for a health benefit, since that is the legal basis on which sports clubs can already be accepted as charitable. We do not think there is any point—indeed we think it would be positively misleading—to give sports and games which do not contribute to health, or which might even have the opposite effect, the impression that they might succeed in gaining charitable status. We would be giving a misleading impression if we went the route of the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson. Sports that can demonstrate nothing by way of charitable public benefit have an alternative route: the Community Amateur Sports Club scheme, which admits sports not by reference to whether they are good for health but by reference to the extensive list of sports recognised by SportEngland. The noble Lord, Lord Shutt, asked a specific question in his own inimitable style. I am afraid that I shall have to disappoint the noble Lord because, much as I should like to speculate on examples of sports that do not meet the health criteria—and it would be fun to do so; we could have quite an entertaining time—it is not really for Ministers to do that. That is really a job for the Charity Commission, which must decide on the definition established by Parliament. The commission will undertake public consultation when the new definition is in force, which will give every sport the opportunity to put its case that it qualifies as a sport within the new definition. So those pie-throwing sports folk, who come from somewhere else in this universe, could launch their argument if they so wished and thought that it was a valid thing to argue as a sport.