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Charities Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am more than happy to provide an explanation, but whether the noble Lord will find it entirely helpful I am not sure; we can but try. One of the changes that this relates to falls essentially under Amendment No. 62. The grouping, with Amendments Nos. 70 and 72, relates to the draft Charities (Northern Ireland) Order, which I mentioned earlier. One of the changes that the order will make, if enacted, will be the creation of a charity commission for Northern Ireland as the regulator of charities there. Amendment No. 62 is the main amendment, and it comes into play when the Northern Ireland charity regulator comes into existence. The amendments allow provision to be made by regulations authorising disclosures of information to the Northern Ireland charity regulator for the purpose of helping it to carry out its functions. Such provision must be made in legislation that extends beyond Northern Ireland, because it needs to authorise bodies outside Northern Ireland to disclose information to the Northern Ireland charity regulator. For that reason, it cannot be done in the Northern Ireland order. We are happily trying to assist the Northern Ireland authorities by including the provision in this Bill. I suspect that that has probably affected the chronology, although I cannot be absolutely certain about it. Maybe the noble Lord has a point about where things fall in the Bill. I certainly take his point about statute sometimes being hard to follow. We thought about this in relation to the Bill generally, and I have probably said on earlier occasions when we have been debating the Bill that we need to ensure that the Bill, when it becomes an Act, is accessible; we will provide proper guidance to ensure that it is. That is all about setting out contents, cross-referencing and all those things. The Northern Ireland provision is new, and it is free-standing as a clause while the other disclosure provisions amend the existing statute. I hope that that helps the noble Lord. On Question, Motion agreed to. 30: Clause 24, page 25, line 22, after ““court”” insert ““or the Tribunal””