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Assistance to Communities

I could not be more enthusiastic in following up the hon. Lady's intervention, not least because she, too, represents a Staffordshire constituency, and we often find ourselves co-operating for that reason on matters of voluntary activity. There is a considerable overlap and I am sure that she is right. The voluntary sector includes not only the charitable element, but the amenity element and the protecting element. Some of that work is ad hoc and some is long-term. As the hon. Member for High Peak said, the growth of the big charities is enormously important. I can remember when Oxfam, in the days when I was at Oxford, was based in a tiny office just up the Banbury road. Look at it now. The same could be said of more recently established charities—perhaps it is unfair to describe them as such—including Tearfund, with which I work closely as chairman of the all-party group on water and sanitation in the third world, and WaterAid, which is relatively new. I could not recite them all, and there would be no point in doing so, as there are so many. Many of those enormous organisations have sub-units, to use a technical term, in each constituency, and that is why there are, as the hon. Member for High Peak said, about 250 registered charities in the average constituency. Some of them are large charities such as Oxfam, Save the Children, Tearfund and the Royal British Legion, with which I also work closely in my constituency, as I do with many other charities. Others are local charities, and some are much older, such as the trust set up by Izaak Walton, who happened to leave some money in his will to part of my constituency. Therefore, there are small, localised endowments, as well as much larger ones, and there is also an overlap with amenity groups, some of which are long-term groups, such as the Madeley Conservation Group, which has done tremendous work in the coalfields, because Madeley was once a coal community. There are also shorter-term, ad hoc amenity groups, such as those that oppose wind farms. I have four such groups in my constituency, some of which are incorporated and some of which are not-for-profit organisations because they want to have a stable constitution. Others are made up of people who simply get together as an amenity group. I would like to refer to one of the accidental outcomes, although perhaps it is a deliberate problem. It often strikes me that when an ad hoc amenity group protests against a specific local government problem—wind farms are only one example—the people involved get together at a big meeting. An MP such as myself will attend and tell them, "This is what you must do if you want to be effective", which we all have to do. Someone will then get up and ask, "Where will the money come from, and will we need legal representation?" We then have to tell them that they will not be able to protest unless they raise the money. Then they ask, "What about the people on the other side?", meaning the state, the local authority or the Government policy that has driven those who are determined to set up the wind farm. The amenity group will then find that they must raise the money on an entirely voluntary basis. Meanwhile, the state, in the manner of Goliath, provides the QCs and leaders of the argument, such as environmental experts, at enormous cost and therefore has the advantage over David, because the voluntary amenity body is obliged to find the money, and that, importantly, is driven by the volunteer attitude. The hon. Member for High Peak made that point. It is about attitude, and I have mentioned care and compassion as well. Those people will go out and raise money so that they can pay for what they want to do. I think that there is a strong case for them to be given legal aid, particularly when there is an enormous imbalance between the very big state and the very small amenity society. However, nothing will stop them. They will step up to the plate, just as they do in the other area that the hon. Gentleman mentioned, and on which I have had an exchange with him. For example, in the context of providing care in the community, an enormous number of people do fantastic work, without any expectation of advancement, patronage or financial reward or benefit of any description—this is the fantastic side of this work, and this is what I believe in passionately—but entirely because they believe in the cause in question, or their local community. They are the unsung heroes of Britain, the warp and weft of our society. The hon. Gentleman mentioned people who go into hospitals. We have had enough trouble with Stafford hospital, as everyone knows—it is a national scandal, not just a local one—but the truth is that an enormous number of people are still going into the hospital to do the kind of voluntary work that he mentioned. That is extremely important, yet it is often taken for granted. The professionalism of the big organisations is complemented by the enormous sense of commitment and compassion that comes from people in villages and towns and in society at large. We are part of an enormous international voluntary sector. The hon. Member for High Peak mentioned UNICEF, but one could mention another sphere of activity that is entirely spontaneous and which we have seen in the work of Live Aid some years ago, and in our responses to disaster funds for hurricanes, tsunamis, Haiti and so on. Now, of course, other organisations come in on the back of massive television appeals, so the idea of the state being able to solve everything has, by definition, proved not to be true. It is often individuals who come and provide the ballast that is necessary to solve enormous problems. By the same token, it is extremely important that huge organisations, as well as the local ones, should not become overtly political. We do not have time this afternoon to go into every aspect of charity law, other than simply to refer to the balance that has to be struck. I believe that the charity commissioners are somewhat too restrictive, as they tend to make over-enthusiastic assessments in construe certain activities as quasi-political or political, when, in fact, the dividing line is difficult to achieve. I recognise that, but I think that in respect of schools, academies and things of that kind, there is a tendency for the commissioners not to realise that we need the spontaneity of local volunteers who come together to provide the added value that committed members of local society are able to provide for schooling or other things. I know that this is a very political question for Parliament, but it is important that unreasonable restraint should not be imposed on people being able to provide for independent schools if they wish to do so, or, for that matter, to provide help so that those who are less well off can get a better education than might otherwise be available to them locally. I do not want to disrupt the cross-party enthusiasm in this debate by spending too much time on that, but the question of mission and of the objects of trusts is an important one, and we must do everything that we can to encourage more and more local voluntary activity. On the broader front, I was struck by the reference of the hon. Member for West Bromwich, West (Mr. Bailey) to the Labour and Co-operative movement. I make no secret of the fact that my family were Quakers for many centuries, and were involved in mutual societies. For example, we helped to finance Samuel Smiles. In fact, we found him—my great-great-grandfather, Newman Cash, is reputed to have discovered him in Leeds before he appointed him secretary to the Leeds and Thirsk Railway, which he set up. The Cadburys are Quaker cousins, and so on. There was an extraordinary combination of enterprise and—let us use the word properly—philanthropic thought and attitude. Another example is John Bright and the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers. The whole concept of this debate is in my DNA, and it is extremely important to the revival of what has been called the broken society. I am extremely glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. Hurd) will reply to this debate. I know that Conservatives are all supposed to be pin-striped and boss-eyed, or how people describe us. [Interruption.] No, not in this debate, but hon. Members know what I mean. However, there should be no assumption that, just because someone comes from a particular political party, they do not share common attitudes towards helping people at large. That is part of it: we may have different political solutions, but it is extremely important to remember who created the mutuals and building societies such as the Abbey National, which we founded in the 1870s, and which is now a bank. In retrospect, I am not at all happy about what has happened to the notion of mutualisation, which part of the essence of the voluntary and co-operative movement and all that went with it, including mutuals such as the National Provident Institution, which was founded by William Cash in the 1830s. The fact is that we tried to create things to help people— there were no profits for the people concerned. They had other businesses, and the two things worked together. Barclays is another company that began that way, as did Rowntree's—I could go on to list more. In trying to recreate the circumstances to repair our broken society, we must look not only at what Government, Parliament and legislation can achieve but at how the spirit of voluntarism described by the hon. Member for High Peak can be brought in. This is not a party question at all; it is about how we, despite our political differences, manage to create in society the means of helping to repair our broken society. I shall just mention drugs and drugs addiction, and the fantastic work that is done by those who work voluntarily to help people who are broken by the terrible scourges of today.