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Charities Bill [HL]

My Lords, I declare interests as president of the NCVO and chairman of the Armed Forces Charities Advisory Company. I add my thanks to the Minister for bringing forward this Bill and my congratulations to all those who have been involved in its preparation. I do so on the grounds of the important principle, which has been referred to already, that there is nothing more infuriating or dispiriting than starting off to research new legislation which you find is amending previous legislation and which, when you get to it, amended earlier legislation and so on ad infinitum. It reminds one of those archaeological programmes where they slice away the side of a street and you find what was thrown on to it in about 1200, then layer on layer below. That makes the law unfriendly and, as my noble friend Lord Phillips has said, it is particularly important that charity law should be as user-friendly as possible for the simple reason that most charities are run on voluntary effort. Of course, some will require the expert advice available from firms such as that where my noble friend Lord Phillips was previously a senior partner. However, as far as possible, DIY is a good principle for charities and that is facilitated by consolidation. In at least two senses, however, I find this a slightly strangely timed Bill. First and most importantly, this being the year of our Lord 2011, the Charities Act 2006 is about to start the quinquennial review which, as my noble friend said, was written into Section 73 of that Act. It is and will be an extensive review because it requires the examiner to look at, "““public confidence in charities … the level of charitable donations … the willingness of individuals to volunteer””," and, "““the status of the Charity Commission as a government department””." It is clear from the word on the street that considerable changes will be suggested to the examiner when they set to work, so I fear that this consolidation Bill, while welcome in one sense, will not be the last word and that we shall be reploughing this ground before too long. The second and more proximate reason for my surprise is the forthcoming charity tribunal hearing on the issue of public benefit. As noble Lords will recall, the 2006 Act ended the presumption of public benefit and required all charities to show that they had a public benefit requirement in their operation. That has always been controversial, as it takes you straight into the heartland of private schools and private hospitals. When we debated the 2006 Bill, some noble Lords found it counterintuitive that schools charging fees of £30,000 could be charities. For the record, I do not find that counterintuitive at all as you do not strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. Yet the strong have a contribution to make to our society in the form of bursaries, useful facilities, teacher exchanges and so on. A further difficulty about the public benefit test is the rather obscure nature of the test case. The noble Lord, Lord Phillips, can expound on this at great length and has done so. It is the case of Re: Resch. which, as a non-lawyer, I find difficult to understand. It is about an Australian private hospital—a fee-paying institution—set in the grounds of a state, or free, hospital. That whole area of public benefit is quite obscure and difficult to deal with and one objective that we had in 2006 was to ensure that the thing was not further confused or compounded by introducing political angles into that tricky area from either end of the political spectrum. That was why the Charity Commission was given the role of establishing the public benefit test.