Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Mr Nick Hurd)
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner.
I have a great deal of personal respect for all three Members of Parliament who supported this debate—my hon. Friends the Members for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) and for Canterbury (Mr Brazier), and the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel)— and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet on securing it. I know they would not have brought their concerns about the governance of St John Ambulance to this place in a cavalier way. My hon. Friend spoke in both sorrow and anger and I think regretted that he needed to come here to talk about the issue. We must take it seriously because the concerns are about a massively important institution in this country. The fact that this debate has been so well attended, even though it is arguably about something specific to a constituency, is testament to the importance of the institution described memorably by my right hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry) as making the difference between a life lost and a life saved.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Banbury, my hon. Friends the Members for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray), for Waveney (Peter Aldous) and for Braintree (Mr Newmark) and the hon. Members for Colchester (Sir Bob Russell) and for Batley and Spen (Mike Wood) all took time to come here and record their thanks and thoughts on this extraordinarily important institution.
I normally agree with everything that the hon. Member for Colchester says, but he was wrong about one thing. He said that the senior management of St John Ambulance would be reading Hansard carefully tomorrow. Well, they will not have to, because they are sitting right behind him, which is testimony—I thought he had eyes in the back of his head, but I was clearly wrong—to how seriously they take this debate and the concerns that have been raised in this place. The Charity Commission is represented here as well, so the debate has left its mark.
As many Members have said, the challenges facing St John Ambulance are well aired. As the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah) stated, such challenges are faced by a lot of voluntary organisations—big, small or medium-sized—around the country, because this is an extraordinarily difficult time to be running voluntary organisations. The response of the management of St John Ambulance and the trustees has clearly been radical and controversial. They are not unique in that. As many Members have said, it is not surprising that people have very different views about the rights and wrongs of the strategy. As my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire made clear, it is not something on which the Government have a view, and as a Minister I do not have a view. That is for the trustees and the members and supporters of the organisation.
What is relevant to us—it was the laser-like focus of my hon. Friends the Members for Canterbury and for North Thanet—is the role of the Charity Commission. That role is extremely important and challenging. We ask the commissioners to be guardians of the integrity of one of the most important sectors of our society, the voluntary sector. That integrity and trust mobilises £14.6 billion-worth of our constituents’ money and millions of hours of volunteering each year, and such integrity and trust is hugely important. There is no doubt that the Charity Commission is operating under very challenging circumstances, given budgetary pressures and the high profile failings that have been identified in the past.
The Charity Commission is under new leadership. There is a new board, which we have confidence in. The leadership have made it clear that they think they can perform their role within the existing budget, but our message to them is that we want them to hunker down on their core regulatory role, because of its importance and because we think that in the past they have gone off-mission. We want them to tackle issues of serious abuse.
The powers of the Charity Commission’s leadership are clear. They do not have a power to intervene outside of a formal inquiry, which is appropriate only where there is serious mismanagement or abuse. They can intervene only where there is serious risk of significant harm to or abuse of a charity, its assets, beneficiaries or reputation, and where the Commission considers that its intervention is a necessary and proportionate response to protect those. Otherwise, the law specifically prohibits the Charity Commission from acting in the administration of a charity. The commissioners do not want to do that, because that is a matter for the trustees. Such interference would conflict with the independence of charities and their trustees being—this is important—one of the cornerstones of charity law in England and Wales, provided they act within the law and the terms of the charity’s governing documents.
The trustees of a charity are ultimately responsible for its management. They have broad discretion to exercise the powers open to them under charity law and the charity’s governing document as they consider the best interests of the charity and its beneficiaries. That is the framework under which the Charity Commission operates. I know the Kent Members of Parliament—my hon. Friends the Members for Canterbury and for North Thanet—do not agree with its position, but the commissioners feel they have not seen any evidence that funds have been wrongly classified or misappropriated by the trustees. In the absence of such evidence, they feel they have no regulatory remit, although they stress they have provided advice on resolving the dispute.
I have no grounds on which to challenge such a position. I welcome the fact that the commissioners have agreed to meet the Members. I would be disappointed if that was solely because of the noise around this debate, but I am assured that a meeting will take place. On the basis of this debate, and because of the importance of the underlying issue, I will write to the chair of the Charity Commission to seek his assurances that the charity commissioners have looked at the issue in a proper way and not in a dismissive way. I would like that assurance and I welcome the commitment to a meeting.
On the attitude of St John Ambulance—the seriousness with which it sees the debate is reflected by its presence here—I spoke to the chief executive this morning. She was adamant about the commitment of the trustees to support the St John home. That has been put in writing, but I had her personal assurance on that and her personal commitment to meet both Kent Members of Parliament in person for a discussion.
I was obviously concerned to hear about accusations of high-handed and remote bureaucracies in London, but the leadership are prepared to sit down with both MPs to discuss the concerns in person, which I welcome. I imagine there is a great deal of local unease underlying this, not least from the families of the residents of the home, where the uncertainty is unsettling. It would be good if that concern could be settled at a local level, but those who have concerns about the governance of the charity will have the opportunity to discuss them with the leadership of the charity. It is a magnificent national institution.
The Government recognise everything that Members have said about the importance of the charity. As Minister responsible for youth, I recognise the extraordinarily valuable role that it plays in training young people; as my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree said, the number of young people being trained grew significantly last year. So its work is enormously important, and it is critically important that we continue to take great pride in this institution and trust it.
This debate has secured an important objective in airing Members’ concerns and in ensuring that both the Charity Commission and the leadership of the charity itself respond to those concerns. I welcome that.