Charities

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I have also seen that report and looked at it in some detail. It is interesting, incidentally, that as of September this year there were 2,000 more charities registered than there had been three years before so the trend has not, so far, been downwards, but it is worrying. From my experience of the charities sector, and I have visited a large number of additional charities since I took over this post, I am shaken by some that I meet in Yorkshire that are almost entirely dependent on public funds. That seems unwise. I strongly approve of those that raise some of their money through their own activities. The social enterprise model is very much part of what charities should be doing. The Government are doing a whole range of things to encourage the new generation to give more of their time and money. The National Citizen Service is one of them.

[Baroness Barker]

My Lords, given that the number of donations being given online and by text is increasing, does the Minister agree that charities are losing out, because gift aid is not yet fully digitised? Does he agree that it is imperative that the Government help charities to achieve a universal declaration of gift aid so that online giving can be much more beneficial than it is now?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I strongly agree with the noble Baroness. We are also looking at the difficulties of payroll giving. The Government want to encourage it. A small number of, by and large, large companies make that easy for their employees. We would like to see an expansion of payroll giving. The figures suggest that older people are now much more generous than the younger generation, and we do not entirely know the reasons. Again, that is not entirely fitting. I trust that all Members of this House are giving at least 10% of their income to charity.

Voluntary Sector and Social Enterprise

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 21st June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the owner of a consultancy third sector business. I also work in an unpaid capacity with a voluntary organisation called See the Difference, now known as the Giving Lab.

I very much welcome this debate, which is very timely given the huge amount of change and turbulence going on in what I call the third sector. I thank my noble friend Lady Scott for drawing a distinction between charities and social enterprises. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, that there needs to be a great deal of clarity about terminology as fuzziness leaves room for individuals to be exploited, which I think is wrong. I am pleased that noble Lords have drawn a distinction in this debate between what is charitable and what is social enterprise. Last year, Social Enterprise UK kindly came up with a helpful definition of a social enterprise. It is a company which trades and earns at least 50% of its income through selling goods and services rather than through contracts in order to generate profits with which to pursue social and environmental purposes. That is entirely different from what a charity does. A charity works with a different skill set in a different way for a different purpose. That is important because much of the public policy which is being made at the moment has at its heart a confusion between social enterprises and charities. More than that, some charities whose traditional sources of income are disappearing are being told that they should become social enterprises. They are facing a lot of challenges in the way that they go about doing that.

The Americans wished upon us the term “not for profit”, which is deeply unhelpful; “not for dividend” is more accurate. Charities and social enterprises can and should make profits in order to do what they do and to be sustainable. Indeed, social enterprises have to make profits. That has a very important implication for social policy. It means that underfunded public sector contracts can no longer be palmed off to the charitable and voluntary sector. I do not think that people in government have understood the importance of that although some people are beginning to do so. I commend to all noble Lords the Public Administration Committee’s report of 2011, which looks at the way in which the big society is being implemented as a public policy by government. The committee was keen to stress that as more and more public sector contracts are outsourced, it becomes more important for government to conduct an audit and accountancy trail about what happens in terms of funding and outcomes for people.

In passing, I mention the article by Zoe Williams which appeared in the Guardian this morning, in which she looks at the future of public service contracts and particularly the naïve notion that small charities will on their own be able to compete either with big charities and big-scale social enterprises or with private companies to take over what are essentially large public sector functions.

I am pleased to see the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, in his place. He and I have had a number of conversations. I very much look forward to his review of charity law. That report is due to be published soon. We must be clear that although social enterprises are developing and are very innovative and pose challenges to government and the existing charitable sector, charities will go on.

I conclude by mentioning three strategic interventions which I think the Government could and should make in order to help charities and social enterprises emerge from this period of turbulence stronger and more effective. The first is the need for there to be a toolkit which social enterprises and charities can use to determine whether they are investment-ready. There are a number of different sources of investment for those bodies but the people responsible for their governance have hard decisions to make about where to risk the small amount of resources at their disposal. There is a real need for them to have a tool that sets out those business decisions in a clear way that they can follow.

Secondly, charities have always struggled to demonstrate the outcomes they achieve for the people they work with. However, enormous progress has been made by a particular company, Triangle Consulting, which works with a number of different charities and bodies to develop what is known as an outcomes star. It enables charities working in different fields—mental health, drug and alcohol addiction, and older people—to show the outcome benefits for their client group. There is no outcome star for volunteering and, as my noble friend Lady Scott said, volunteering and the encouragement of it are critical to all this development in the future. I wonder whether the Government might look at supporting an outcomes framework for volunteering.

My final point relates to the digitisation of gift aid. The fact that it continues to be a paper-based exercise is holding back charities and social enterprises, and stops them engaging with a new generation of givers. Digitisation of gift aid will be an extremely important step forward for social enterprises and particularly for charities in the future.

Mental Health (Discrimination) Bill [HL]

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Friday 25th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Coddenham, for returning this House to an issue that it has previously debated—for example during the passage of the Mental Health Bill in 2006. The legislation which this Bill seeks to repeal was passed because Members of Parliament took the view that to do so was to protect the best interests of people experiencing mental distress and to protect the four institutions named in the Bill.

Since then, there have been two significant developments which make the Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Coddenham, appropriate. First, the Mental Health Act 2007 states that,

“‘mental disorder’ means any disorder or disability of the mind”.

The effect which was intended by the Government of the day is that mental health legislation extends to a very wide range of people, including those with mild depression and those who may never think that they should be covered by mental health legislation, as well as the rest of us. They are being excluded from these specific duties and they should not be.

Secondly, the Mental Capacity Act 2005 enshrines in law the common understanding which we all have that the capacity of people with mental health problems or learning disabilities can vary from day to day. Since the 2006 legislation was passed it has become much more common for a person to take out a lasting power of attorney. In addition, people with mental health problems, such as those who are bipolar, are now, as a result of that legislation, more likely to make an advance statement. At a time when the person is well they can state that should they become ill again, they wish a nominated person to be involved in making decisions on their behalf. They can say, “It is likely that, should I become ill again, I might try to make unwise decisions. I wish at that point for those decisions to be ignored”. Those two proposals mean that a period of mental ill health is not now the inevitable catastrophe that it might have been. People with mental health problems and those who care about them can use those tools to mitigate the effects.

On juries, several jurisdictions—the noble Lord mentioned Scotland—already operate the system that would come into operation under this Bill. It is very important to note that a person who is experiencing mental distress can apply for recusal and therefore not have to serve on a jury. The chances of a major case being disrupted because a juror has ill health would be minimised.

For all those reasons, it is now less likely that the organisations in question would suffer adversely. In fact, those organisations would benefit from having people with experience of mental ill health involved. Therefore, Parliament should move with the times, move forward and pass this Bill into legislation at the earliest opportunity.

Big Society: Women’s Organisations

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Tuesday 8th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi]

My Lords, the noble Baroness will be aware that I have recently raised the issue of anti-Muslim hatred and Islamophobia. This is a growing issue and it is right that women’s organisations such as the Muslim Women’s Network should play a key role in taking forward the concerns that I have raised. The Government are looking at the issue of Islamophobia in much detail and we will bring forward a paper to look at concerns that have been raised. I assure the noble Baroness that we will be consulting many groups, including the Muslim Women’s Network.

[Baroness Barker]

My Lords, in the light of the abolition of the Audit Commission and comprehensive area assessments, what mechanisms will be available to assess the impact of funding cuts on women’s voluntary organisations at local level?