Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Barker and Lord Deben

Monday 20th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I made my views about this amendment known in Committee, and they have not changed. I listened very carefully to what the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, said, and she said one thing that made me believe that this amendment is wrong. She said:

“It is just like a company”.

Well, no, it is not. Charities are distinctly different in law, which is why there are different charitable formats. The noble Baroness said that the majority of charities would be incorporated, but that is not so: approximately 50% of the charities in this country are very small and most of them are not even registered with the Charity Commission. The unincorporated association format is there specifically to enable people who wish to come together for charitable purposes to do so to a standard of operating which is regulated by the Charity Commission in most cases. But they are not held to exactly the same standards as an incorporated association.

The noble Baroness and I often come at things from completely opposite sides, and I disagree with her on this. One reason why the unincorporated association is a valuable framework that is worth retaining for charities is that in the sorts of cases that she raised, it is trustees who have done wrong who are personally liable for what has happened, but the purpose and the assets of the charity remain valid. The effect of this would be to obliterate a whole level of charitable activity; the noble Baroness will, in effect, rip the heart out of a lot of community good up and down the land.

One thing I am not sure about, and the one thing that the noble Baroness did not tell us about in her introduction, is the scale of the problem she is seeking to address. If there is evidence that this is a widespread problem, she has a case, but it needs to be made in a different way; there needs to be a thoroughgoing investigation, which would settle for all time whether or not unincorporated associations, in their present form, should continue or not. I would like to see that done in a thorough and considered way and not on the basis of this debate and this amendment.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness has made a very important point. It is conceivable that we should discuss whether these two forms of charity—the incorporated and the unincorporated—might no longer be entirely fitting for the circumstances of the day. We could discuss wholesale reform, but it seems to me that approaching that in a particular and narrow way is not the right way to do it. Law is not best made that way, not least because if you do it in that piecemeal manner, you can end up with something that is much worse than what you started off with. The law of unintended consequences is very powerful in these circumstances.

The second thing I would say to your Lordships is that Britain has a remarkable reputation around the world for charity, as we have often said in debates. But we have to remember that this is not something that has come about recently; it has happened over a very long period of time. It has resulted in, I have to say, a rather untidy system—there is no doubt about that. There are various different ways of looking at this, and sometimes people want to tidy it up. Perhaps one of the system’s strengths is the fact that there are so many different sorts of charities and so many different groups of people doing things in a slightly different way. With the Charity Commission, we have tried to set some reasonable standards and to ensure that there are very clear reference points.

We have tried hard to do that in a way that corrals people as little as possible. New charities often arise because people feel strongly about something that they have a personal relationship with: something happens, somebody they know has been hurt, they are concerned and they say, “I must do something about that”. Personally, I am a huge supporter of that. When one is canvassing, it always seems the worst thing when you bang on a door and someone says, “Somebody ought to do something about that”. My response is always, “Why don’t you do something about it? It is no good talking about somebody else”. Charities often arise because people say, “I want to do something about it”. That is a really important part of it.

My worry here is therefore, secondly, that we are not just approaching a complex business from a particular, narrow direction but also that we are adding yet again to the complications that face people when they want to turn a spontaneous reaction into a more permanent form. Of course, that leads to duplication of charities and I know that there is a real problem there. However, it is a good, healthy and encourageable part of humanity that people want to do something themselves about a matter they feel strongly about. I fear that if we went down this route without thinking very hard about it, we would—as the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, rightly said—put into the small charities some real concerns.

Thirdly, I would have to be much more convinced about the propriety of putting at risk the funds of a charity given for a particular purpose because of the activities of a particular trustee—which would be the result of the amendment. I can imagine amendments that would not produce that response. I can imagine changing the law in a way that might help to solve the problem that the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, put before the House. However, this amendment does not do that and could put a whole lot of other things into serious default.

The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, is right that to bring forward so complex an amendment in a debate of this kind without having some idea of the size of the problem, or the nature of the different parts of it, is not the way to deal with it. If you do not know how big the problem is, you do not know how dangerous it is to make the change. If it is a huge problem, you may want to risk the change, but if the problem is much more limited, you will probably want to say to yourself, “This is better left to a more mature and serious consideration, and there should be a much bigger one about the legal distinctions between incorporation and unincorporation”.