Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Barker and Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts

Monday 20th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker]

My Lords, we move on to the issue of social investment, one which we spent considerable time deliberating in Grand Committee. During those discussions, the Minister repeatedly used the phrase, “dancing on the head of a pin”. I am not much of a dancer, and I return to this not to rehearse the arguments that we had then but for what I think is a really important reason. As we said in Grand Committee, this is the first time that social investment has ever been defined in law. The extent to which trustees are acting properly if they make an investment on which they will not receive a financial return is a question on which, as we heard in Grand Committee, there are a number of different points of view. I simply want us once again to go around the question of the difference between financially motivated investment which happens to be in line with the charity’s social purpose and consciously, explicitly socially motivated investment. The reason for doing so is risk. There is a strong possibility, at least for the first few years of any such investment, that there will be, at best, no return and there may even be losses. It is crucial that we protect in law the trustees who are making such investments.

The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, and I made the point in Grand Committee that the definition of social investment in the Bill does not reflect the definition given by the Law Commission. The Law Commission’s definition of social investment includes “avoiding financial liability at a future date”. It was, therefore, somewhat difficult for the noble Lord and I to learn during Grand Committee that the Law Commission had helped with the Bill’s drafting. The Law Commission’s definition does not require there to be a positive financial return. That is what it said in its initial report on social investment. However, the Bill includes financial return in the definition. At new Section 292A(5), it defines financial return as,

“if its outcome is better for the charity in financial terms than expending the whole of the funds or other property in question”.

The amendments in this group would add “equal to”. The amendments would allow trustees to make an investment on which there would be simply a social return. There may be a financial return—as opposed to a definite loss, which would be what a grant would amount to—but there may not be. We on these Benches think it important to make that distinction.

The definition in the Bill fails to differentiate between financially motivated investment and consciously, explicitly social investment. That is why we have tabled the amendments, which are slightly different from those which were tabled in Grand Committee. They would require trustees to be open in their investment policy about the fact that they were making social investments, not seeking to make a financial gain but directly trying to achieve a social purpose. As long as they did that and were not harming the capital assets of the charity by completely depleting them, we think that broad definition of social investment would get us to a point where trustees, who are very risk averse under existing law, could begin to develop the whole social investment market. That is what this Government, like the previous Government, have said that they wish to do, but which has so far been constrained by law. That is the reason behind Amendment 20 and all the other amendments in the group. I beg to move.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, I shall be exceptionally brief. I hope that my noble friend will be able to reassure us when we come to the next group that government amendments largely cover the points that the noble Baroness has made in her amendments, all of which are very worth while. We may be able to probe a bit further to ensure that we are getting where we think we are on that group, rather than at this point, but her amendments are interesting.

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[Baroness Barker]

My Lords, the House might find it useful to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, on the Government’s Amendments 26, 27 and 28, which were not grouped with the previous group starting with Amendment 25. I would find that helpful.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, these amendments are about the royal charter charities, so they are very different. We had so far been dealing with social investments and the definition of that. This group is about the special position of royal charter charities. I am not sure that it will detain us very long, but nevertheless it is a different topic and they have been separated by the Bill team into two different groups.

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

My Lords, if I am right, I will address Amendments 26 and 28, which relate to very minor improvements to language, adding an active grammatical formulation and a specific rather than generic identifier respectively. I trust that they will not require further explanation.

The amendment to new Section 292B(4) improves the wording of the specification around the exclusion of charities established by legislation or by royal charter. They have been excluded from the social investment power because of the differences in governance structure. The amendments here simply offer an improved form of wording to reflect this.

The addition of new Section 292B(5) is needed to explain better the territorial extent of the subsection on charities established by legislation, as set out in new Section 292B(4). It clarifies that the exclusion relates specifically to charities established by, or whose functions are set out in, legislation or secondary legislation authorised by Acts of Parliament or measures of the Welsh Assembly. I expect that these measures will not trouble noble Lords unduly, being of a rather technical nature without policy implications.

Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Barker and Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts

Wednesday 1st July 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, the Committee owes a debt of gratitude to the noble Baroness for giving us a chance to canter over this ground. As she says, this is controversial stuff but it is certainly worth the sort of creative thinking that she has just outlined.

There are a couple of public policy issues. The first is whether it is an issue for actual fundraising—a way to give more resources to the Charity Commission—but there are those charities for which you might have a second public policy idea; that is, if you made people pay they would behave better. You could use various policies to drive up standards of governance within charities. Some charities say, “What you don’t pay for, you don’t value”. Of course, as we know, a charity number is an exceptionally valuable thing to receive in the sense that it enables you to get local authority or central government funding or makes it possible for you to apply to grant-giving foundations that almost certainly will not even entertain an application from you unless you have a charity number. So there is the argument about how one might use an aspect of this issue to improve governance.

The challenge, of course, is how you levy it. We heard earlier today from the Minister that there were 7,192 new charities last year. Noble Lords can do the arithmetic, whether it is £10, £100 or £250. But unless it is going to be north of £100 for your initial registration you are not going to raise a significant sum of money. People will say that £100 is a great deal of money—maybe. Equally, you might say that if a charity starting out does not have £100 spare, its financial viability is a bit doubtful.

There is an argument about initial registration. I am less keen on things such as fines for late returns of stuff to the commission. If small charities do not do it, the problem of finding them and getting the money means that the administrative costs for the Charity Commission will almost certainly outweigh any money that is received. My particular issue, which came up in the evidence, was that if you set up a trust and you use a standard commissioning trust document, which is available on the website, that is fair enough; but if you want an all-singing, all-dancing trust deed because you are a wealthy bloke or a wealthy lady and you want a very specialised trust to reflect your own wishes, and you are going to send it down to Taunton to the Charity Commission to bless and it spends two or three days blessing it, I do not see why that should be paid for by the taxpayer. If you want your own special trust deed, that is fine—you are entitled to it—but there ought to be a cost-recovery basis for the Charity Commission to be able to get that paid back. That has a degree of fairness and equity that would be attractive and would raise a decent sum of money.

When I paid my visit to Taunton and talked to the people there, they said, “Well, you know, I get this telephone call from a law firm and they ask me a series of questions. I am virtually certain that they are writing down my words, putting it on their letterhead and sending it off to the client with a fee note attached”. There are issues there that need to be explored as part of the exercise that the noble Baroness was talking about. There is no reason why the taxpayer should subsidise the activities of law firms, however eminent and brilliant they may be.

My view is that in the end we shall move inexorably towards a hybrid funding model, under which the state will pay a basic amount for what one might say are the “must-have” tasks and the sector will pay for the “nice-to-have” tasks, such as help desks and the types of things to which the noble Baroness referred. If you talk to charities, there is a list of things that they think it would be helpful for the commission to provide. There might be a bit of argument about what is a “must have” and what is a “nice-to-have” but over time that could be sorted out by discussion and intellectual heavy lifting. The sector needs to show the way and that is a much better way for the sector to take charge and come up with some proposals.

That of course takes me to my last and most important point; namely, the attitude of the Treasury. It is no good my noble friend on the Front Bench thinking that this will happen, unless there is an absolutely cast-iron guarantee that the Treasury will keep its hands off it. If you raise a couple of million pounds or £3 million from the sector and the Treasury says, “That’s a brilliant idea. We will have £3 million off the grant”, the sector will be absolutely furious. How we get to the situation where the sector in good faith enters into a funding arrangement to help develop its own future and to have the right regulatory structure in which we all have trust and confidence, and how we get that level of commitment about which the sector can be assured—not just this year or next year but over time—is a very difficult issue, to which I am not sure that we have yet found the answer. For the sector to move forward with confidence and to think of new, creative ideas of the sort mentioned by the noble Baroness in her opening remarks, it will require us to find a way to unlock that problem.

[Baroness Barker]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley. The funding of the Charity Commission is a subject which anyone who has met its current chair for longer than about five minutes will have had raised. It is quite a complex issue. One of the most interesting points to arise from the investigation into the Cup Trust was the extent to which the Charity Commission was not, at that stage, aware of the cost of its own operation. At a time when every charity in the land has ruthlessly to look at the cost of its operation, it is only fair that the commission should do so, too.

I want to make three points. Clearly, the matter will not be resolved today but it is a useful contribution to the debate. First, the exercise of the commission’s powers is not in any way related to the number of charities which it has to regulate. In fact, it is rather disproportionate: a very small number of charities cause the most costs to the Charity Commission. Increasingly because of digitisation, most charities are dealt with in a low-cost and volume operation—there are just a few which are bigger.

Secondly, the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, was quite right when she said that it is the commission’s advice that is most valued. That is an area of work for which it receives no revenue at all. It is rather strange that this country has the most advanced charity legislation and regulation in the world, so much so that one would think we might be able to export it around the world to generate income. If I were setting up a charitable foundation in Russia, I would not want to register it there; I would want to do it here. Much as the previous Government set up an international commercial court in London, might the Charity Commission at some point look towards increasing its income by internationalising and commoditising what it does?

Finally, until the Charity Commission is willing to look to other regulators, such as the FCA, and to appreciate that it has common interests with them and to be less isolated in the way it pursues its function, it will inevitably always be running back to government asking for funding. As the commission has seen in the last few years, government funding is finite. The noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, has raised some really interesting questions which the sector needs to think about but which the commission needs to start thinking about much more creatively than it has done before.

Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Barker and Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts

Monday 29th June 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, having also been a member of the Joint Committee, I support the need for flexibility on this. I used the example at Second Reading of the Yazidi women who have been enslaved by ISIS and whom it is allegedly possible to ransom for $10,000. Clearly that money is going if not directly then indirectly to ISIS and these charities are faced with an incredibly difficult decision. On the one hand, morality drives you towards wishing to rescue these wretched women who are in a state of sexual slavery. On the other, there is the danger that if you do it, you may end up being prosecuted for the reasons that we have been discussing. I support the need to find some way through this thicket. Whether it is a DPP statement of guidelines or whatever else, I do not know, but we should not let it just ride through our Committee without having a real go at getting clarity as to how charities can operate, not only for the benefit of the individuals concerned but for the reputation of this country. Our soft-power reputation for making an important contribution to providing humanitarian aid in various parts of the world is important to us, and we need to spend time making sure that we maintain it.

[Baroness Barker]

My Lords, it is worth noting that this issue is not new. Anybody who can remember the 1970s knows that similar decisions had to be made then about whether charities raising money for organisations in Ireland were legitimate charities. I go back to the point raised by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, when he talked about reasonable excuse. If a charity is raising money in pursuit of its charitable objects, the question becomes how it pursues its charitable objects, not whether it is therefore deemed to be supporting terrorism. The Charity Commission, having raised the temperature around this issue, is under an obligation to work with the sector to come up with the guidance for charities, which is obviously necessary, on how they can pursue their legitimate charitable objects in the difficult parts of the world in which they have to work. This is not new, and it is not beyond the Charity Commission to facilitate an answer.

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[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

That is absolutely right. The noble Baroness did say that, but her amendment says, “All fundraising charities”. I know she slightly shifted the ground in the middle of her speech, and I accept that.

What, then, is the problem? There is reluctance in the sector to accept that every problem is everybody’s problem. There is a tendency to push the pea round the plate and to blame another sector, so the chuggers in the street blame the telephone collectors, who blame the direct mail people, and so on. They say, “It’s not our problem—it’s somebody else’s”. There is also reputational pride in individual charities: “We don’t do that sort of thing—other people do that”. Therefore there is a real need for the sector to understand that it is judged by the weakest link, and unless it takes steps to remedy it, the sorts of results the noble Baroness talked about will occur.

Secondly, there is a failure to see that the alphabet soup of regulatory bodies—the IoF, FRSB, the PFRA and the Charity Retail Association—is confusing to the public. They often appear to be acting quite separately; the FRSB’s report on Mrs Cooke said:

“Fundamentally, the FRSB Board believes that the IOF Code must be strengthened”,

as if they are completely separate organisations, way away from each other. It seems much neater to collaborate and work closely together.

There are three things that we should encourage the sector to do. The public need a single point of entry into the system—whether they wish to approach it by phone, by email or by letter—by which complaints or concerns can be addressed. All the bodies involved in charity fundraising regulation and all charities need to pool their sovereignty into a single charity self-regulating organisation, called, say, the charity fundraising authority. That would be tasked with producing national guidelines and model rules with which local authorities should comply. If they do not comply they should explain why they are not complying. They should also provide internal best practice rules for fundraising, in particular about things like passing on names of donors to other charities, because the Olive Cooke case was about the pressure built up by repeated approaches from charities. The Government need to oversee this, either directly or through the Charity Commission.

This will be a challenge to the sector, which has not found it easy to accept change and responsibility for one another. I accept and agree that the situation is not satisfactory and action needs to be taken, but I wish good luck to whoever takes it on and suggest that they pack a tin hat.

[Baroness Barker]

My Lords, I agree to a certain extent with what the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, said. He has wrestled with this particular issue for the best part of six years now and he bears some of the scars accordingly. There is no doubt that the voluntary and charitable sector is acutely aware that this particular case has raised this matter to a point where it can no longer be ignored or shunted around between different bodies. Some noble Lords were present at a national event held by the NCVO two weeks ago, at which Sir Stuart Etherington stated in terms to the great and the good of the voluntary sector there assembled that they cannot dodge this issue anymore and that the voluntary sector has to come up with some strong self-regulation. If it does not, it will find itself on the receiving end of regulation from government.

It really is quite tough for the voluntary sector to do that, not least because the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, is right: there are completely different types of organisations doing different things in different ways, which are all subsumed under the catch-all of “fundraising”. It is sometimes the bigger organisations—the multimillion pound organisations—that have the resources with which to emulate practice in the private sector, which is sometimes pressurised but which actually works. That is the problem: emotional appeals and pressure work.

Equally, very small charities that work locally and in a face-to-face way, raising small amounts, quite often have a higher level of ethical practice because they have to: they work in communities where, if they work even remotely unethically, they do not raise money. There are then those charities that operate in the middle, which sometimes are some of the most innovative organisations of all but which would be the ones that would fall foul of regulatory requirements, just because they do not have vast teams of people overseeing their compliance.

A fundamental problem for charities is that when they are open and transparent about their fundraising costs, they put themselves in the firing line for all sorts of comment. It makes them incredibly reluctant to do that—not because they want to deceive anybody but because the very same people who have taken it upon themselves, quite rightly, to criticise in cases such as this take the charities to task for doing that. You cannot run a compliant, ethical and effective fundraising operation on thin air. You cannot do it.

The noble Baroness is right to do her bit to up the temperature on the voluntary sector at this moment, but I am not sure she is absolutely right with the amendment that she has put forward. I believe that the voluntary sector should be allowed one last chance in the last chance saloon to put itself right. The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, is also right that there are too many different bodies all hovering around the same thing, clogging up the decision-making, and there needs to be a rationalisation of that. I would suggest that there should be a time limit, say of a year. If the voluntary sector does not come forward with a new code of conduct within that year, the Government would be absolutely right to step in at that point and exercise their powers.

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[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

The danger about moving as the noble Baroness says is that when in two years from now there is a charge from the Government for regulating the sector, there will be an enormous outcry, so what looks attractive to begin with will be inflexible, expensive and even more unpopular than the present system. It would be better from every point of view, accepting all the points about vulnerable people, if the sector could be persuaded to take up the challenge, find the will, find the money and make it happen, because it will make it happen in an effective way. The problem at the moment is that it has not really accepted that there is a fundamental problem and thinks that if there is a problem, it is not its problem but somebody else’s.

[Baroness Barker]

My Lords, I would like to follow that up by saying that I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, is absolutely right that one of the big issues—in this field in particular, but it is a big issue right across our society that we have not got to grips with—is how we will include people with dementia in all sorts of aspects of our life. This is true in terms of the NHS, and social care, and here.

The voluntary sector ought to be the one place in our society where we can go and talk to the Alzheimer’s Society and ask what a proper code of conduct and practice might look like. It is self-evident from what the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, said, that the commercial sector has not got this right yet. Organisations such as banks are the bodies in our society that should be at the forefront of dealing with transactions with individuals, even more than government. Banks have millions of transactions every day with millions of individuals, including older people. They clearly have not got it right. We should have one go in our sector at getting it right for everybody else. If that does not work, then by all means go down the route that the noble Baroness wants to go.

Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Barker and Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts

Tuesday 23rd June 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, I would like to focus on Amendment 2. I do not doubt that it is an exceptionally well-meaning amendment. If that sounds patronising, I do not mean to be at all; I think that it is very well meaning. We have all been horrified by the Jimmy Savile cases and the other cases of that nature, and we all want to do everything we can to protect children. The easy option is to say, “Absolutely, we should agree to this”, and that would avoid the by-product that one might be accused of being careless about the safety of children.

However, this afternoon I shall resist that temptation and ask my noble friend to reject the amendment. I do so on three grounds: those of efficacy, proportionality and impact. I want to say a word about each of those in turn but, before doing so, I draw the Committee’s attention to the fact that, before doing the charities review, I produced another report for the Government on what stopped people volunteering—what stopped people giving money and their time. The report was called Unshackling Good Neighbours. I took a lot of evidence from people about this and I should like to refer to some of it.

First, on efficacy, there are not many good outcomes from the terrible saga of Jimmy Savile and other prominent people, but one is that now the doziest trustee of the sleepiest charity is aware of CRB vetting and barring, as well as the legislation and the importance of complying with it. That is for two reasons: first, the risk to trustees themselves if they fail to do so; and, secondly, the risk to the charity they represent. We were talking about fundraising. The rows that there have been over unauthorised fundraising will be as nothing compared with the damage to a charity’s reputation if it is shown to be light-handed over the need to check its volunteers as appropriate.

The evidence that I had when preparing the Unshackling Good Neighbours report was that screening to prevent undesirable individuals becoming involved with children or vulnerable adults is now pretty fine. Indeed, if I heard the noble Baroness aright, the example that she gave was from 2010, about five years ago. We learned that the dangers, such as they were, were not so much within the institutions, because these undesirable people go where the softer targets are. They know that they are going to be checked if they work in schools with vulnerable adults, so the dangers are outside the school gates and, above all, on the internet, and that is where society needs to apply the pressure to ensure that our children are safe. Therefore, at the moment I do not see why this amendment would add to the efficacy of the vetting and barring arrangements vis-à-vis charities.

Secondly, on proportionality, vetting and barring legislation has nothing to do with charity law. It is the statute on its own that needs to be enforced. Vetting and barring is to do with a well-run organisation, whether it is a charity or not, but it does not particularly apply to charities. I think that government departments and the police need to enforce their own legislation and not pass it around, trying to find somebody else to do the checking for them. I am always concerned that if more and more is passed to charity trustees, fewer and fewer people will wish to take on the risks and responsibilities of what appears to be becoming a very one-sided state of affairs. If, as I believe, the mesh on the screen is pretty fine, should we be imposing another specific role on the Charity Commission? It should do it anyway, and in any case it has the powers to ask for this. The commission is already stretched. Vetting and barring is a role that is not part of charity law and there is already an established enforcement procedure for it.

If we are concerned about the situation with charities, why are we concentrating just on vetting and barring? Why do we not include health and safety? That, too, is very risky for people. Without sounding too flippant about it, a school headmaster whom I talked to said, “Actually, if you want to safeguard children with a new level of screening, the best way is to make sure that everybody everywhere drives at below 30 miles an hour, because that is how most children are injured”. Therefore, I think that proportionality is the second important issue.

The third is the question of impact. Surely our shared objective must be to encourage as many of our fellow citizens as possible to become involved in our civil society and to volunteer. It may be strange to the Committee but many potential volunteers find vetting and barring legislation intrusive, especially in the way that it is implemented and shows a lack of personal trust. The law says—I think that the Minister will put me right if I have got this wrong—that it is a question of frequent and intensive contact. Nervous trustees interpret those words pretty widely, and amendments like this will increase that nervousness and increase the likelihood of wholesale vetting and barring checks even when they are not needed.

One of the examples that I received was from a retired doctor living in the north of England: she was 65 and wished to do some work reading to Alzheimer’s patients. She was required to carry out the CRB vetting and barring check. She said to me, “Look, I’ve been before the GMC now for 35 years and if you can’t trust me now, what else do you require from me? I’m not going to do it as a matter of principle”, and she did not. That seems to me to be a shame. It is important that we do not allow this to become out of all proportion.

I have a second example, from a lady who got involved in a Manchester drama group. She was required to be checked and was happy about that but, she says,

“having been approved, we were invited to a session with the local child protection officer. I came away from that meeting with a number of very serious questions as to whether I should get involved with this sort of group. The talk left me feeling I would potentially be placing myself in situations of real risk. The child protection officer focussed the session on ensuring no adult put themselves in a vulnerable position e.g. if a child requests to go to the toilet—in no circumstance should an adult accompany them. If a child (with particular reference to girls) falls and cuts her knee, whilst wearing tights—under no circumstances should any adults remove the girl’s tights and help stem the bleed. No adult, whatever sex, should ever be alone with either one or more children. Needless to say, I came away from the session questioning the sense in many of the messages conveyed. As a caring responsible adult … I did not feel at all comfortable with the prospect of not being able to help an injured child”.

In accepting the spirit of the noble Baroness’s amendment, we have to be prepared to step back from this issue and accept that there is another side, however difficult it is to interpret. Why does this matter so much to us? All of us, particularly as parents, are of course horrified by child abuse and wish to stamp it out. Less attractively, however, there is an industry out there that actually profits from CRB vetting and barring checks. If noble Lords receive the same emails that I do, they will have had one today from one of the agencies that provide vetting and barring checks saying, “If you get checks through us for the next month, we’ll put £1 of the check cost towards charity because our chief executive’s going to run a marathon”—a way of appearing user-friendly. That is fine, but they are not going to tell us that fewer checks are needed; they will tell us that we need more. Some of the big charities have vetting and barring sections, and they too—after all, it is their job—are going to say, “We need more checks and more emphasis on them; that is the right way forward”.

I am not so sure. I think that right now the mesh performs its task pretty well. Is it perfect? Of course not. Whatever the size of the mesh, though, there will be failures, and when they happen we shall be told by someone that if the mesh had been finer we would have caught the person in question, and that will be very hard to rebut. Still, we need to stand back now and not impose further responsibilities on the Charity Commission that, as a by-product, may reduce the willingness to volunteer.

[Baroness Barker]

My Lords, I wonder if I might ask the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, a question about her Amendment 11, which, as she explained quite clearly, deals with children. A lot of my work with charities is about vulnerable adults. In fact, the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, is right: if there has been any silver lining to the horrors that have been unveiled over the last five years it is that there is now a much clearer focus on the need to protect children in all settings. That includes in charities.

The law governing abuse of vulnerable adults is much less robust. If one were to think about this in a strategic way, the increase in dementia that will happen over the next 10 to 20 years, barring the discovery of an effective medical treatment, means that scope for abuse of older people will be far greater than it is now. That is something to which good charities—there are many of them—are alive. They put in place robust procedures with their staff and their volunteers. I happen to think that it is no less serious than abuse of children. If I have an objection to that amendment it is that omission.

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[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, I was slightly surprised to see that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, was not going to rise to his feet to take us through the significant words “any serious incident”, as serious incidents obviously can be in the eye of the beholder, the second point,

“results in, or risks causing”,

which requires one to take a view of the future, which is also quite demanding, and the definition applied to “significant harm”. I wonder about the wording of this amendment, which I think would have a pretty chilling effect on trustees and might well lead to them ringing the Charity Commission with inquiries about the nature of particular incidents and whether they qualified under this quite broadly drawn clause, or indeed might lead to a rash of reports to the Charity Commission, which may or may not be a good use of the commission’s time and energy to follow up.

For my part, I go back to my wish to expect trustees to behave responsibly and for the Charity Commission to check them, but not to impose other and further duties. I drew a different conclusion from the noble Baroness about the Charity Commission’s guidance on its website, which seems to be a much better way of dealing with this than putting it into statute. The charity’s trustees would have to be aware of that guidance and follow it. I think that the noble Baroness was slightly unfair to the commission about the order in which it has rated the different offences. Just because child abuse comes a bit further down the list does not mean that it is considered less important; I do not think that is a fair conclusion to draw. It is more important that we should have flexible guidance and that the Charity Commission empower trustees. We should not impose in statute quite wide-ranging and imprecise duties that will be a further reason why people do not want to act as a trustee.

[Baroness Barker]

My Lords, I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, that I do not think anyone in this House feels that the whole matter of child abuse has been done and that there are no more protections to be had. There is a question about the extent to which we need to change the law as opposed to the extent to which we need to give advice and change practice within organisations. I rather think that large organisations, such as the BBC, and indeed small organisations, are very far from having fully worked out their response to the revelations that have come out over the past couple of years.

I, too, take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson: I think that the order in which things appear on the Charity Commission website, to be fair to the commission—and we are not always very fair to it—is as much to do with history as with anything else. In the time of Anthony Trollope, financial misdemeanours were at the forefront of the commission’s mind, not child abuse. I really think that the climate has changed. I shall not repeat the arguments that I made about older people under the previous group, because I misread the groupings, but I take the point about the protection of vulnerable adults.

I wanted to ask the noble Baroness about her Amendment 11—and perhaps the Minister might help with the answer to this—and the power to disqualify all trustees of a charity. My understanding is that it is a basic tenet of charity law that trustees are jointly and severally liable for decisions that are made or for failures within the charity. So I am surprised to learn that trustees can be removed only as individuals. I should have thought that their joint and several liability would mean that, if something as bad as the examples given by the noble Baroness were to happen, the whole board of a trust would be equally affected by it and would therefore they would all be removed. But maybe my understanding is slightly out of date.