Charitable and Voluntary Sector

Baroness Morgan of Cotes Excerpts

Thursday 30th April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this important debate. I know from my time in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport how important civil society is and how hard the Minister and her colleagues will have worked with Treasury Ministers to put together the support package for charities already announced, which is very welcome, and the other schemes referred to.

In the time available I want to raise three brief but, I hope, important points. First, we have received a lot of lobbying and briefing from the larger charities ahead of this debate. However, I think we all know that it is the tiny charities that make a real difference at the grass roots in this country, for which not a huge amount of money makes a tremendous difference. I draw attention to my registered interest as a director of the Loughborough Wellbeing Café Project, which supports people with mental health problems in this corner of the east Midlands in Leicestershire. It does an awful lot online at the moment because physical meetings are obviously no longer possible.

Secondly, as has been hinted at, there must be a way of making any application process for small charities, and for charities in general, as simple as possible. I draw the attention of the Minister and her officials to a letter that those of us speaking in this debate have received from Lloyds Bank Foundation, which asks a series of questions about access to the National Lottery Community Fund—about definitions and how it will work—and I hope that the Minister might provide some more answers and details on those questions to help charities access that important funding.

Finally, as we are worrying about a second wave with regard to health risks, we also know that there will be second-order economic consequences, including for charities. I therefore add my support for the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, about the medical research charities. The package put in place at the moment is clearly designed to provide immediate crisis funding for our charities, but there are longer-term consequences, particularly for other, non-Covid-related conditions, where funding for medical research is critical. I hope the Government will provide funding to enable those important schemes to restart.