Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill [Lords]

Anna Turley Excerpts

Thursday 3rd December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Anna Turley (Redcar) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a privilege to respond to the Bill on Second Reading as shadow Civil Society Minister. I thank the Minister and his colleagues for bringing the Bill before us, and for the open and co-operative way in which they have sought to engage with us. It is much appreciated. I thank all the civil servants involved in drafting the Bill, and all the charities and organisations that have contributed to its development and to our understanding. I also thank noble Lords, who used their customary wisdom and experience to refine and improve the Bill in its passage through the other place.

This is a good and important Bill, and we on the Labour Benches welcome it. There is, of course, some room for improvement, and I will come on to that in my speech, but its objectives are to be welcomed. We all know the vital role that charities play in building a strong and flourishing civic society. Thousands of people around the country give up their time every day to work as trustees and volunteers. Thousands more depend on the vital services they provide. As the Minister said, charities change and save lives. They support the poorest and the most vulnerable. They pick up the pieces of social and economic failures. They heal, they tend the sick, they bring dignity in old age and they give children the best start in life. We owe it to all of them to provide a secure and robust regulatory environment that inspires confidence and allows the sector to flourish.

The sector has had a difficult year. The regulation of the sector has come under increasing scrutiny and we have seen high-profile cases that have been deeply concerning. We have seen poor governance, financial mismanagement and, as the Minister set out, concerning fundraising methods. These cases are extremely rare, but they are deeply disappointing to the rest of the charitable sector. It is important that we support and encourage confidence in the wider sector by clamping down on any abuse. That is why we welcome the Bill.

It has been good to see the sector itself step up to the plate to tackle so many of these concerns. It is vital that we play our part in supporting the sector in that process by giving it the legislative and regulatory environment it needs. It is also vital that we get the right balance: a strong and sound regulatory environment that ensures trust but allows charities the freedom to be innovative, enterprising and, crucially, effective in delivering their social aims and objectives.

We welcome the core aims of the Bill. We support providing stronger protection for charities in England and Wales from individuals who are unfit to be charity trustees. That is vital to ensure good governance and prevent abuse. We support the measures to equip the Charity Commission with new and strengthened powers to tackle abuse more effectively and efficiently. To ensure confidence in the sector, it needs to be able to respond quickly and decisively to any concerns raised. Further clarifications are required, however, and we will work with the Minister to resolve them in Committee.

I want to put on record at this point my pleasure in hearing the Minister say the Government will use the Committee stage to look again at fundraising: at whether self-regulation is sufficient and what steps we can take if it fails. We look forward to working with him on that.

We welcome the aim to give charities a new power to make social investments; some are already doing that, but it is important we give charities the reassurance to enable them to do so. We know that one in three British consumers will pay more for products with a positive social or environmental outcome. It is important that we enable the charitable sector to encourage that.

There are some areas, however, where we believe the Bill can be improved. We will look to work with the Government during the progress of the Bill in Committee to do so. We will be seeking to discuss the following points.

First, on the freedom to speak and engage in political discourse, we continue to oppose the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014. We intend to use the passage of the Bill to highlight and defend the right of charities by law to campaign and speak out on issues in line with their objectives. So often, it is charities that end up picking up the pieces of our policy failures. It is vital that we give them the right to campaign on their issues, and to challenge and hold us to account. That is a key part of a strong, healthy democratic and civic society.

Secondly, on clause 9 and the disposal of assets, the clause sets out that

“The Charity Commission shall ensure that independent charities are not compelled to use or dispose of their assets in a way which is inconsistent with their charitable purposes.”

We will continue to defend clause 9, so as to give housing associations the statutory backing to ensure they can make their decisions in the best interests of their tenants, and not be bullied by a Government determined to sell off and run down affordable housing. We think it is absolutely right that charities have the freedom to dispose of their assets in the way that they see fit.

Thirdly, on the protection of children and vulnerable adults, the Bill provides an opportunity to better protect children and vulnerable people. We are grateful that the Government accepted proposals in the other place to include people on the sex offenders register as among those who will be debarred from being trustees, but we believe there are other measures we can look at to strengthen that area. We will bring them forward in Committee.

Finally, on clarifying some of the powers of the Charity Commission, the Bill seeks to strengthen the powers of the Charity Commission. We believe there should be a strong, well supported regulator of charities that acts fairly and has the appropriate powers. Ultimately, the regulator must preserve public trust and confidence in charities. However, some provisions in the Bill could threaten charities’ independence. For example, there are no objections in principle to giving the Charity Commission the power to give warnings to a charity, but the current drafting raises some concerns within the sector.

For example, the commission can issue a warning if it thinks there has been a breach of duty or trust or other misconduct or mismanagement. It is possible that the commission could issue a warning about an issue of relatively low concern. Also, a disagreement between the trustees and the commission could arise about whether the warning was justified. It is therefore important to attach safeguards to the issuing of a warning, and failure to comply with it should not in itself have significant consequences that could be disastrous for charities. I hope that we can continue to discuss the matter further in Committee. In addition, the commission should give adequate notice of its intention to issue a statutory warning.

These are issues that should be discussed in Committee because clearer guidelines should exist on the number of days and other protective remedial powers. Given the implications a warning would have for the charity in question, we should also consider a right of appeal to the charity tribunal. I look forward to working with Ministers on those issues as we go through Committee.

In summary, we believe all these areas can be discussed and looked at in more detail as we take the Bill forward in Committee. This is an important Bill. It has some room for improvement, but offers a great deal to build trust and confidence in the charitable sector, which is why the Opposition will support it. I look forward to working with Ministers in Committee.

Community and Voluntary Sector Funding

Anna Turley Excerpts

Tuesday 24th November 2015 Westminster Hall

[Michelle Donelan]

I agree. I am very much involved with the carers’ organisation in my constituency and I completely understand that point.

We need to go further to encourage and enable more people in long-term unemployment to go into volunteering schemes. We already do that, but we need to work more closely with volunteer centres to ensure that it happens more. There is a lot of concern about the loss of benefits to volunteers, so there is much work to do there.

We need to invest to encourage more young people to volunteer as well. Some fantastic work has already been done, such as that of the National Citizen Service. It is important today to focus not only on the negatives, but on the positives. Seventy-five thousand young people have changed their lives and got involved in their communities through the NCS. We should take note of the things that are working as well.

[Anna Turley (Redcar) (Lab/Co-op)]

I share the hon. Lady’s positive view of the NCS and its good work with young people. At the same time we are seeing huge cuts to youth services across local authorities and the NCS works with a fairly small number of young people compared with the great majority who can access mainstream services. Does she not think that the cuts to local authorities also impact on young people’s preventive services?

[Michelle Donelan]

The cuts to youth services are for a totally different debate, because they are not purely about volunteering. There is a vast variety of youth services depending on the different areas and models involved. There is also the question of replacement: in many areas, including mine, the council has worked closely with the community to offer a replacement service that is the most cost-effective and efficient for the people using it.

In addition, the Government are providing funding for campaigns such as the national Step Up To Serve #iwill campaign, which aims to make social action part of the lives of as many 10 to 20-year-olds as possible. More remains to be done, however, and I am quite shocked that there is still no formal encouragement in respect of the value of getting volunteering into schools, through things such as voluntary placements. We have always had a system of work placements, but there has never been a system of voluntary placements as a formal mechanism in the UK. I have approached my local volunteer centre about the issue, and we are trying to do something with willing schools in my constituency.

We need to change the ethos and encourage more businesses to allow voluntary days, which would build on the Government’s initiative on that. There have been other great investments, which we should not fail to mention, such as Big Society Capital, tax relief for social investment, social impact bonds and £70 million for social investment in the investment and contract readiness fund.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anna Turley (Redcar) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Moon, and my privilege to respond as shadow Minister for Civil Society. It is also a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin John Docherty) who set out clearly and powerfully the role of the community and voluntary sector in Scottish civil society and its impact on the Scottish economy. He also talked about the Big Lottery Fund, which I will discuss in some detail. I share his deeply held concerns.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah) for calling this extremely important and timely debate. She set out eloquently and passionately the challenges faced by the community and voluntary sector. She also gave a heartfelt example of how crucial services such as the Blenheim Project in her constituency are to people in need, in particular at times of crisis.

Tomorrow, the Chancellor will set out his departmental spending priorities. It is his chance to set out his vision for the kind of society and economy he wants to build. The question for us today is whether that vision will be one that recognises and values the role that the community and voluntary sector can play in building a safe, healthy, decent and prosperous society. Many Members have set out fantastic examples of great work done by civil society organisations in their local areas, as well as the challenges such organisations face.

The hon. Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan) mentioned Mind. Many of us would want to pay tribute to the great work that Mind does, not least in my own constituency, where it has been dealing with some of the repercussions of the huge job losses we have faced. She made a really important point about the preventive role it plays in reducing pressure on our public services. That also made me think of the importance of investment to prevent costs further down the line in public services. She also mentioned gift aid. There is an important message for the Government on that: they should look again at whether they might loosen the eligibility criteria for the small donations scheme, which so far has generated only £21 million, not the £105 million expected. That might be something that they could explore further.

My hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones), who is chair of the all-party group on civil society and volunteering, spoke eloquently about the importance of core funding. Any of us who have had experience of working with the voluntary and community sector will know how important that funding is to enable voluntary organisations to keep the lights on and keep functioning, when often grant money for specific projects is more readily available. She also talked about the importance of new technology. There are some really interesting issues there that we can look to take forward.

The hon. Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter) made some important points about businesses giving up time for people to volunteer. It is important always to look at the contribution that everyone can make, not just the professionals within the community and voluntary sector. We recognise the importance of diversity of funding and of capacity within the sector; to my mind, however, we must not lessen the importance of the role of partnership with public services and the support of local authorities and central Government, as they are often absolutely critical to funding projects that would not necessarily get private sector support.

My hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Gerald Jones) talked eloquently about the impact of cuts on the devolved Administrations and on local government, and the effect that had on local communities in his area. My hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) paid tribute to Hands Up For Down’s, which sounds like a really excellent organisation doing great work. She also mentioned the impact of cuts to the Big Lottery Fund.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff Central (Jo Stevens) talked eloquently about Open Public Services, which ranks alongside the big society as a flawed philosophy, set out by the Government five years ago. It has seen many contracts gobbled up by the private sector and larger charities, to the detriment of smaller charities, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq) also pointed out. I thank all my colleagues for their important contributions to the debate.

The worry for many of our hard-working community and voluntary sector volunteers and professionals, as well as those who rely on their vital services, is whether the Chancellor will tomorrow hasten his assault on the sector, which has already seen the big society agenda disappear like a mirage, wiped out by a wave of cuts over the past five years. Figures I have received from the NCVO show the sector is already receiving £1.7 billion less of its income from Government than it was in 2010-11, and the number of grants to the sector from Government has halved since 2002. The charity sector faces a shortfall of £4.6 billion by 2018-19 on current spending trajectories. Charities and community groups have been hit by a triple whammy of cuts to their grants and income; a reduction in local government support, with partnering public services facing their own drastic cuts, leading many of them to cut preventive services; and having to deal with a large rise in demand.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West mentioned, according to the Charity Finance Group, 70% of charities expect demand for their services to continue to rise in the next 12 months. In 2009, the figure was half that, with only 36% of charities thinking demand would rise. Charities know they are picking up the consequences of this Government’s economic and social policy failures. They are often catching the people who have fallen through the gaps and are too often failed by the state. Charity and community groups are fearful of tomorrow’s statement. They are asking whether tomorrow will see a spending review that puts the final nail in the big society coffin and shows that, like the Tories of the past, this is a Government who believe in neither the state nor society.

Nowhere is that threat more clearly exposed than in the expected cuts to the Big Lottery Fund, as many of my colleagues have rightly set out. The Big Lottery Fund has been a vital ingredient in helping many community organisations to deliver vital services in the local community and transform lives, particularly in our most deprived areas. The rigour that the Big Lottery Fund applies to its funding process ensures that charities can prove they work to change people’s lives—a rigour that has been sadly lacking from the Government’s own direct distribution of money to charities, as highlighted by the Kids Company saga.

If it is true that the Chancellor intends to take around £320 million from the Big Lottery Fund and redirect it to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to spend on arts and sports, it is a shameful act of misappropriation. The Chancellor should not be raiding the people’s lottery to plug gaps in his departmental spending, to try to compensate for the total failure of his long-term economic plan. The British people donate these funds when they buy lottery tickets in good faith that the money will go to good causes—village halls, youth clubs, playgrounds, domestic violence support, care for older people and those with disabilities, and the many groups we have heard about this afternoon. Ninety per cent. of Big Lottery Fund grants are less than £10,000, and they are a lifeline to small local groups, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West set out, so this act will hit the smallest charities doing the most important work in the most deprived areas.

As the former Conservative Prime Minister John Major recently said, lottery money was to be from the people, for the people. The guiding principle has always been that lottery money adds to, rather than replaces, public funding. Is the Minister going to allow that principle to be shredded to compensate for his Government’s failure to protect and support our public services? Is he aware that some 3,800 charities are still waiting for the repayment of £425 million that was taken from the Big Lottery Fund to help pay for the 2012 Olympics? Depriving vulnerable people and communities of support during this difficult time is outrageous and is contrary to the very nature of what players of the lottery expect will happen with their contributions. I urge the Minister to ask his right hon. Friend the Chancellor to think again.

In conclusion, I hope the Minister will give some reassurance to the community and voluntary sector ahead of tomorrow that the Government still value the contributions it makes to our society. In 2009, the Prime Minister, then Leader of the Opposition said he wanted to

“set free the voluntary sector and social enterprises to deal with the…problems that blight so many of our communities”.

Far from setting them free, this Government are starving them of funds and forcing many of them, as we have heard today, out of operation. I urge the Minister to fight for the future of a sector that is vital to the strength, health and dignity of our society.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Halfon]

As I said, I suggest the hon. Lady holds her horses and waits to see what happens in 24 hours. I will talk about what we have already done to fund civil society and big society in a moment.

The Government recognise that individuals are looking beyond the state and want to help friends, family, their community and their local services. People are becoming far more community-minded and are asking not what their community can do for them, but what they can do for their community. Millions give their time, energy and expertise to help others, and they put service above self. I am wearing a Heart 4 Harlow badge, which is from a social action project created by faith communities in my constituency. They work together to do social action and to help our town. This social action—this people power—is the foundation of the bigger and stronger society that we all desire.

It is no surprise that the Charities Aid Foundation found that the UK is the most generous nation in Europe. That means that the public are giving twice, which it is important to note, both in their taxes and personal donations. With all the talk of funding, it is also worth noting that taxpayers are giving about £13 billion a year to charities up and down our country—remember, that is not Government money, but taxpayers’ money.

We should also note that five years ago, our country was broken. We had experienced the deepest recession in living memory and the deficit between public spending and the Government’s revenue was unsustainable. Unemployment had risen to record levels and household debt was higher than many of us would agree is sensible. The societal issues that stemmed from those circumstances meant that public services and civil society both faced an incredible challenge—one of increasing demand, but without the ability easily to invest increased resources to meet it.

[Anna Turley]

If the Minister is setting out the challenges and saying that there is a consequence for public services and the big society, we are now five years on and the crisis is even greater for the community and voluntary sector. Is that not a consequence of the last five years of economic policy as well?

[Robert Halfon]

As I said, the taxpayer is spending £13 billion a year, which is a sizeable chunk of money, on charities.

I turn to the Government’s achievement over the last years in pursuit of this vision. There is, for example, the community organisers programme, which is training more than 6,500 organisers to work in hundreds of cities, towns and villages. Community organisers are not about replacing existing jobs or services; they are about people power, giving social entrepreneurs, charity workers and volunteers the real tools to help themselves. One example is the work of community organiser, Tania Swanson, in Clacton in Essex. She works with the Rural Community Council of Essex to assist with projects on affordable housing, energy efficiency and community farming, as well as on many other community initiatives.

The big society has meant the establishment of the Centre for Social Action, too, which has seen an investment of around £70 million of real money from the Cabinet Office, commissioners, local authorities, philanthropists and other partners into 215 social action projects in England, working alongside and helping public services. Just as the Government have liberated business entrepreneurs from red tape and regulation, so the big society has worked to free charities, voluntary groups and social entrepreneurs from red tape. There has been £200 million of investment to help charities transform themselves to be more effective. We have seen the creation of the world’s first social investment bank, Big Society Capital. A prime example of that, and one I know about, is the £825,000 invested into the Essex social impact bond to help vulnerable young people avoid care or custody and stay at home with their families.

To me, perhaps one of the most exciting and forward-looking of the big society projects is the National Citizen Service, which was highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham. It gives young people a real chance in life and a real experience of community ethos, social action and important skills that they will have for life. Over 5 million hours of volunteering has been given by NCS participants to their local communities; that is a whole generation for whom social action has become the norm, not the exception. Ensuring that future generations are more socially minded is key to the work of the National Citizen Service. A lot of work has been done to help young people. In my constituency of Harlow, we have the Young Concern Trust, which does an enormous amount to support disadvantaged young people.

I said earlier that the big society was about social capital, social entrepreneurship and people power, and that that is the continued mission of the Government over the next five years.

Oral Answers to Questions

Anna Turley Excerpts

Wednesday 21st October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Anna Turley (Redcar) (Lab/Co-op)]

Q11. On 16 September, the Prime Minister told this House that he would do everything he could to keep steelmaking on Teesside. He failed. Now we learn that the £30 million support package that the Government promised for retraining and economic regeneration is not only going towards the statutory redundancies of those who lost their jobs: I have an email from the Minister with responsibility for the northern powerhouse to a constituent in Stockton South that says it will also be used to pay for the final salaries of those who have lost their jobs in the past month. This is an insult. How much more injustice does the Prime Minister think the people of Teesside can endure?

[The Prime Minister]

We will do everything we can to help, including the financial package that the hon. Lady set out—making sure we help people with retraining and new opportunities, and with bringing new industries to the area—but let me tell her what we cannot do. We cannot in this House set the world price of steel and we cannot overcome the fact that the SSI plant had lost £600 million in this Parliament. Those are the facts which, frankly, Opposition Members have to engage with.