Voluntary and Charitable Sectors

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 26th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for introducing this debate and I declare an interest. I work with two consultancies which work very substantially with charities and local authorities.

The key issue facing the Government, the private sector and the voluntary sector could be summarised as the need to ensure that there is economic growth that benefits all parts of society, that we have effective public services that are responsive to people’s needs and that we have strong, united, resilient communities. That is the task for all three sectors. The measure of any organisation that is doing its job is that it knows the unique difference that it makes and that it can prove the progress it is making towards its objectives. In the context of thinking about public services, I want to focus on the specific things that Government can do to help voluntary organisations and local authorities in the tasks they have ahead of them.

The first thing the Government need to do in their programme of work is recognise that the key role that charities can provide in public services is the prevention of problems that usually, at a subsequent stage, wind up at the door of statutory services. It is incredibly difficult to prove that one has prevented something from happening. Thanks to the work of people such as Norman Lamb and Paul Burstow, we are beginning to recognise the importance of that in the NHS and social care. The challenge for this Government and other Governments is to set out their own central policies and outcome targets for government services, which include prevention outcomes that can perhaps be delivered by central government or by state organisations, but perhaps more effectively by social enterprises and charities. When he comes to sum up, I wonder whether the Minister could talk about how central government might do that.

The second thing the Government should do is to highlight the issue of commissioning and procurement. The way in which public services are procured has a profound effect on communities. In many communities it is still the case that the public authority is one of the biggest employers and determinants of growth. It is therefore of extreme importance that commissioning of services is done in a way that is beneficial to the social, economic and environmental needs of the local community. I am sure the Minister will know that EU procurement rules are being changed to enable far greater concentration to be put on the social and economic value of services. Can he say what the Government are doing to ensure that all public authorities understand that they now have this new flexibility to get greater social value in their area? Can he undertake to ensure that all public authorities realise that the Public Services (Social Value) Act came into force in 2012? It could have a profound impact as it gives local authorities leeway to ensure that price is not the sole determinant of a contract. They can take into account other factors and in certain circumstances can favour local providers, charities and social enterprises. This is a politically important development and it has so far been woefully underestimated.

The next thing the Government should do is ensure that the current high level of trust of charities that exists in the minds of the general public is maintained. The Government can do that in two ways. First, they can ensure that the Charity Commission—the regulator of the sector—continues to be an effective organisation that enjoys the trust of the sector and the public. Can the Minister update us on the programme of digitisation of the Charity Commission, which I think was announced last year? Providing relevant and up-to-date data on what charities are doing is a key and fundamental part of that trust. Can the Minister also talk about enabling the whole sector, including small charities, to become digital by default? There is complicated legislation covering how charities ought to be accountable, but the greatest thing that could be done would be to require them to set up a simple website containing their governing documents, annual report and most recent set of accounts. If that was done, we would not need an army of staff at HMRC going over these accounts as any member of the public could tell what a charity was doing and whether it was living up to its ideals.

Charities remain one of the most transformative forces in society. The key role of a charity is to transform the world around it, both its community and the public authorities. I want to talk about just one campaign being run at the moment which I think is leading the way and having a tremendous effect. The Alzheimer’s Society’s Dementia Friendly Communities programme is revolutionising the way we deal with people who have one of the most difficult conditions with which to live. I will just say this to noble Lords. In a couple of weeks’ time, I hope that they, like me, will be watching the Grand Départ 2014 of the Tour de France as it leaves Leeds. It is going to be a dementia-friendly event with lots of people with dementia who, on what I hope will be a sunny day in Yorkshire, will be remembering the happy times they had as cyclists in their youth, surrounded by those who feel confident to have them there as part of their day. That is what charities can do when they have the will.

Charity Commission

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2014 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Baroness Barker]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the effectiveness of the Charity Commission.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I declare a few interests. I own a business called Third Sector Business and am a consultant with B&W Consulting, both of which are small organisations that work extensively with charities.

I thank all noble Lords who will take part in the debate. The Charity Commission was founded under the Charitable Trusts Act 1853, and I suspect that the first debate on the subject of its effectiveness probably took place in 1854. It is a subject upon which many people have an opinion and few, if any, are neutral, and it is one to which Parliament returns often in the light of difficult cases. So it is today.

The commission has been heavily criticised in a series of reports over the past 12 months and at the moment appears somewhat beleaguered. The reason for holding this debate today is simple. As long as England and Wales continue to have a large and diverse charitable sector, it is in the best interests of government, charities and, above all, the public that there is an effective regulator of charities. We had the welcome news this week from the Charity Commission that the income of charities in England and Wales has risen by almost £3 billion and now surpasses £61 billion. That is a lot of public money sitting in trust, and the organisations to which it is entrusted have the right to show that they are worthy of that trust.

Today’s debate is an opportunity for Members of your Lordships’ House, with their long and distinguished experience in these matters, to think about ways in which we can rebuild confidence in the Charity Commission’s regulation of charities. It is not an opportunity for another bout of the favourite sport of bashing the commission. Noble Lords will remember that last year the commission appeared before the Public Accounts Committee, which asked the National Audit Office to review the commission’s effectiveness as a regulator and report back. The PAC produced a report written in characteristically scathing terms. It is a shame that the precision and forcefulness of its forensic examination and questioning was followed by a set of rather unclear and unhelpful suggestions for the commission. It would have been more helpful if the PAC had given a clear indication of exactly how it wished the commission to fulfil its functions in future.

The NAO report, the Regulatory Effectiveness of the Charity Commission, was published on 4 December, along with its report on the commission’s handling of the Cup Trust. Those reports do not make for easy reading but they make plain that the problems that the commission now faces are longstanding and are not the fault of the current officers of the commission, or indeed their immediate predecessors.

It is helpful to look briefly at the history of this issue to understand why some of those underlying problems have arisen. In the mid-1990s, charities grew substantially as providers of public services under contract. In 1996 the NCVO produced the Deakin report, which stated that in order to have a vibrant voluntary sector there had to be robust regulation, a clear role for the regulator and a clear legal framework within which the regulator and charities could operate with confidence. In 2001 the NCVO returned to the issue and produced a report entitled For the Public Benefit?, which, again, stated the need for a clear legal framework and, in particular, for there to be clear guidance about what is and is not a charity. That led to the 2004 Charities Bill. Many of your Lordships sat in this room throughout 2005 during the passage of that Bill and had yet more discussions on key issues such as: what is public benefit? I have to say that the decision of Parliament to leave the matter of what is public benefit to be decided by case law presents the commission with an ongoing and enduring problem in delivering its role as a regulator.

Today we are back to the position where the commission has had its budget reduced by one-third and, as ever, there are arguments about the way in which it has gone about pursuing particular cases. However, it is clear that we need to help the commission to recover ground and confidence. I work with lots of organisations, and the best of them—it does not matter which sector they are in: public, private or voluntary—do three things: they have a clear vision of what they are trying to achieve, they have the information that they need to fulfil that vision, and they have excellent relationships with other organisations. Were we to look at the commission in terms of those three issues, that might help us, the Government and the commission to see our way forward.

At heart, there remains a lack of clarity about what the commission’s job is. Following the strategic review of the commission a couple of years ago, everyone has now agreed that its principal role is to be a regulator; that is the unique role that it can fulfil. However, what do we want it to regulate—simply charity law, compliance with charity law, or the increasingly individual charities? In certain parts of government, I think that there is a view that we should have a de minimis regulator along the lines of the FCA, which simply regulates compliance. I do not think that is right. We have the most advanced, complex and vibrant voluntary sector in the world, and we need a regulator that is much more proactive about setting standards of good governance and trust. We need the Charity Commission to regulate within that framework.

On the matter of relationships with other organisations, I have always had a feeling that the commission is a somewhat distant and aloof organisation. In these times of straitened economics, the commission needs to be far more adept at developing good strategic relationships with other organisations. It ought to proactively signpost charities and the million trustees who use its services to go to other organisations for top-quality information and advice. It has always been reticent about doing that in the past.

The principal issue on which there could be a steer from government is the relationship between the commission and other regulators. The report into the Cup Trust has shown clearly that HMRC was at fault. From the beginning, it was clearly an issue of tax evasion and should have been dealt with primarily by HMRC, with some assistance from the Charity Commission on its areas of specialism. In future, that is what the commission should do with all regulators. The onus should be on other regulators, and the Charity Commission should be a specialist back-up point.

In the very little time remaining, I want to say one thing. The budget of the commission has been cut; we all hear about that endlessly. The Government should make one piece of investment: in the commission’s digital strategy. I am sad enough that I use the Charity Commission’s register all the time. It is incredibly clunky; you have to really know what you are looking for. In this day and age, it does not answer the strategic needs of anyone—of government or of the sector. The single most important thing that could be done to encourage public trust in charities—that is what this has all really got to be about—is to require any organisation that calls itself a charity to have the most simple of websites, on which it must have its annual report, its governing document, its latest accounts and its statement of activities. If the Charity Commission were in a position to actively promote digital transparency throughout the sector, far fewer problems would end up at its door. The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, was absolutely right. There are 175,000 registered charities, and a greater number of very small organisations that call themselves charities but are not registered. The commission alone cannot police every one of them but, with the help of the Government, who are currently pursuing their own digital strategy, it can drive up standards of transparency and accountability. I hope that we will focus on that today.

Civil Society

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Prosser, for introducing this debate and I declare an interest. I have a small consultancy that works with charities.

I am not a big fan of the phrase “civil society”. Every time that I come across it, I think that it does a disservice to what it is trying to describe, but I cannot think of anything better. I am not always entirely sure what it is. I listened to the noble Baroness, Lady Prosser, giving her explanation at the beginning. For me, civil society means the point at which the statutory, voluntary and private sectors come together to make a difference to the common good and the lives of citizens.

If we had had this debate about 10 or 15 years ago, I do not think that we would have talked very much, if at all, about the role of the private sector in all of this, but we do now. It is the part of civil society about which we know least. There is a new report by Dr Catherine Walker, published by Directory of Social Change, which looks at corporate giving. There is some very interesting information in it that noble Lords will probably not have heard before.

The report is an analysis of the giving of the top 550 corporate givers. It uncovers that companies play an important part in political and social development, but there is little evidence about what they do. They give approximately £700 million to £800 million, though it is a bit difficult to tell, because some multinational companies do not declare. That represents 2% of all charitable income, and 20% of companies give 90% of the cash that is given to charities. Cash donations to charities make up about 77% of the donations and the balance is gifts in kind. The average donation by a company is about £1.1 million. There are 73 companies that give more than £1 million. As far as we can work out, the total contribution as a proportion of pre-tax profits is 0.3%. Does that not say something?

In England, the biggest beneficiaries of charitable corporate donations are in Greater London, which gets about 33%. The West Midlands gets 1%. As far as we can tell—where it is possible to tell—the giving is totally unrelated to need. Corporations give where their offices are. They give primarily to community and social welfare charities, to education and to children’s charities; more than 50% of all giving goes to them. Causes such as human rights and women’s issues are far less popular. They get less than 10%. Arts and culture are traditionally seen as the domain of corporate givers rather than of individuals.

Despite everything that has happened since 2008, the financial sector is still the top sector for charitable giving. It gives about £245 million in cash. The least charitable sector, with an average spend of just about £300,000, is technology. I am glad that the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, is now in her place. There are also corporate trusts, and they provide about half a billion pounds in grants, 50% of which goes to three causes: education, community and social welfare, and children. This is the first report of its kind and it has set a benchmark in reporting. I hope that it will be possible to repeat the exercise and grow the statistical basis. We know that we need more transparency in reporting. There are also some limitations. We know practically nothing about the corporate giving of small and medium-sized enterprises.

The report is an important piece of work. Why is it important? It shows that giving varies dramatically across the country and that there is a key role for government in making up the deficits geographically and in terms of sectors, because of the disproportionate benefit to different localities.

I hope the Minister saw the Institute for Government’s report Making Public Service Markets Work because the private sector increasingly plays a huge role in and benefits enormously from the delivery of public services. We know that the big four—G4S, Capita, Serco and Laing—get by far the majority of the billions of pounds of public service expenditure. We also know from last year’s NCVO and CAF survey that local charities are beginning to lose out because of the way in which commissioning and, in particular, procurement is being done. The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, was absolutely right.

In its submissions to government on government procurement, NCVO said that social value ought to be both the strategy objective and at the forefront of the Government’s policies on procurement and commissioning. The Social Value Act is incredibly important as public services will remain large and significant employers in different localities, particularly in hard-hit areas outside London. It is therefore important that we take all this information into account and that the Government rethink the part they have to play in relation to the private sector’s role in civil society and in enabling all citizens in all parts of the country to get the best from it.

Mental Health (Discrimination) (No. 2) Bill

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Friday 18th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker]

My Lords, I forgot to put my name on the list, but I hope that noble Lords will permit me a couple of minutes to make two points that have not been made so far in this debate. I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, for his work in bringing this issue back to the House.

The legislation that the Bill seeks to repeal was passed because, at the time, Members of Parliament thought that they were protecting people vulnerable because of mental illness and the organisations named in the Bill. Since then, there have been two significant developments that make this Bill appropriate. The first is that the Mental Health Act 2007 states that mental disorder,

“means any disorder or disability of the mind”.

The effect of that, which was intended by the then Labour Government, means that today mental health legislation extends to a very wide range of people, including those who have mild depression. People who would never believe it until it happens to them can find themselves subject to mental health legislation and being excluded from the duties set out in the Bill. That should not be the case.

Secondly, the Mental Capacity Act 2005—a piece of legislation of which the last Labour Government should be rightly proud—enshrines in law the common understanding that we all have, that people with mental health problems or learning disabilities can vary day to day. Their condition can vary; it can sometimes be good and sometimes be bad. Since the legislation was passed, it has become much more common for people with mental health problems, such as those who are bipolar, to state at a point when they are well that they know from past experience that they may during a period of illness make unwise decisions. They can make an advance statement that says, “Now that I am well, I wish to say that if during my illness I make unwise decisions, I wish those decisions to be ignored”. That makes episodes of mental distress much more manageable than they ever were in the past. For those two reasons, it is very important that we pass the Bill. For example, with juries, there is no reason why a major trial should be jeopardised, because people can recuse themselves; they can go to see the judge and make sure that they are not holding things up.

There is one other reason why this provision is important, and I refer back to the new organisation of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, Insight: Research for Mental Health. It is the objective of everyone who works in mental health services to fund research that will one day find the cause of mental distress, new treatments and ultimately, one day, a cure. If we continue to debar people from aspects of public and economic life, in particular from roles that give them meaning, we delay the point at which we will be able to find those treatments and cures that will enable people with mental health problems to do as they do in many cases now—to continue to function day by day as valued and valuable economic and social contributors to our society.

For all those reasons, this is not just a Bill that we should commend. It is one that we should ask the Government not only to pass but to help to be implemented as quickly as possible.

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.

Public Services

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, for introducing this debate. I declare an interest; I have a consultancy called Third Sector Business.

Three years after the financial crisis in the City, the shock waves are making their way out to local government and to charities. The noble Lord mentioned the survey results that came out this week from the Charities Aid Foundation. They should have come as no surprise. The survey showed that there are approximately 10,000 charities that are very vulnerable because they derive a large percentage of their income from delivering services through contracts with local authorities. Probably some of the charities have lost sight of the purpose for which they were set up. Some of them may deserve to move over and make way for more innovative and interesting social enterprises that are very tech-savvy and cost-effective; but some of them for years have been subsidising local authority service provision, and some of them are very important to the communities that they serve and to which they bring additional benefits. Therefore, some of the organisations deserve help to survive.

The Government recognised that in April this year when the Cabinet Office launched the £10 million Investment and Contract Readiness Fund, run by Social Investment Business. That is a three-year programme, but it is urgent that learning from the programme should be got out quickly to charities that clearly need to develop new business models and the sort of skills that the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, talked about, such as measuring their impact, knowing their cost base and, above all, being able to demonstrate that they are the best organisations to serve the people who need public services.

In 2007-08, the Public Administration Committee published Public Services and the Third Sector: Rhetoric to Reality, in which it asked: “Does size matter?”. It is a hugely important question. In future, public services that will be delivered by the third sector will primarily be those where it can be demonstrated that money is being saved elsewhere in the public expenditure budget. The problem with that is that often the people who deliver the services have real difficulty demonstrating the savings and the value to other parts of the public service system. Under the previous Government, Total Place budgeting began to address that issue. Under this Government, community budgeting is going to continue—but it has a long way to go before it will be possible for one public service commissioner to say, hand on heart, that giving money to a particular voluntary organisation has definitely saved money.

It is particularly important for models of preventive services—in other words, services that apply across whole communities that are at risk rather than to individuals. Will the Government put greater effort into developing the community budgeting skills of local authorities and of the voluntary sector? Community budgeting will only work, as the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, said, if we have a commissioning process which is sufficiently flexible to deal with the major problems which we have. There is a question about how we configure large and small voluntary organisations in future to deliver public services on the scale which we know is going to be necessary. We know that in social care, in order to relieve the pressure on NHS budgets, the voluntary sector is going to have to deliver a lot of high-quality services. In conclusion, this is going to be a very turbulent but quite exciting time if the Government can assist the voluntary sector with two or three specific targeted things which I have mentioned. I hope the Minister will say that they can.

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?