Charities Bill [HL]

Baroness Goudie Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Goudie (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interests as in the register, as a trustee of a number of charities and as an ambassador.

I welcome this Charities Bill, which was announced in the Queen’s Speech on 11 May, and these important changes to charity law. I am pleased that the Charity Commission has been working with the Law Commission and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. These consultations have been going on for a number of years, and I now have the pleasure of seeing that they will be enacted. I am also pleased that the Labour Party supports this Bill.

Charities will be able to have access to a wider group of professional advisers on land disposal. We know that many charities are left properties and land by beneficiaries who want to help them, as they are personal charities in many ways. Also, many charities have properties as investments. As a patron of the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland, I know that we were lucky to have been able to sell two large offices at a time when the charity needed investment to buy a better office and work with more staff. In difficult times, it is often necessary to sell.

I am pleased about the flexibility around charity endowments. Endowments are an excellent form of good housekeeping. In the long term, as we come out of Covid, we will have a great opportunity to encourage smaller charities to allow endowments. We have seen how this has helped some charities that have had difficulties during and prior to Covid because of difficulties in themselves. Trustees will be able to borrow up to 25% of their present endowments, but I want to be assured that there will be a way of monitoring this and ensuring that the borrowing does not endanger them. I know that trustees would not wish to do that, but outside advisers should ensure that charities and their staff are not endangered by this.

On the question of appeals, I have been involved in cases where charities have had great appeals but the companies that charities use to assist them in their appeal are not always transparent. As the Bill proceeds, I would like to see us put in a few more clauses to protect charities from these companies and show how we will be more transparent, because the companies that assist charities always get paid. I hope that charities will have full disclosure when using these companies, because sometimes the amount that they take is more than the charities are able to raise. This is a really important issue for us and for the Government, as well as to protect trustees and staff.

Charities should also be responsible for declaring what funds are used for and whether any funds are over or cannot be used for what they were raised for. This is a really important issue that should be on charities’ websites. It is also important that charities have websites—they know that they have to—with all their funding, staff, et cetera.

The Minister knows that I have a view about the future of charity boards, as we discussed at one point during an Oral Question. I hope that, not through this Bill but through other legislation, we will look at corporate governance as we come out of Covid for charity trustees and how that should operate along the lines of company boards et cetera.