Charities Bill [HL]

Baroness Greengross Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Greengross (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interests as in the register. I welcome the changes proposed in this Bill, based on the Law Commission recommendations from 2017. I also pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, for the statutory review of the Charities Act that he carried out in 2012, and for the very relevant points that he has just raised with the Committee.

As someone who has had a leadership role in charities for many years, I know all too well how much of a burden the legal restrictions are for those trying to manage these organisations. While I welcome the proposed changes in the Bill, I do so with some words of caution as to why we must continue to have a strong legal framework governing how charities operate.

In particular, I wish to draw attention to the extension of cy-près whereby the wishes of a donor to charity can be carried out even if the original purpose of the gift has failed. The Bill proposes to extend these cy-près powers to include donations of £120 or less, or where a trustee resolution has agreed to use the funds for a different charitable purpose. In most cases, the charities would use this money sensibly and for a charitable purpose as close as possible to the original, but experience has sadly taught me that there will be times when this will not be the case. Unfortunately, it is often with small transactions or donations that fraud can occur.

For many years, I was director-general of Age Concern England. Age Concern was not, and is not, one organisation; it is a federation of local Age Concern organisations, most of which operate professionally and play an important role supporting older people in their communities. Every so often, though, in my experience, there would be a rogue element somewhere—in the federation, these things happen. On one occasion, for example, someone involved with an Age Concern local charity had managed to manipulate their partner and unbeknown to them had stolen money from the local charity to build themselves a house with a lot of land. That person was caught and ended up receiving a long prison sentence. As chief executive, I had to travel out of London to where this local charity was based to convince the local police not to publicise the case to the national press. Fortunately, they agreed, for if they had not, the reputation of the national federation would have been undermined by the actions of an individual operating in a local charity.

These stories are fortunately rare, and in this case the person responsible was caught and the money was recovered, but it illustrates why we need strong legal frameworks regulating how charities operate. While having to comply with the Charities Act is often cumbersome and time-consuming, having these sorts of rules governing charities reduces the risk of this type of fraud, so while I support the Bill and the changes it recommends, I do so with the warning that legislation and safeguards about the way that charities are run are often strict for good reason. We lose them at our peril.