Public Administration Committee Report (Charity Commission)
Debate between Bernard Jenkin and David Nuttall
Mr Jenkin
I will give way to my hon. Friend when I am close to the end of my remarks.
We recommend that the presumption of public benefit in the 2006 Act should be repealed along with the Charity Commission’s statutory public benefit objective. The situation must be rectified with a new Act to allow the commission to focus on its proper job. Parliament, not the Charity Commission, should determine the criteria for charitable status and should not delegate them to an executive body.
We concluded that the other objectives for the Charity Commission set by the 2006 Act are also far too vague and aspirational in character—an all-too-frequent shortcoming of modern legislative drafting—to determine what the Charity Commission should do, given the limitations on its resources, to fulfil its statutory objectives.
Mr Jenkin
The Cabinet Office must consider how to prioritise what is expected of the Charity Commission, so that it can function with its reduced budget. That must enable it to renew its focus on regulation as its core task. The commission is not resourced, for example,
“to promote the effective use of charitable resources”
or, for that matter, to oversee a reappraisal of what is meant by “public benefit”; nor is it ever likely to be.
PASC’s report also makes recommendations on the issue of chugging—that is, the face-to-face fundraising whereby many feel pressured by chuggers.
Mr Jenkin
That is exactly right. The legal advice we received on this question is quite clear: in the 1949 case of Gilmour v. Coats, the House of Lords made it clear that a cloistered religious order is not charitable, as any benefit is restricted to its members, who are a private class and not a sufficient section of the public. It has never been the case that every religious organisation is automatically charitable. However, the judgments in two other cases—Neville Estates v. Madden in 1962 and Re Banfield in 1968—were that a private religious group that is not wholly shut off from the world at large may be charitable.
The 2006 Act was not intended to introduce anything new, and it may have introduced some instability by requiring the commission to think up guidance on public benefit. That is what we feel was the real mistake—the apparent removal of the presumption and the requirement to produce guidance. If Parliament wants public benefit to be defined, it should define public benefit or it should leave the matter to the courts. Making the Charity Commission use its intervening judgment is what Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts described as the hospital pass.
Mr Nuttall
I thank my hon. Friend and his Committee for their report. I look forward to reading it in more detail, but I will be honest and say that I have only had a chance to skim through it. I want to concentrate on conclusion 28, on the payment of trustees. Does he agree with me that in cases where there are voluntary trustees who are willing to replace expensive paid-for corporate trustees, that should be encouraged, welcomed and, indeed, facilitated by the Charity Commission?
Mr Jenkin
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that question, because we were presented by my noble Friend Lord Hodgson with a recommendation that it should be made much easier for trustees to be paid officials. I have to say that there was a strong reaction against that proposal, which has a bearing on the point my hon. Friend raises because the whole point about charities is that trustees are not paid. There may be quite highly paid executives in charities, but the job of a trustee is not to benefit financially from being a trustee. There are exceptions, but the Charity Commission has to approve them. I believe my hon. Friend is suggesting that the commission should be prepared to withdraw that consent in the event of a person offering to do the job for nothing. I invite the commission to consider that matter, which we may revisit in a future inquiry.
Publication Administration Committee Report (Smaller Government)
Debate between Bernard Jenkin and David Nuttall(13 years, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House notes the publication of the Seventh Report from the Select Committee on Public Administration on Smaller Government: What do Ministers do?, HC530.
This procedure, involving a motion, is in place of what we hope one day will be an arrangement to make a statement. I will make some remarks and then invite right hon. and hon. Friends to intervene.
Our Committee decided to inquire into the role of Ministers following the Government’s decision to reduce the number of right hon. and hon. Members by 50 without a corresponding reduction in the number of Ministers. The Prime Minister made it clear before the election that the public wanted us to
“cut the cost of politics. Everyone is having to do more for less”.
He therefore asked if it was not time that
“politicians and ministers did a bit more for a bit less”.
He was absolutely clear that he intended that statement to apply to Ministers as well as to MPs.
The UK is notable among similar western nations. We have more Ministers than France, Italy, Spain and Germany.
Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that we could make do with fewer Ministers in the UK if we did not receive as many edicts and directives from the European Union?
Mr Jenkin
I am most interested that my hon. Friend should ask that question, because my Committee is considering the possibility of an inquiry into the impact on Departments of our relationship with the EU and looking for an academic who might support us in that work and help us to construct a cartography of the relationship between EU institutions and Whitehall Departments.
The total number of Ministers has grown steadily since 1900. Our report examines whether revising the role of Ministers could provide a way of reducing their numbers. We took evidence from current and former Ministers, as well as from academics and senior civil servants, and we were left in no doubt that Ministers have a very heavy work load. Lord Smith of Finsbury, a former Culture Secretary, said that the amount of paperwork he had to contend with was “plainly ludicrous” and
“no way to run a life let alone a country”.
It is less clear whether all that Ministers do has to be done by a Minister of the Crown. Chris Mullin, in his autobiography, noted his role as “a glorified correspondence clerk” and lamented:
“So much ministerial activity is entirely contrived and pointless.”