Small Charitable Donations and Childcare Payments Bill

James Duddridge Excerpts

Committee Debate: House of Commons
Tuesday 18th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. I spoke on a similar clause four years ago when this Bill first went through Committee; I think that the hon. Member for Clwyd South was here as well. Looking back, many of the Members who served back then appear to have moved on to far greater things than I have, so they will not be repeating this debate.

It is worth looking back at the debate four years ago, when the topic was whether restricting the measures to cash was appropriate and whether we should include different technologies or different means of giving impulse donations for which getting a gift aid declaration is hard, in order to achieve the objectives of the scheme. The current scheme is worthy. It is meant to give a level of support equivalent to gift aid to small donations, in order to give hard-pressed charities extra money. It is regrettable that four years into the scheme, the amounts claimed are much lower than we thought. Ideas to help charities claim and achieve the £100 million that Government thought this would originally cost are to be welcomed.

Four years ago, I was perhaps a bit prescient on this point; I even referred to contactless payments in that debate. I thought that the world might move on, that cash would become less common and that we would all find different ways of donating, whether by making contactless payments on terminals or by clicking buttons in an app. The Bill risked becoming out of date quickly if we were not careful. I suggested at that point that perhaps the Government should take the power in the Bill to amend by statutory instrument the definition of “cash or cash equivalent” in that situation, so we could keep up to speed with technology and not have to keep coming back every few years to primary legislation to fix it.

Here we are four years on, trying to fix contactless payments. That is quite right, and I will happily support it. We have even included Android Pay and Apple Pay, again quite sensibly, but we cannot predict where we will be in four years’ time. How will impulse donations be made? Will it still be by text message, by app, by cash in a bucket or contactless payments, or will we have found some new technology, perhaps fingerprint swipe? It is hard to imagine where we will be in four years’ time. If we are to keep the Bill as effective as we want it to be, why not have that power available so that the Government can say quickly, “Let’s make a tweak here, and allow this to fall within the scheme”?

[James Duddridge (Rochford and Southend East) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making lucid points with which I agree fully, but he recommends that Ministers could make a change through statutory instrument. Would he perhaps consider allowing them to make the change without a statutory instrument, maybe by short consultation or even ministerial decision? That would be liberalisation.

[Nigel Mills]

My hon. Friend is being quite generous as a Back Bencher, offering the Government more power than they want to take. I suppose that there would be spending issues if the Government generously expanded some new and risky technology and that Parliament might want to scrutinise that. I would prefer, in my perfectionist world, some order that undergoes parliamentary scrutiny, but I concede the argument he is putting forward.

The then Minister four years ago, who is now the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), was called a “dinosaur” for rejecting the Labour amendments. I am hoping that this Minister will not be called something like that today, given the liberalising approach that she is taking. The then Minister was not keen to accept the amendments, which were meant to apply to cash in order to help people who do bucket collections and so on, where one cannot get a gift aid declaration, as it is an impulse donation and people are not inclined to stop and give those details.

My argument for amendments 2 and 3 is that an SMS message is also an impulse donation. We see adverts on the TV where it says to text a number with “YES” or “FIVE”. If I do that, I do not provide them with any more information. It is a small, impulse donation. The evidence that we have from the various charity groups is that people do not make a gift aid declaration after doing that.

If we cannot tempt the Minister to accept amendments 1, 2 or 3, perhaps she will think on Report whether she can take the power to allow new ways of donating to be included in future, so that she can gradually evolve the scheme and put the extra money into achieving the objectives that we all share. Especially at this time of year, when British Legion volunteers will all be out doing great work shaking their buckets to collect cash, we want the scheme to be as effective as possible. I fear that, by being too restrictive on how donations qualify, we will not give more money to charities, as we all really want to.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rebecca Long Bailey]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time. New clause 3 would ensure that local scout groups, guide groups and Army, Navy and Air Force cadet branches are able to claim individually under the gift aid small donations scheme, rather than being considered as part of a single national charity for the purposes of the scheme.

We have received representations on behalf of those groups arguing that the current treatment under the scheme is unfair. Under the connected charities rules, those organisations are considered to be one charity. However, local organisations fund-raise independently and are independent from one another financially. The Charity Finance Group has suggested that the amount of top-up received by individual scout groups in particular equates to about 17p a year. The new clause would simply allow individual groups to make individual claims through the scheme.

According to the sector, that would improve take-up of the scheme and ensure that small local organisations, which were intended to benefit, are able to do so. I appreciate that there are probably many other organisations with comparable structures that would benefit from similar changes. New clause 3 is more of a probing amendment to try and tease out from the Government why they do not want to reform the scheme in such a way. Perhaps we can return to this issue in more detail on Report. I would welcome any moves by the Minister to review the position and propose an amendment on Report that would catch all similar organisations with comparable structures.

[James Duddridge]

I dropped off my kids at beavers and cubs; and one of them is going to scouts. In this amendment, would the division apply to the 2nd Thorpe Bay unit, or would it apply to each constituent part, whether beavers, scouts, cubs, guides and so on?

[Rebecca Long Bailey]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point, and that is why I would welcome a review by the Minister of the proposal in the new clause. We need to catch more than what is simply on paper at the moment; the provision needs to go beyond the scope of local scout groups, for example. There are many other organisations that would benefit from being included individually in the ways I have proposed and I welcome comments on this point by the Minister. I also point Members to a note that they received this morning from the Charity Finance Group, which makes some helpful suggestions on this very point.