Finance Bill

Lord Addington Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard) & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee negatived (Hansard) & Committee negatived (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 17th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when I see the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, something in my memory tells me we should be talking about education after all these years.

The Finance Bill is the backdrop to a disaster, not one which the Government made but one which they must handle. I would like to concentrate on the charitable sector, which has had only one or two mentions so far. At the start of this process, a couple of months ago, I was lucky enough to lead a debate about the problems of the charity sector. The Government have given hundreds of millions of pounds to back it up; that is great. However, the sector looks like it has lost billions.

Why does this matter? Quite simply, there is virtually no section of our society which does not use charities to fulfil its ends. Charities are involved in education, recreation, healthcare support, housing—you name it, charities are there. They have lost their main income streams—those fun things which you do together. The sponsored walk is out; the charity dinner, where everybody drinks slightly too much and makes pledges, is gone; the high-street shop, which has filled a vacuum, is gone or has a very low uptake. The pressure is there.

Some charities, such as the British Dyslexia Foundation—I here remind the House of my interest as its president—are providing training. There is a big surge with children at home, as parents want to know what to do with a dyslexic child. One feels that, to go back to the old ground of the noble Lord, teachers should have been doing this beforehand, but never mind. All this training is fine, but you still need other activities to back it up, and not all charities can do it. Those sections of our society dependent on social activities to generate their income to deliver social goods are vulnerable.

There has not been enough attention paid to these groups at the moment. They overlap with other things, like furlough for staff—we have had a great deal of people asking why you cannot volunteer when you have been furloughed. There must be another look at how we can get this sector to work as the economy starts to emerge from lockdown. Some of the primary fundraising activities will be among the last things we can return to.

We must have another look here or the state must take over these duties, and I do not think that it has a great appetite for that. A little bit of pump-priming, thought and help is required here, or huge sections of our social support structure and things which make life bearable will be threatened.