Trusts (Capital and Income) Bill [HL]

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Wednesday 25th April 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, I am afraid that I am not a barrister or a solicitor and so the Earl of Chesterfield and Howe versus the Earl of Dartmouth do not adorn my lavatory walls—or, indeed, have not, until now, swung into my ken.

I welcome this small, technical but important legislation and I wish to address particularly the charitable aspects covered by Clause 4. I declare my interests, which are on the register in your Lordships’ House: I am president of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations; chairman of the Armed Forces Charity Advisory Committee; and I have been appointed by the Government to review the Charities Act 2006.

The existence of permanent endowment, as my noble friend clearly explained, has caused trustees of charities with permanent endowment a great deal of difficulty. If you force trustees to consider primarily the form in which they will get their return, you will get a series of artificial distinctions. By investing the capital gain—as opposed to dividend income or interest—you may end up with a seriously suboptimal result.

In recent years, a number of investment opportunities have arisen that are for capital gain only, particularly in the world of private equity. Where you are able to invest in smaller companies your return will almost certainly be in the growth of the value of the company. These companies cannot—and probably should not—pay dividends because they need to retain their profits to grow the business. It is therefore very important that this flexibility is built in to charitable investment.

As I understand it from my noble friend, this, of course, does not remove from trustees—I am sure that it does not—the need to balance future capital appreciation against the need to run the charity in the mean time, and, of course, the need to balance risk and return, which still applies as if these provisions had not been made. I welcome these proposals on the grounds that they are deregulatory and will free individual charities with permanent endowment and the Charity Commission from some administrative work.

As I understand it—and my noble friend Lord Phillips will correct me on this because he has forgotten more charity law than I will ever know—the right of the Charity Commission to make regulations on this matter has been in some dispute. Some lawyers have questioned whether it actually has these powers. The commission’s powers are, of course, open to challenge, as we saw with the public benefit test considerations last summer.

I have a further point of concern which the Committee may wish to explore. I have described the Bill as deregulatory, but in proposed new Section 104B (1), (2) and (3) there is a list of regulations. If, as I am sure my noble friend will tell me, the normal duties of trustees apply, do we really need to have this extensive list of regulations? Are we not able to trust the trustees? For example, proposed new Section 104B(2)(c) would require charity trustees to,

“notify the Commission of the passing, variation or revocation of such a resolution”.

That takes us back almost to where we started because, if resolutions are made in that way, they will have to be sent to the Charity Commission, the only difference being that the Charity Commission will not have to give its permission. I flag that up as a possibility we might wish to explore later.

I have given prior notice that I would like my noble friend to address the specific issue of the special position of English cathedrals under this legislation. The Church Commissioners and the Association of English Cathedrals are anxious to make a small amendment to Clause 4 which would enable cathedrals to resolve to invest their permanent endowment on a total return basis in accordance with the regulations which the Charity Commission is going to make. This comes about because ecclesiastical corporations are specifically excluded from the definition of a charity in Section 10 of the Charities Act 2011, which means that the powers of this Act do not apply to them, nor will the powers to be conferred by proposed new Sections 104A and 104B.

However, the relevant bodies corporate which are now established for each cathedral under the Cathedrals Measure 1999 exist for exclusively charitable purposes and are therefore charities for the purposes of the general law.

In recent years a number of cathedrals have expressed increasing interest in a total return investment, as the requirement to generate income from their permanent endowment is distorting their investment decisions. Cathedrals, of course, as ancient institutions, have more permanent endowment than most. Access to the total return investment allows for a more strategic portfolio of investments, which will provide a better balance between the needs of current and future beneficiaries. I hope that my noble friend, either now or at a later stage of the Bill, can address that point.

I described this earlier as a small, technical but important and welcome measure. However, it is only the first in a series of changes that need to be made if we are to realise the full value and potential for social impact investment. It does not, for example, address the issues or challenges arising from mixed-motive investment, a practice which is very close to total return investing. Mixed-motive investments are made by trustees on the basis partially that they are financial investments, and partially that they are programme-related investments. Programme-related investments are made to advance the charity’s purpose and are not considered to be financial investments at law.

I will give the Committee a brief example of how this might work. A charity which aims to improve educational opportunities and address homelessness invests in a property fund that will invest in properties for social enterprises. The fund focuses investments around three areas of social impact: homelessness, education and community development. Based on conversations with their fund manager, the trustees assess that 60 per cent of their investment can be justified as a programme-related investment that furthers their social mission. They decide that the remaining 40 per cent must be justified as a financial investment. Conversations with their investment advisers indicate that a commercial return on this sort of investment should be, say, 15 per cent per annum. To justify their investment, the trustees decide that there must therefore be a commercial return of 40 per cent and that they must get back the remaining 60 per cent in their PRI investment. When you blend the whole thing together, you have a return across the whole piece of 6 per cent. You can see how close this balanced rate of return is to the whole idea of total rate of return; it is very close indeed. It is a sadness to me that we have not been able to grasp this particular issue and extend this Bill by a series of small amendments to take in this additional way in which charities are now seeking to invest.

If I could glance over my noble friend’s speaking notes, I am sure that the answer to this will be, “Resist this”. It will be resisted because mixed-motive investment might be considered controversial—this is a Law Commission Bill—and because the Law Commission has not consulted on this precise point. Law Commission Bills are invariably consulted on in every aspect.

If that is my noble friend’s answer—and I am sure that it is going to be, but I may as well try—it would be helpful if he could give some indication during the later stages of the Bill whether his department has it in mind to bring forward ideas to tackle the mixed-motive investment as part of the overall approach to social investment.

Social impact investment is coming of age. It is a strategic issue for this country. However, there is a real danger of the necessary legislative changes required to facilitate it falling between departmental stools. My noble friend’s department, the Ministry of Justice, is producing this important but modest measure, yet not tackling other critical issues. The Law Commission will consult this autumn on further charity law reforms, but seems unlikely to tackle the necessary innovative leading edge issues.

The Financial Services Bill, at the Committee stage, is deeply depressing reading. I invite the Minister’s officials to look at the proceedings of the eighth sitting on Thursday 1 March, where attempts were made to raise the social impact investment idea. The amendments themselves were wrong; they were not acceptable. However, the Minister’s reply—it was Mark Hoban—indicated the dead hand of the Treasury across the whole of this area, still thinking in conventional investment terms of invested protection, whereas social impact investment melds financial and social return. It is not an investment for everybody, but the present situation, whereby one can easily give money to a project, but find it difficult to lend money to it, must be counterintuitive. People will be more encouraged to support these leading-edge charities and voluntary groups if there is a prospect of them getting their money back. That might encourage them, if they are successful, to put more money into the next project.

The Government have laid great stress on the need to create innovative ways of financing charities and voluntary groups that are seeking to tackle some of these most deeply entrenched social problems in our society. I hope that somebody, somewhere, in Whitehall is getting a grip of these various separate legislative proposals to ensure a proper degree of co-ordination and impact. The statutory stars are in alignment at the moment with all these pieces of legislation around, and it would be a great opportunity missed. Indeed, strategically, from the country’s point of view, it is a chance to make London the world centre of expertise for this rising and new activity.