Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill [HL]

Lord Hope of Craighead Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grade of Yarmouth (Con)]

My Lords, I thank both Front Benches for the warmth of their greeting to me as the chairman-designate of this new fundraising regulator. I hope that the depth, sincerity and warmth of their kind remarks bear no relation to the level of lethal poison in the chalice that I have inherited. I join the thanks expressed to the noble Lords, Lord Leigh and Lord Wallace, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, for the incredible work that they put into the Etherington review, which has been so unanimously welcomed.

It might help the House if I gave a short update on where we have got to in the fast-track creation of the new regulator. The show is on the road: the chief executive has been appointed and began work on 4 January. Within four weeks, we now have an office, generously provided by the Charities Aid Foundation, and six staff. Appointments to the board will be announced in the next few weeks, and we will also need to put in place a standards committee and, to hear and resolve complaints, an adjudication committee.

I do not think I underestimate the task ahead if we are to deliver on our intention to be fully operational in the early summer, but we are on track at the moment. At the point of handover from the Fundraising Standards Board, we will take ownership of the code of guidance from the Institute of Fundraising, and the rule book on street and door-to-door collections from the Public Fundraising Association. We are working very closely with both organisations, and I welcome their endorsement of the new regulatory arrangements. At handover, the arrangements for registration—obviously, we want as many charities as possible to sign up to the fundraising regulator, although that will not stop us from investigating those which may not sign up—and for levy payments by the larger fundraising charities will need to be in place.

Our proposals for the fundraising preference service will also be ready. The working group developing those proposals, serviced by the NCVO on our behalf, is already well under way. Let me emphasise that until the point of handover, the 2,000 member charities of the Fundraising Standards Board will need to continue to support that organisation, financially and otherwise, while it retains responsibility for fundraising regulation, until we are absolutely ready to go. We and the Fundraising Standards Board are committed to a seamless transition, which is essential if the purposes of the Bill are to be realised, and we want to inherit its experience and learn from what has worked well.

There is general acceptance, however, that the Fundraising Standards Board was somewhat under -resourced. We will have the levy resources necessary to do the job. We will be independent, with ownership of the code of guidance, and we will not hesitate to apply sanctions where appropriate. We will liaise closely with the Charity Commission, taking full account of its revised fundraising guidance for trustees and, if all else fails, referring to it contentious cases that may breach the guidance.

The Etherington review, the Fundraising Standards Board’s excellent but deeply worrying report on the sad, sad case of Olive Cooke and the recent report from the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee in the other House have all demonstrated serious shortcomings in the fundraising practices of many larger fundraising charities. That is why this Bill is such an important and timely contribution. The public’s very negative view of this was confirmed last week in the YouGov poll published by the Information Commissioner’s Office.

The British public are as generous as anybody on this earth when it comes to putting their hands in their pockets to help those in need. However, charities cannot take that generosity for granted. There have been serious breaches in terms of the ethical way in which fundraising practices have begun to grow up in this country. We must take steps, which this Bill provides with the creation of this fundraising regulator, to make sure that that generosity is not taken for granted. The fundraising regulator now has a responsibility to the general public and, for the future of charities, to donors and potential donors, not least when they are vulnerable, to ensure that they are protected from undue pressure and unacceptable fundraising practices. That protection will be our first priority and these amendments and the Bill will, we hope, go a long way to ensuring that the public are protected and their generosity not taken for granted.

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, as the Minister will recall, I had the privilege of chairing the Joint Committee that conducted pre-legislative examination of what was then called the Protection of Charities Bill. I cast my mind back to a year ago, when our committee was still sitting and considering the terms of our report. It is a pleasure to see some members of my committee in the House this afternoon. It is against that background that I pay my own tribute to the Minister and his Bill team for bringing the Bill to this stage: we are now truly at the last lap. One of our main concerns was that there should be no delay in the legislation we were examining. It is a great pleasure to see that matters have been taken this far forward with the changes made.

The only amendment I wish to comment on—I do not want to arouse too much controversy about this—is Amendment 2. I listened with great care to what the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, said and I appreciate the concern on the point she mentioned. However, the one feature I stress is that we did not as a committee have the chance to examine Clause 9. As the noble Lord said, that was introduced to the Bill on Report. It is the kind of clause that, speaking for myself, we would have wanted to examine with great care because of not only its implications on the point that the noble Baroness made but also its width. It is completely unqualified. If it had been more precisely targeted, we might have been a little more inclined to support it. I rather suspect that a clause as general as this would impose a very great burden on the Charity Commission. To a large extent, because of the protection of charity law generally, the clause would not be needed. I stress that I speak only for myself but I am relieved, against the background of what I have mentioned and having heard the Minister explain the reasons for it, that this amendment has come forward. I very much support it. My main point in rising to speak at all was to express my thanks and appreciation for the fact that we are now at this stage, in effect bringing the matter to an end.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the Minister on getting his first piece of legislation through to its conclusion. I thank him also for the way in which he took us through the amendments today.

I will concentrate initially on one aspect of these amendments that has not so far been discussed: Amendments 3, 4 and 5, dealing with matters to do with the rehabilitation of offenders. I and other members of the committee had great sympathy with the case made to us by the charity Unlock about the problems that this Bill would pose particularly for charities that specialise in the rehabilitation of offenders. Their great concern was that up to approximately 50,000 people in this country with past convictions would find themselves now unable to take part in the process of being a trustee, even though they had committed those offences some considerable time ago and had managed to rehabilitate themselves. Last week in court there was a ruling on the matter of the severity of minor offences and their duration in relation to people having to make declarations. I rather suspect that, if that judgment is upheld, this legislation will have to be revisited fairly swiftly. I simply draw that to noble Lords’ attention.