Charitable Sector

Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts

Tuesday 5th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Low of Dalston]

My Lords, we had a very good debate on 16 June on the role of partnerships between the Government and civil society, and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, on giving us the opportunity to pick up from where we left off. I also congratulate the bumper crop of maiden speakers, who have been largely maidens, and I eagerly look forward to the others.

On the state and civil society, my view is very simple; we needed the state to step in to remedy the deficiencies of civil society in caring for the vulnerable and providing basic health, education and other services for the population at large. Some Ministers seem to base their view on the need for a big society on a reading of history that sees broken Britain as being partly a consequence of the growth of the state and the growth of the welfare state since 1945 having crowded out voluntary action. However, the evidence is that levels of civic participation have remained relatively constant and that that participation has changed in nature but has not significantly declined as a result of the growth in state activity.

Society is obviously alive and well. The noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, when she was plain Mrs Thatcher, was very much criticised for saying that there was no such thing as society, but I think that that was rather unfair. She was merely making the rather basic sociological point, although she might not have welcomed it being described as such, that we should not reify society as anything more than the collection of individuals who make it up. It is not difficult to argue that society is broken. Indeed, on that earlier occasion, the noble Lord, Lord Alton, in particular, mobilised a string of examples to make the point. I do not think that any of us needs to be persuaded that we are beset by social problems, but I think that equally telling as an index of the health of our society is the wealth of examples that it is possible to come up with of the voluntary coming together of individuals to engage in collective action for the common good, which is at the root of all charitable activity.

I am in favour of the big society as an expression of the voluntary efforts that go to make it up but it should not be contingent on rolling back the state. We need them both. One has only to consider the Balkanisation of the voluntary sector in America to see this. The only question is the balance between the two and how they can interact to best advantage. However, I intend to resist the temptation to dilate further on the big society and shall stick to the question on the Order Paper—namely, the role of charities in all this. The impulse of compassion, which is also at the root of charitable endeavour, is one of the most basic instincts of mankind. Indeed, I heard on the radio only this morning that archaeologists from the University of York have been able to infer that it was to be found in Neanderthal man, who apparently had arrangements for caring for the sick.

Charities enjoy a high level of trust in our society—behind doctors and the police but ahead of private companies and certainly ahead of politicians and journalists. I did not necessarily draw the conclusion to be found in the Charity Commission’s latest survey of public trust and confidence in charities, which was reflected in the Library note prepared for this debate, which, like other noble Lords, I found extremely helpful. However, charities come in for some criticisms, and I should like to spend the rest of my time addressing some of them. In so doing, I declare my interest as someone with 40 years’ experience of working in charities great and small who has ended up as vice-president of the RNIB and as president of a number of others which I helped to found back in the 1970s and which are all declared in the register of interests. I suppose that this makes me something of a charity hack in the terms of the noble Lord, Lord Phillips.

First, from the left one encounters a distrust of charity based on a suspicion of the eleemosynary principle and hostility to charities’ perceived paternalism. I do not think that there is a lot in this. Whatever may have been the case in the past, charity today is little more than a particular form of organisation or a legal form that carries certain tax advantages. The principles of consumer participation and user involvement are now well accepted, and charities are far more accountable and responsive to their members and beneficiaries than was ever the case in the past.

Next, one encounters suspicion of charities’ campaigning role. Clearly, expenditure on political campaigning would not be an appropriate use of charitable resources but, having made this clear, I think that the Charity Commission’s guidance strikes the right balance. Of course, charities have a vested interest like many other interests in society, including well funded commercial ones, but charities perform a valuable function in a democracy, as someone else said a little earlier, in ensuring that the interests of those whom they represent are properly considered by policy and decision-makers and properly reflected in public debate. I remember the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, expressing concern in a debate in this House about the role of lobbyists from charities in the European Parliament, but I was pleased to see the Council of Europe recently drawing a distinction between professional and civil society lobbying. The European code of conduct on lobbying in a democratic society, particularly as it relates to NGOs, states that,

“lobbying should be very clearly defined, differentiating between lobbying as a professionally compensated activity and the activities of the organisations of civil society”.

That is a crucial distinction.

Finally, it is sometimes possible to detect a bias in favour of smaller, third-sector and community organisations, as against the larger national charities, in the interests of fostering local communities and social action. Indeed, we have even caught a whiff of it from time to time in the debate today. This has been described as a prejudice against what is depicted as the corporate face of the voluntary sector. It can perhaps be seen in the level of regulation that far outstrips anything to which the banks are subjected. Voluntary organisations come in all shapes and sizes and they all have their part to play, but the larger charities certainly have their place. Volunteers and the big society need to be organised. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London said in an earlier debate:

“Charities … cannot simply expand their volunteering without also expanding the infrastructure to provide support, advice, training and, crucially, management of volunteers. In the evaluation that we have done of scores of projects over the past 10 years, we have to confess that failures in management are the most common cause of ineffectiveness”.—[Official Report, 16/6/2010; col. 1021.]

The right reverend Prelate then referred to my own contribution, so I am more than happy to return the compliment. It means that the voluntary sector still has work to do to put its house in order. Its diversity is a strength but fragmentation is not. At a recent count there were found to be 733 voluntary organisations in the visual impairment sector, so there is a major need for rationalisation and consolidation. There is much talk of partnership—my successor at the RNIB defined partnership as “doing what I want with your money”—but it has always seemed to me that there is no substitute for unified management. The threat of retrenchment may provide an opportunity. It is not unknown for charities to be thought of as entirely staffed by volunteers, but that is an anachronistic way of thinking. Charities have become increasingly professional—first at officer level but now at the level of trustees. That has been made necessary by the considerations to which the right reverend Prelate drew attention, and now by regulation. There is nothing wrong with that—in fact, it is a good thing—but we need to be aware that it has consequences. I predict that it will be increasingly necessary to pay trustees and that the Charity Commission will need to give more systematic and not just ad hoc consideration to that, as it recently did with the RNIB.

When I joined the University of Leeds, my professor said that the universities exemplified the last vestige of the leisured elite. I am sure that that is no longer true of the university, but since coming here I have occasionally wondered whether the leisured elite might not have migrated to the House of Lords. However, it is clear that there is no longer a leisured elite that stands ready and willing to stock the boards of a charitable sector.