Charities Bill [HL]

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, pay tribute to my colleague and noble friend Lord Hodgson for a tremendous amount of work done in probably one of the key areas of our national life. I declare an interest: currently I am a trustee of the Northamptonshire Victoria County History Trust. I am also involved in a whole host of charities in Bedfordshire, where I live, including the Bedford School Foundation—which I founded—and I help a number of trusts in Northamptonshire, where I represented Northampton South for 23 years.

This Bill is really welcome, and I congratulate Her Majesty’s Government. It has been a long time coming. Two Governments did nothing about it, and thankfully the present Government have got a grip of it and decided to move forward. I congratulate my noble friend on the Front Bench on having the privilege of steering it through and the Prime Minister on making sure that the Bill is on the statute book in due course.

Although one welcomes the vast majority of the work that has been done and the proposals, inevitably one looks at the elements that were not accepted by the Government. There is one element that sort of straddles, and that is land. I am a loyal user of my local Church of England church, where my wife was the secretary until very recently. I absolutely agree that Her Majesty’s Government are right to remove the proposal that there should be a requirement for charities not to advertise disposals of designated land. However, I am still marginally confused. I apologise for that, but when one is active in a parish one is very conscious that there are bits of church land that are a bit of a holding, and it is not necessarily easy to remove just a section, particularly on burial grounds. You will quite often find that there is an old burial ground and different bits of land belonging to other owners, which are already agreed in principle to be an extension of a burial ground. I just raise that issue, because I think it is important.

On Clause 12 on borrowing from the permanent endowment, I understand why charities have to borrow. It is not a good thing on the whole but, if they have to borrow, I understand why. I was chairman of a friendly society, and from memory it had a very strict rule on the percentage of borrowing. It was not left the least bit vague, and I suggest to Her Majesty’s Government that it should be quite clear, in black and white, what the percentage is and not as a general rule.

On the charity tribunal rejection, we can perhaps look at this again in Committee, but Recommendation 40 of the Law Commission review argued that it should be possible for authorisation for charity proceedings under Section 115 of the Charities Act 2011 to be sought from the court or the Charity Commission where the commission had an apparent or actual conflict of interest.

As far as I understand it, the whole of the charitable movement is supportive of the Law Commission’s suggestion because it would provide reassurance for those seeking authorisation and ensure that the Charity Commission is not suspected of using authorisation for reasons not to do with the merits of the proceedings. We only have to look at what is happening in society at the moment with statues being thrown into the Bristol docks, and others being pushed over and destroyed, to see that life in our world is changing and that somebody—it may well be the Charity Commission—needs to get a grip of those elements.

I raise one specific issue; it is much more relevant for Committee than here. I have been approached by the Spilsby Grammar School Foundation on its attempt to update its constitution. It is not appropriate to go into it in detail now but I hope that my noble friend on the Front Bench will accept some representations from the trustees and their lawyers, Sills & Betteridge, rather than me going into detail now.

I conclude by reflecting for a second—as this is a Second Reading—that gift aid, which is the foundation of much of the money that comes in to our charities, was introduced by John Major on 1 October 1990. Today, it is the world’s greatest charitable tax relief scheme. That is a major achievement for any society. It is worth well over £1 billion in tax relief and represents around 6% to 7% of voluntary income. I also pay tribute to Gordon Brown. He extended gift aid so that smaller donations would be eligible. That in itself is a great tribute.

I have just a final thought. I received in my email this morning a briefing on the social care Bill. I declare an interest as I am married to a doctor and we talked today over breakfast about whether there is a possible opportunity in that area in life to produce the equivalent of the gift aid scheme for social care. I am a marketing man and discussed this only briefly over breakfast so I have done no real deep thinking on it, but I am putting down a marker: I think there is an opportunity there.