Civil Society and Lobbying

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, I am right behind what the noble Baroness said about the importance of charities and I am right behind them—but no charity is beyond scrutiny. During 2016 so far there has been a growing chorus of concern about the lobbying activities and associated behaviour of one charity set up by statute, the National Trust, and particularly the activities and behaviour of those in the regions away from London, with some terrible publicity recently for a once universally revered outfit.

I am not clambering aboard any bandwagons here, for in a short debate I sponsored in your Lordships’ House back on 12 November 2001 on the need to modernise the National Trust’s governing legislation, many issues were raised concerning inadequate corporate governance, lack of transparency, lack of regional representation in particular, and lack of regulation of its activities. All that was missing then, from today’s cocktail of concerns, was growing concern about lobbying by the National Trust.

The distinguished social theorist, the Anglican canon and the London solicitor who set up the National Trust in late Victorian England—and our predecessors in this and another place who passed the statute in Edwardian England—could not have foreseen what a landed leviathan the National Trust would become. The National Trust, indeed, has accumulated holdings that no Whig magnate in our House in the 18th century could ever have dreamed of accumulating. It has more than 600,000 acres of land, close to 600 miles of coastline and about 250 monuments and buildings. Yet the National Trust is totally unregulated, except by itself. Some people say that it is out of touch and increasingly remote. That, perhaps, is simply a function of the scale and size of the National Trust.

I believe that the present scale and organisation of the National Trust is inconsistent with the Government’s modernising agenda, which I strongly support, because devolution and accountability are increasingly part not just of regional rhetoric but of regional reality. Yet in 2016 the National Trust has set off on a totally new course with its additional lobbying activity, producing a new and positive blizzard of lobbying and a maelstrom of demands and advice, in relation to—just listen to the litany—global climate change policy, fracking, wind farms, and then, as if it was Defra, proposing a six-point national agricultural policy for post-Brexit rural times, with farmers, of course, to be denied subsidy or support unless they pursue particular environmental agendas. These environmental agendas may not be wrong but the suggestion is certainly extraordinary.

At the same time, and in lock-step with a change of focus into becoming this new lobbying organisation, the National Trust seems to have developed a new line in what can only be called autocratic and out-of-touch behaviour, whether towards farmers or cricketers. We just heard about cricketers and warm beer from the noble Baroness on the Front Bench. Just listen to what we have seen in the last four weeks. As far as farmers are concerned, there was the gazumping of local farmers in the Lake District, who were all at an auction to bid for a very delicate, upland hill farm area where they have long been active as the last, rather fragile link with our traditional farming heritage, and very welcome low-cost custodians of our man-made landscapes. Up pops some agent of the National Trust, bidding hundreds of thousands of pounds more than any chartered surveyor would suggest the land was worth as farmland, with all the casual insouciance of someone waving the cheque-book of a land-accumulating Ukrainian oligarch.

Let us turn to cricket and football and the National Trust’s attitude to these activities. Just yesterday, as reported in the Times—and therefore it must be true—the National Trust is evicting the local football and cricket teams from pitches in the park of Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire. They have been there for decades—almost time out of mind: father to son, and, I dare say, mother to daughter—playing football and cricket and occupying just 1% of the 900 acres of the Shugborough estate. This was because, as a National Trust representative was quoted in the Times as saying:

“Football and cricket really are non-traditional activities”.

You could not make it up. Generations ago the aristocrats used to encourage people to play cricket and football there. I suppose that was noblesse oblige, which is not always to be sneered at—whereas the new autocrats of the National Trust want to turf them out. Again, you could not make it up.

The trust needs to be better regulated. It was set up by statute for the benefit of the whole nation and its citizens, not just for the executive and paid-up members of the National Trust. There needs to be someone to whom complaints can be made, whether by an aggrieved tenant farmer or a member of the general public such as me or anybody else who just happens not to be a member of the trust. After that there is an urgent need for a full review, best set up by the National Trust itself, into its own governance since 1907. It has grown and grown in a way that is not its fault or that it could ever have predicted. I urge it to do this. The noble Lord, Lord Bragg—I apologise for not having suggested this to him in advance—would make a splendid independent chairman of such an independent commission into the National Trust. It would look at the trust to make quite sure that indeed acts in the national interest, cleaving to its statutory and charitable origins.

Civil Society

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

The speakers list as published by the authorities of the House this morning makes engaging reading, with myself and my friend and noble friend Lord Cormack down co-jointly to be the eighth speaker. I do not want to alarm the House by suggesting that we may be entering into some sort of lordly duet; we have done a deal through the usual channels that I will stand now and he will stand later. Still, it is a thought, as procedure develops in your Lordships’ House, that we might have a bit of this.

Equally engaging has been the report from the House of Bishops, on which I congratulate them. It is an interesting read and I agree with quite a lot in it. I do not want to alarm them by saying that, but I do. I was fascinated by the fact that it is termed a “pastoral letter”. It seems to be a bit of an innovation for the Anglican Church to refer to such things as pastoral letters. Whatever next? Will we shortly be having encyclicals issued ex cathedra by the most reverend Primates from their cathedrals in Canterbury or York? I await that with great interest.

By comparison, Catholics have long been used to pastoral letters, generally shortish and pithy, to be read out by parish priests at the direction of their bishops as a substitute for Sunday sermons, on everything from the need to go to confession more regularly to the need to help the poor, the lonely or those who are imprisoned. This all goes back to the opening of these issues by that great Victorian Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Manning, who fearlessly waded into secular matters, which I welcome any bishop, or indeed any faith leader, doing at any time. He was on the commission by the then Prince of Wales—Princes of Wales do this kind of thing—on housing for the working classes, in the latter part of Victorian times, and spent four hours talking to dockers, trying to bring about peace in the dock strike in the 1880s. So this is a strong tradition, and many of these things led to the doctrine of subsidiarity. Many of them then got spun into those short, pithy pastoral letters that I was told to sit up and listen to in earlier days.

The House of Bishops, by comparison, has produced something much longer: a dense, detailed document that is almost a manifesto—I do not use that term in a political sense—about how to change, in its words,

“the trajectory of our political life”.

During the course of its 52 pages, which I have read, the bat is not swung at any political party or creed, which I think is a triumph. However, some people come in for it; people who are called “self-interested consumers” come in for a bit of battering by the Bench of Bishops, although I am not quite sure who they are. However, when you get to the end, where I was expecting the ultimate pithy description of what this new trajectory of our political life should be and how to get there, the answers are still a bit unclear. I think we need to sharpen the focus.

I would like to do that today by trying to look in particular at the charitable sector. In the House of Bishops’ pastoral letter there are certainly some passages on the charitable sector in the set of pages between page 35 and 38 on strengthening institutions, but they are rather brief. I want to look at the problems of charities in civil society under the magnifying glass—in a way that I do not think the House of Bishops quite did, but you cannot get everything into every pastoral letter, however short or indeed however long. I want to examine three big problems facing what I think of as “big charity”. There is a world of difference between the 150,000 or so smaller charities, which are very close to their communities and to grass roots, and the big players—the top 50 or 100 charities with big incomes—and how they behave.

In an age when we are all rightly concerned with ethical behaviour and with transparency, those who run big charity, compared with those who run the myriad little charities, have a few questions to answer at the moment about their behaviour. First, there are questions about how they approach ways of raising money from individuals—often the widows whose mite they seek to get their hands on—using direct-mail bombardment, direct texting campaigns and insidious forms of cold-calling in the case of some nameless charities, and using not volunteers but organisations with paid-for staff. That is wrong, so I welcome the Fundraising Standards Board taking issue with them and seeking to introduce new guidelines with regard to those poor, ethically challenging practices on behalf of the big charity world. I also welcome the fact that the Charities Minister in another place, Mr Rob Wilson, has spoken to some of them about putting their house in order.

Secondly, many find being approached in the streets by third-party marketers purporting to be fundraisers—a practice known colloquially as “chugging”—pretty disturbing. I know some people who would never dream of giving to a charity which chugs, because they think it is out of kilter with what should be the DNA of a charity, whether big or small. Therefore, in their use of direct mailing, cold-calling and chugging, some in the charity world—the top 50 or 100—are in a competitive race to the bottom of charitable behaviour, and I deplore that.

Thirdly, big charity—not all of it—undoubtedly pays some of its chief executives far too much in relation to the ideals and charitable DNA of those charities; not just people getting £100,000 a year but people being paid £200,000-plus a year. The right reverend Prelates are not paid anything remotely like that, and they give an example to us all of just making do—reusing old cassocks, that sort of thing. The Anglican Church shows a lead on those matters which big charity could usefully follow.

All this increase in pay seems to be cheered on by the charities chief executives body, which is as much concerned about pay and rations as it is about pay and ethics. It is wrong. I far prefer the spirit of the anti-hunger charity Mary’s Meals, whose CEO, Magnus MacFarlane Barrow, recognising of course that staff have to be paid, and paid reasonably so that they can bring up their families, said:

“We have a conviction that those who are paid to work for Mary’s Meals should never be paid high salaries. This is because we work with some of the poorest people on earth, as well as tens of thousands of volunteers all over the world, and we would find it hard to do that while paying ourselves high salaries”.

I say, amen.