Small Charitable Donations and Childcare Payments Bill

Debate between Rob Wilson and James Duddridge

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Tuesday 11th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[James Duddridge]

I thank my hon. Friend for pulling me up. In fact, round the corner from my office is a charity that supports people in Uganda, which was within the geographic patch that I was responsible for. It is indeed a Southend charity and it would receive some of the benefits of this legislation.

The Second Church Estates Commissioner, my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Dame Caroline Spelman), mentioned the great value of churches in the community. Like perhaps other Members, I want to pepper my speech with examples from my constituency. I want to pay particular credit to the Southend Association of Voluntary Services, which pulls together charities and best practice and allows charities to be given the expertise to utilise the types of benefits that the Government are introducing.

It seems like only a hop, skip and a jump since 2006, when I remember throwing two lever-arch folders into my bin in Portcullis House, in the knowledge that I would never again have to look at charities legislation. I should have kept those two Bills, but I went back and looked at the Charities Act 2006. It was a much bigger Bill, with 78 clauses, rather than the nine clauses we are considering today. There are a lot of things that are still relevant today: the debate about whether schools should be charities, and whether education is in itself a charitable good or whether charities need to go out and prove themselves over and above. A lot has changed. My hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr Turner) was speaking from the Opposition Front Bench, and there was also a gentleman from Doncaster North—a junior Cabinet Minister with great, or maybe not so great, things ahead of him—who did a good job on that Bill.

One charities issue that was raised during the passage of the 2006 Act was “chugging”, or charities mugging. I notice that the short title of this short, nine-clause Bill is quite wide, so there are perhaps opportunities to insert a few more clauses, whether proposed by Her Majesty’s official Opposition or enthusiastic young Members of Parliament such as myself, or—[Laughter.] It does not say “Pause for laughter” in my notes; that was not a joke. Maybe the Minister will bring forward a review of charities mugging. Even now we get harassed at tube stations, and it is a distraction from the passion for charitable giving that, really, everyone wants to engage in.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mr Rob Wilson)]

It would probably help my hon. Friend to know that we have reformed the self-regulation of charities. There is a single regulator that is now responsible for those activities, rather than the three that there were before, so we are in a much better position to deal with complaints from the public.

[James Duddridge]

I thank my hon. Friend for that; perhaps he will take this as a complaint from a humble member of the public. If he joined me in trying to get from Fenchurch Street station to Tower Hill in the morning, on the way to the House of Commons, he would see not only the appalling works and the way people are funnelled through, but that the number of charities operating there creates a physical boundary between the two stations, which is a real problem for commuters who otherwise would donate. There are quite a few instances when I have felt less positive about charities, which I am naturally passionate about. I thank my hon. Friend for highlighting the work. Perhaps I could review what has been done while I was looking at other things since 2006, and also perhaps invite him for a cup of coffee on the corner of Fenchurch Street to meet some of my constituents coming into London and encountering the problem.

We are debating the “Small Charitable Donations” Bill, but I am not quite sure what “small” is. A Southend charity set up by Charles Latham and Howard Briggs has looked to provide a capital amount that could be used to provide small loans to micro-opportunities—non-charities but, in some cases, registered charities as well. That developed from a level of £60,000 or £80,000 to become a £1 million or £2 million fund. Even at that level, it considers itself small and has to do all its fund management via the Essex fund. My constituency predecessor, Sir Teddy Taylor, is involved in that fund. It deals with small charities, but I am not sure that it would be helped by the definition of small charities in the Bill.

I am generally a believer in small being beautiful—my wife is very petite—and in relation to charities, the closer the charity stays to an individual cause, the better. The shovels example is, I think, great. Southend’s charity that wants to do some something for targeted HIV/AIDS patients within a certain age category is another fabulous example. There are, however, some bigger charities—I am not going to name them; they do good work—that have somewhat lost their way. These are the ones that we see on the back pages of The Guardian, in case any of my hon. Friends sully themselves with such things—they are very good for the fireplace. We can often find a job with such a charity paying significantly more than an MP’s salary—shock, horror. This could be running a charity, or doing a junior, second-tier director job, but, as I say, small is beautiful and the more we can help small charities with the sort of provisions in the Bill, the better. At the moment, there is a flight for merging charities, meaning that charities get much bigger. When they do, I fear they move too far away from their communities. We should encourage those charities to stay small but numerous.