Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill [Lords]

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 26th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Anna Turley]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. He pays tribute to the charities that do some of the most important work with the most excluded. Such people need a voice and are often those who suffer the consequences of bad policy making in this place. Charities often have to pick up the pieces of such policy making.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

I am slightly mystified by some of the comments about so-called political activity. We are talking about basic advocacy. We only have to go back to the end of the first world war to see the Royal British Legion campaigning for jobs for veterans and so on. We are not talking about party political campaigning. That is what the voluntary sector objected to in the 2014 Act.

[Anna Turley]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As she has ably demonstrated, charities have a long-established role in educating, informing the public, campaigning and securing positive social change throughout our history.

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[Anna Turley]

I am surprised that the hon. Gentleman has a problem with negative behaviour—I am afraid that it is a fact of life. Having looked at the evidence from the Charity Commission on that case, I still struggle to see what was wrong with the situation. I am very happy to continue that conversation with the Charity Commission.

The hon. Gentleman says that that was the only evidence given. More than 160 charities signed a letter to the Government ahead of the general election saying that the legislation should be scrapped, including Save the Children, the Salvation Army, Oxfam, Greenpeace, Age UK and Amnesty International. The charity sector is up in arms.

[Susan Elan Jones]

Surely the big problem that people had was that they did not like the idea of dodgy lobbyists giving money to dodgy politicians. It was not about victimising groups such as the Salvation Army. The hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) says that it was just the Badger Trust that was affected. If he had heard what the Countryside Alliance said at the all-party parliamentary group on civil society and volunteering about what it thought of the gagging Act, he would accept that a wide variety of groups are affected.

[Anna Turley]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point about the strength of feeling in the sector.

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[Maggie Throup]

I understand where the hon. Gentleman is coming from, but I believe that new clause 3 will encourage charities to go down that route and, perhaps, stray from their original intentions, however well-meaning they may be, thus inadvertently—not intentionally, I admit—misleading the public. I fear that the inclusion of the new clause could conceivably allow us to reach a point at which a large cancer charity, for instance, spent more on lobbying national and local government than on investment in research on and development of new cancer drugs. I think that that is what the hon. Gentleman was alluding to, but I disagree with him. For me, this raises a number of major issues.

The first issue is the impact on donations. Charities rely heavily on public donations to fight for their specific cause or issue. The Charities Aid Foundation estimated recently that in 2014 alone, £10.6 billion was donated by the British public to a vast array of good causes. By politicising charities, we risk donors turning away from charities whose cause they support because they do not necessarily share the charity’s political agenda or party alignment.

Secondly, the new clause would serve to allow larger national charities, which already dedicate significant resources to lobbying Members in this place, to strengthen their influence over Government policy and decision making. That would be to the detriment of smaller, often local, charities, of which we all have many examples, which would be further marginalised from the decision-making process because they simply could not afford to compete for airtime.

There is also a third point. Like many others, I would be deeply concerned if those charities that are very much a cornerstone of our society—the Royal British Legion, Macmillan, Age UK and the NSPCC, to name but a few—suddenly became vulnerable to infiltration from those who wanted to push a specific political agenda or to use the charity to criticise or support the Government of the day, rather than running it as a force for good.

I am sure hon. Members will agree that we do not really need any more politicians. Yes, it is only right and proper that charities should play their role in shaping our society by seeking to influence Government, nationally and locally, but they also have much more to offer society without widening their scope into out-and-out political campaigning—or, as some might call it, the dark arts. That is why I will be voting against the new clause this afternoon.

[Susan Elan Jones]

It is a great pleasure to speak in today’s debate. We often have wonderful debates in this place about what Britishness is about and what our culture is about. I actually think that the voluntary sector in this country represents the best of British—that is, the best of English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish. As politicians, we do not always say thank you, but our starting point today as we consider the Bill should be to say a very big thank you to our hard-working and diverse voluntary sector in this country.

We should also remember that most charities in this country are relatively small. They operate in communities, and it is not our job in this place to be a pain in the neck for the 900,000-plus trustees of charities around the country who give their time voluntarily to make management and governance decisions, or for the charities’ many volunteers. The motivation of those people is undoubtedly to do good in our society and in our country.

We cannot, of course, forget the exceptions—the horror stories—including the dreadful death of Olive Cooke, who appears to have been hounded by 90 charities sending her 460 letters asking for donations in the course of one year. Nor can we forget the undercover Daily Mail report on what appeared to be severe malpractice in the call centre from hell. And nor should we forget the case of Kids Company and all the abuses that went on there. Incidentally, those abuses could and should have been dealt with by the Government and by the Charity Commission under its existing powers. We see those cases as exceptions, but they are nevertheless important and it is right that we are having this discussion today in Parliament.

Members on both sides of the House will see elements of voluntary activity in their own political traditions, and we can certainly develop some sort of empathy with different parts of the voluntary sector. We on this side of the Chamber can look to the labour movement, the co-operative movement, the working men’s and women’s organisations and a whole range of other bodies, but I know that the Minister for Civil Society, the hon. Member for Reading East (Mr Wilson), will also be moved by Edmund Burke’s notion of the little platoons. What I ask today is that he does not overburden those well-behaved little platoons in our country with red tape when it is not needed. Most of us would agree that where regulation is needed, the sector itself generally does that job best. I, for one, would give a warm welcome to the fundraising preference service, which will deal with some of the totally unacceptable abuses of practice in fundraising.