Clause 3
Charities Bill [Lords]
4:30 pm
Andrew Turner (Shadow Minister (Charities), Home Affairs; Isle of Wight, Conservative)
That has certainly been a concern. I accept, of course, that, in the Bill, the Charity Commission is deemed to be independent, but Ministers make the appointments. When we come to clause 4, I intend to discuss the process through which the public benefit test may evolve; that is certainly a concern of mine.
I go back to my amendment. The second example referred to by amendment No. 4 is that of the alleviation of poverty. As I said on Second Reading, I find it difficult to understand how it can be argued with any reasonable likelihood of success that a charity for the relief of poverty is not for the public benefit. On Second Reading, the Parliamentary Secretary said that
“if we take the case of a trust to benefit a few people in one’s immediate family, one might say that it was set up for the relief of poverty. However, there might be questions about whether it genuinely provided public benefit.”—[Official Report, 26 June 2006; Vol. 448, c. 96.]
There is a presumption that there is public benefit, of course—but it is rebuttable. In the case under discussion, such use of a trust would be excluded, because it would be so defined that its membership would be fixed, which means that it would be a private trust, not a public trust. A private trust cannot be for public benefit.
I accept that there may be cases in which the presumption is unreasonable, but those are cases in which the presumption is rebuttable. I do not want every charity whose object is the relief of poverty having to go out and demonstrate that it is relieving poverty in the way the Charity Commission intends, and thereby expend a huge amount of time and energy. I do not see how the abolition of the presumption can have any effect unless charities are asked to demonstrate what Ministers say that they want them to demonstrate: identifiable benefits. So every religious or educational charity—not just Eton and Harrow, but the Isle of Wight Steam Railway, which is an educational charity—will be asked to spend time and money demonstrating how it provides public benefit, when the Isle of Wight Steam Railway would far rather build an extension to join the island line from Shanklin to Ryde pier head.