Clause 5
Charities Bill [Lords]
5:30 pm
Edward Miliband (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Cabinet Office; Doncaster North, Labour)
Indeed. Subsection (3) deals with miners welfare trusts. I note the concerns of my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Lynda Waltho) on this issue, and I promise that I will report back on this matter on Report, and that I will make further inquiries into it. The provision is being repealed because it is also seen as being incompatible with the ECHR, because it discriminates in favour of a certain occupation as against members of other trades or professions.
Before members of the Committee become alarmed, I should point out that there has been extensive consultation with the Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation on this issue to find a way to enable the 330 miners welfare trusts to continue their good work. As the consultation took place before I became a Minister, I shall meet representatives from CISWO and other miners welfare trusts. We will do further research on the position of such trusts, and I will report back, as my hon. Friend asks, on Report. Miners welfare trusts that allow entry to people other than miners will not be affected and will continue to qualify. I think that in practice—I have to be careful what I say here—other organisations should also qualify as having charitable purposes with little effort, but we need to research that. Further work must be done, and I will report back.
The final part of the clause deals with sports clubs. Subsections (4) and (5) prevent a sports club that is registered as a community amateur sports club, or CASC, from also being a charity. That is because CASC status and charitable status are meant to be separate options for small, community-based sports clubs, because there are different tax and regulatory regimes for CASC organisations. We certainly do not want to get rid of CASC status, because it has been widely welcomed in the amateur sports club community. Given the different tax and regulatory regimes, clubs could not be covered by both the CASC and charities regimes. Hence, the slight ugliness of this part of the clause.
As to what happens to organisations that might transition from one to another, my understanding is that it will continue to be possible for a CASC to move to charitable status and vice versa, which is exceptional in charity law. I hope that that reassures the Conservative spokesman and the hon. Member for Worthing, West.