Schedule 1
Charities Bill [Lords]
5:45 pm
Martin Horwood (Shadow Minister (Environment), Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Cheltenham, Liberal Democrat)
The previous discussion on the responsibilities and powers of the Charity Commission is relevant to this provision too. One of the things that I have noticed, on moving from the charity sector to Parliament, is that there is a charming belief in this place that laws always have the right results once they are passed. [Interruption.] The more experienced Members do not share that belief, so I stand corrected. Sometimes, though, I think that when considering legislation we should introduce mechanisms to make it more likely that bodies will do what we intend them to do, so that the representative nature of bodies such as the Charity Commission is preserved.
There is some disquiet in the voluntary sector about the operation of the Charity Commission in practice and about the need for it to reflect the wider population in two important respects. The first such respect is the increasingly diverse nature of British society. It is probably unfair to say that the commission reflected the great and the good in the old-fashioned, traditional charitable sense, but there is certainly a risk that it does not reflect the full diversity of modern Britain. If it is considering religious charities, which may include Islamic charities, Buddhist organisations or others from a wider range of social and ethnic backgrounds than previously, it should perhaps be more representative of those communities as well.
The second important respect is the increasing trend toward representation of people who have direct experience as beneficiaries of a charity. That applies in the running of the organisations themselves. There is a clear trend among grant-giving bodies such as Comic Relief or the Big Lottery Fund and even Government Departments to insist on evidence that beneficiaries of charity services or service users are represented in the running of an organisation, and that would be a good principle to extend to the Charity Commission itself. I suggested an amendment that would have made that explicit, but the Clerks pointed out, in ruling it out of order, that almost everybody could be the beneficiary of some charity, and that therefore the provision would be rather meaningless, and I am sure that that might be right.
Amendment No. 72 would increase the minimum number of members of the commission from four to six, thereby increasing the likelihood of the commission being a more representative body in both those respects. It would also incidentally reduce the potential power of the chairman’s casting vote—a reduction that would be a desirable thing in any organisation. On a probing basis, I would like to test out the reason for having such a small number as the minimum number of members of the commission.
Amendment No. 73 specifically addresses experience of charitable activity. The original amendment that I drafted was rather more explicit about that experience being experience as a beneficiary or as a service user, but, as I explained, that has been ruled out of order. The revised amendment does what I did not really intend, which is to provide a new broad power for the Secretary of State. Under most circumstances that is the kind of thing that I stand up and indignantly oppose, so I am not sure that I am as enthusiastic about the re-drafted amendment as I was about my original one. Nevertheless we should take every opportunity to ensure that members of powerful bodies such as the commission—it will make rulings on charities rooted in particular communities, social backgrounds and ethnic origins and representing, for instance, people with disabilities—should wherever possible have experience of such services themselves. Ideally, the Charity Commission should include a person with disabilities and perhaps someone with a different ethnic background from the majority of its members. That is why I have proposed the amendments.