Darren Spivey, Tim Leech and David Warrellow gave evidence.

We will now hear oral evidence from representatives of the RNLI, Wavelength and the National Trust. Welcome to our meeting. I remind Members that questions should be limited to matters within the scope of the Bill and that we must stick strictly to the timings in the programme order that the Committee has agreed. I hope I shall not have to interrupt you in mid-sentence, but I will do so if I need to.

Q 5353

Thank you very much, gentlemen, for coming and for being willing to give evidence to us. Could you set out how you think the Bill as it is currently drafted should be changed? Or is it perfect?

David Warrellow: Speaking on behalf of the National Trust, we would want to look very carefully at the most recent amendments to the community building provisions in particular. As those provisions were previously drafted, we were expecting to be able to take advantage of this scheme at a large number of our visitor properties, engaging with visitors at those properties. The most recent change, to exclude properties where the visitor has to pay for entry, would obviously exclude a large number of our properties. We will still have some that will potentially qualify, but a much smaller number, so we are disappointed with the most recent amendment.

Q 54

On that point, what estimate do you have of the number of properties that you will not now be able to claim on?

David Warrellow: I would estimate that we can claim on 15 or 20 at the most—ones that are purely free for entry. Having said that, there may be other properties that could qualify on days when there is no admission charge. At the moment, for example, we participate in the heritage open day scheme in September. That tends to be over a weekend, so our properties will open for one or two days over that weekend, but that in itself will not be enough to qualify under the legislation as it will  not meet the six-times-a-year criterion. We could look to open up properties on a free-of-charge basis, on a selected basis, if that would help.

Tim Leech: As a small charity, we are not really going to benefit from this at all. We have had cash donations in the last couple of years of around £100 to £140. We do not have any buildings: we do not have shops or community centres. We deliver all our services in people’s homes via a third party. So I would be looking at bringing in a bit more parity to the Bill, so that it is more applicable. I can see that there are going to be great benefits for smaller charities, if there is, perhaps, a sliding scale in terms of the relationship to gift aiding. Whether the relationship is 1:10, 1:1 or 1:3, I hope that there would be changes around it to bring it to other areas where people may be able to raise funds. It is also about getting something into legislation that we can actually utilise, build on and use. I support that—I generally welcome it. It will bring new money in for the sector, and it is a great opportunity for us.

Darren Spivey: I am Darren Spivey from the RNLI. Obviously, I echo Tim’s points. This is a great opportunity for charities. I reread the original purpose, which was to enable charities to claim a gift aid-style payment where is difficult to obtain one. My concern about the way the Bill is going is that there is a lot more overlay of detail and things that we would have to prove in evidence. I have listed a few things: evidence that it is a community event, evidence of cash collection, evidence that attendees are beneficiaries. A lifeboat station may be the hub of the community. The RNLI is almost entirely funded by the general public, so a substantial number of cash donations go through the lifeboat station. My concern, especially having been present at the outset of gift aid, when we went from a great idea to requiring a lot of evidence—even when you have a donation by phone, which is meant to be form-free, HMRC require a letter to be shown to say that you have sent something to somebody to show that you actually have the money and that you told the donor the conditions—is that once this goes through with all this level of detail, you are just getting rid of one onerous administrative burden, which is the form for small amounts of money, and moving to another one, where you will have to prove that the attendees and the beneficiaries are the ones we said they were. How do we evidence all these things?

I welcome the Bill hugely. In terms of cash donations, we miss out on a lot of gift aid because of the amount of money that goes through the lifeboat station. A practical example would be where money is put into the local collecting box because, in terms of security and the way we administer, it is the most secure, easiest and most efficient way. How can we then split those donations between general visitors to the lifeboat station and those who attended, say, a safety event or a first aid event, or who were a casualty who was picked from the water? As I say, it is an excellent idea, but there are practicalities to all these overlays that I can see coming through in the latest amendment. How do we prove and evidence that these things are happening?

Q 55

My question is to Mr Spivey. In my constituency, which is about an hour from the sea, there are several active RNLI fundraising groups. Obviously they have no community buildings and there is no charitable work carried out in this inland area. What percentage of your cash collecting do  you think is derived from similar sorts of activities that do not come under the category of a community building collection?

Darren Spivey: You could probably say that it relates to the number of fundraising branches and the number of station branches. Just about all of them bring in over £5,000 of cash donations, and we have about 1,000 fundraising branches and about 200 community station branches. I welcome this Bill because we have a potential of 200 community buildings gathering that money, but if the intention is to enable us to get more gift aid on the kind of donations you talk about for the local community—that is not just the RNLI; it is anybody collecting money—there is a huge opportunity missed in those areas. As I say, the measure is welcome because we are starting to get more into this difficult area, but there is that downfall that it does not allow us to get the gift aid on the cash donations that I am sure our loyal supporters want.

Q 56

I wonder whether I could probe a bit more in relation to the community buildings? This is a question for the National Trust in particular. Is your concern mainly about the pay per entry issue, or are there other aspects of the legislation and amendments as drafted that would make it difficult for the National Trust to make use of that particular aspect of the Bill? My other question is for the RNLI: can you give us some examples of how you think we could alter the legislation to ensure that all the areas from which your small cash donations potentially could come can be counted for gift aid?

David Warrellow: With regard to the community building provisions, when we looked at the legislation as previously drafted we were reasonably confident that a large proportion of our visitor properties would qualify—we would have a large number of buildings within each site, but they would be deemed to be a single building for the purposes of the legislation. In terms of meeting the criteria on the number of beneficiaries and the number of times the events were taking place each year, we did not think that we would have any difficulty meeting those criteria.

The amendment to exclude properties where the visitors have to pay for entry will take out a large number of our properties. We have other properties that are free to enter; we have information centres or study centres—places like that—but they tend to be the sort of properties where we do not necessarily get the footfall of visitors that would generate enough in the way of cash donations. So that change would have a big impact on us.

Darren Spivey: From my point of view, there are two important elements, which Fiona mentioned. Okay, the lifeboat stations are the community buildings. I think that starting to take out some of the restrictions on how items are collected and who the beneficiaries are, which would be very difficult to evidence, would be a strong start. Here is the community building, we have proved that it is the community building, and people see it as the hub of the RNLI, at the local lifeboat station and near the sea. I think that proof is fine; I do not think that you then need the overlays of what more needs to be proved—all the beneficiaries, and so on.

In terms of fundraising branches, it would get more and more difficult and open up a whole world of legislation. You could talk about community organisations,  and, because we need to monitor it to see how branches are doing, we certainly have the evidence of cash collections. Each community organisation has its own registration number, so if you had a registered community organisation that collects cash for the charity, you could start to open it up to that area. Not all of them collect £5,000 and not all of them collect it in cash, but certainly with a registered community organisation, where there is a degree of analysis and overview, as well as a committee and things like that, you could start to draw out a few more additions to this purpose. I come back to the purpose of trying to relieve the burden on cash donations.

Q 57

I have a question for the RNLI concerning your local branches. Am I right in thinking that for most, if not all, of these local branches, the committee would be voluntary?

Darren Spivey: Absolutely.

Q 58

Perhaps a good proportion of what they do would be organised community events?

Darren Spivey: Yes.

Q 59

So they are events they would perhaps charge people to attend. There are clearly some very welcome parts of this legislation, but do you think that there is a danger that, because all these people are volunteers, they may think, “Well, actually, I can’t be bothered to do this”? Is it likely that, on a national level, you would turn around and say, “If we want to benefit from this legislation it would be much easier to try to get individual supporters to give”? Do you think that some of the restrictions would make some of your voluntary committees just say, “No, we can’t be bothered”?

Darren Spivey: That is an interesting question. If it created any more administrative burden, I do not think that they would do it. Considering the maximum is £5,000 per area, and in different areas we would gather more monies than just cash donations, I think that it would turn people off if we asked them to do any more administration. On the flipside, I do not think that we would ask them to do the administration. If it turned out that, for each of the six bullet points I have written down, we would have to evidence that it was a certain type of event, and it was a donation of less than £20, and all those other things, I do not think that we would do anything more than simply say that we cannot gather money at that type of community building, or even that community branch.

Q 60

Further to Mr Spivey’s point, are you saying that it is a question of the detail of the evidence required by HMRC, rather than the wording of the Bill?

Darren Spivey: That is my biggest concern in all of this. Generally, from where gift aid started as a concept to this, now, it seems overly burdensome for what you are trying to do, which has absolutely great intentions, so please carry on.

Q 61

But the burdens come from the implementation rather than the statutory regulation.

Darren Spivey: Yes, exactly. When gift aid first came in, there was a real difficulty, between HMRC and the charities, in how we could prove what HMRC wanted us to prove. It ended up with more forms, more administration and more audit checks. I remember that  we had a soft audit check at first and were found wanting. We made changes, and everything is fine now, but now we have at least two people who monitor our gift aid, full time. That is the kind of burden that could be added here if we do not do this in the right way.

Q 62

One reason for a number of the Bill’s clauses is to protect against fraud. To what extent have you had concerns about any members of your organisations being involved in fraud? Has there ever been a prosecution brought by HMRC, or any other body, because of concerns about fraud in organisations that are under your umbrellas?

David Warrellow: On behalf of the National Trust, I can say that the vast majority of our gift aid claim is currently off the back of our membership subscriptions. We also claim on appeals and donations, but the amount of gift aid claimable on that is much lower than for memberships where we have a regular, ongoing relationship with our supporters.

As far as any evidence of fraud is concerned, nothing at all has ever come to my attention from any aspect: in property administration; at the centre; or in local supporter groups that fundraise on behalf of the National Trust.

Tim Leech: In all the organisations I have worked in, from large to small, it has never been an issue that has come to my attention—I have never seen it raised.

I would also point out that while fraud is what people are concerned about, and we are tightening things up to try and prevent that, the Government run schemes already through which you can claim money, which do not have this amount of backing to stop fraud happening, so I think this is a bit of an overkill, if you do not mind me saying. The whole point of the Bill is to make it easy to get money back into the communities so that something can be done with it, and the more you tie that up and worry about it, the more problematic it becomes. Spot checks would be one thing, but you have tightened up gift aid, which is a positive, and if it were on a sliding scale, it would be more open to people to join in, and it would promote gift aid as well, so you could take it forward in that way.

Darren Spivey: From the RNLI’s point of view, there are two elements to the question. The first is of fraud in the RNLI, and people taking money from the RNLI. I have been at the RNLI for 18 years and I have seen probably only eight or nine cases of fraud. I still remember going to a certain island—to Aith—and when I asked the question, they said that anyone who committed fraud against the RNLI would be drummed off the island. That shows that there is a great passion in volunteering for a charity; people do not do it to take money.

Obviously, you create systems to minimise the risk of fraud, and in my written declaration, I think I said that one of the concerns I have with how you want this to happen practically is that if you collect a batch of money at the end of a charitable event, it increases the risk of fraud, as opposed to putting the money into a secure box, which is what we ask people to do.

In relation to gift aid, where we have had three inspections now, the only issues we have had in relation to fraud are where we cannot find a particular form. When we went back to the donors, which we did on our second audit when reparation was still allowed, every  time the form came back saying, “Sorry, it was just an administrative error.” There was no fraud from the RNLI in relation to trying to over-claim; it was merely an administrative issue of trying to get the right form in the right place and trying to find the forms.

Q 63

Mr Leech, you slightly pre-empted me with your experience of other forms of Government funding. Will the three of you say what other sources of Government funding you receive, if any, and what you have to do to receive those sums of money and to protect against fraud?

Tim Leech: The charity that I run at present receives no Government funding, although we support a lot of Government initiatives, such as the TV switchover help scheme. Money from national lottery schemes and small community funding is one source of which I am very aware and it is utilised by lots of different organisations and community activities. With these, you can claim up to £10,000 and you do not have to be a charity. Of course, there is a stark difference between a registered and a non-registered charity. A charity is a legalistic construct that can be applied to lots of different classes, so there are lots of ways that one can get into that. That seems to be a good indication. Those funds are channelled back to the public through charitable or community-level work which, again, gives you an indication that people are checking for fraud and that the administration is tight. It seems to be balanced in terms of what you can do with that amount of money.

David Warrellow: To my knowledge, the National Trust does not receive any direct Government funding either. The vast majority of our income is generated from membership subscriptions, investments, legacies and visitors at our properties. We receive a large number of grants from various grant-giving bodies, and my understanding is that some of the audit requirements imposed by those bodies are quite onerous. We have to keep quite a lot of paperwork—in many cases original documents—for back up and to prove that the money we receive has been spent on the projects for which we have applied for funds.

Q 64

Sums as low as even £1,250.

David Warrellow: No. I am referring to much larger grants. I do not know what the individual requirements are, but I know that we have come across the issue where although we have tried to scan our invoices and other documents, we need, in fact, to keep the originals for some of the grant-giving bodies, because they will not accept scanned images as evidence, so their requirements can be onerous.

Darren Spivey: With the RNLI, 98% of our money comes from supporters, not from the Government. Having said that, in relation to inspection and review, we have a very good working relationship with HMRC at the moment through gift aid and VAT claims. Our latest visit is more in relation to a high-level risk assessment—I believe that that is where HMRC is going—to say, “What kind of organisation are you? Let us look at your systems, controls and procedures, and see if we are comfortable with them.” HMRC is reviewing these over the next five or six months to see what kind of risk we are. From our point of view, HMRC seems to be  moving more towards a risk-review and an audit function, as opposed to working in a specific, detailed and evidential way.

Q 65

In terms of some of the other requirements, your organisation will be affected by the requirement to be able to match through previous gift aid, for example. Do your smaller organisations—member organisations—already collect sufficient money via gift aid to meet that requirement?

Tim Leech: About an eighth of our money is through gift aid. We have always done that; it is a major source of our funding. We were early subscribers to the scheme and we have a very loyal donor base who like to give that way. Some people are not eligible to give because they fall outside the tax regime. I find this a fair way of doing it. We would be able to sign up if we could have community events, if we started working in a different way or we were a larger organisation. I have to think very carefully how I spend money on fundraising, because I cannot put boxes in every shop or go off to loads of community buildings. However, that is not to say that charities that can should not benefit that way.

I can also see it from another point of view: that of a parish council looking at a couple of trusts operating in my village where they are trying to build a new sports pavilion. They have already started the gift aid scheme, but they will not be eligible because it has not been running for three years, but that little extra boost would be very useful for that community to carry on the Olympic theme. A village hall trust would find it very useful as well, but they have not necessarily got gift aid up and running. If we could have it at a high level—say 10:1—that might be a better way forward for people as well. There is an onus on trying to tie it up too much with gift aid, I think.

Darren Spivey: From the RNLI’s point of view, the matching aspect is not a huge issue. With my Charity Tax Group hat on, I would obviously welcome what my colleague has talked about. It is difficult. I am a volunteer treasurer of other small organisations and, largely, they find gift aid onerous. They probably will not have gone into the gift aid side of things—doing the forms and so on—so this will not benefit them. They are smaller and not as well organised, and they do not have professional people working for them, so we have to recognise that it is quite difficult for them, on the volunteer side, to do the things we are asking them to do.

Q 66

At the moment, do your component parts that would meet the requirements for community buildings, and so would get over that barrier, account for gift aid separately, or do you normally deal with that centrally?

Darren Spivey: We deal with that and, again, there is a huge amount of administration and form filling to ensure that we get the right value. There are times when trying to get the right evidence costs us more than the amount of gift aid we get back on a £10 donation. I welcome this—I think it is fantastic—but I sympathise with those smaller charities that do not have the level of support that the RNLI can give those volunteers, because we have to do a lot of administration to ensure that they do all the right things, and dot the i’s and cross the t’s, to get that money back. While it will not be such an issue  for our people, because we are there to support them—certainly with the gift aid forms—we do not go down to that level with the smaller values at the moment; we just make sure that we do it for the bigger values.

Q 67

Is it your understanding that each component bit would have to satisfy the matching requirements?

Darren Spivey: That was not my understanding. I thought it was by the charity. I did not know it was that specific.

I am not sure; I just wondered whether you knew.

Darren Spivey: My understanding from reading it was that it was the charity registration itself, rather than the community building—I hope that it is, otherwise it is going to be extremely difficult to prove over the years.

It is the charity itself.

Q 68

A question for clarity and to have this on record. You talked about the proportionality of what you are expected to do to get the additional top-up payments. Do you think that the administration you have been asked to do is proportionate, given the amount that the charities will get? Is there a better way to do it, and is there something that could be done to simplify the process?

Tim Leech: I do not think it is proportionate. That starts from what I said about the need for parity to be brought to the process so that it is applicable to as many people as possible. I think you can look at it in a number of different ways. Take the good bits of gift aid: people make a choice, and they can make a choice of gift aid, which I find very attractive. I see this as very separate to gift aid; it is about small charitable donations. People make such donations, and they should be able to have the benefit back, and the charity or charitable cause receiving that money should be able to claim that. You are asking about it being matched just because the charity has taken it up and registered as a gift aid charity or cause. That is part of the process, and you could have a date from which that starts.

It could be that people are shown to be looking at a cause that is undertaking work within the community, which becomes part of the process and is recorded, so it is more about something happening and people trying to raise money around it, rather than trying to chase the money back and being asked about evidence of it being donated in such a way, which to me would become very onerous. You can also see whether it matches up with people’s bank records and judge whether it is properly administrated.

It is also about whether you want to take it slightly another way by looking at the organisations that are accountable and transparent. By that I do not mean that they have to be registered charities, but they should at least have known, named trustees for administrative governance, with that information publicly available, whether on a notice board or through posting accounts and so on. Those things would start to give me a little bit more security.

The amounts that are being asked for are very small and they become a problem only when lots of people are able to claim because it builds up. That is where you have to get a little more proportionate with the larger claims. Does that help?

Darren Spivey: I think there is a danger that it could easily require exactly the same administration, if not more, as you get more overlay. With gift aid, you have to provide HMRC with evidence that you have actually had the money in the bank account. We have to keep copies of bank statements for our branches to show that money went into the bank account. That is the kind of evidence we have needed in what should be quite a simple system.

For this, are we going to have to prove that there was a first aid course for the general public and that the general public could access the building? I honestly do not know until you get to the practicalities of this. My fear is that it will become more burdensome and we could not take advantage. Again, I come back to the main purpose: the cash donations and being able to get that back. I come back to simplifying the process and saying, “You are a registered charity. You do have a community building where you can prove that the charitable activity is carried out,” or, “You do have cash donations to a cause for a registered part of that charity.” If we want to widen it to our fundraising branches and say that the purpose is about getting the gift aid on those cash donations, we should bring it back up, rather than getting more and more detail, because I am worried.

Q 69

Are you happy with the way in which a small donation is defined in the schedule as having just a £20 limit and just being in cash? Should the limit be higher or lower? Should you be able to make other forms of donation of that sort of value?

David Warrellow: Personally, I think the £20 limit is about right. It was originally going to be £10, so we welcome the increase to £20, which feels right for the type of scheme that we are aiming for.

On whether it should be purely cash, there ought to be provision in legislation to allow HMRC to accept alternative forms of payment. Technology is fast-moving, and we have things such as contactless payments and text donations. While the scheme can certainly start off by being for cash donations only, HMRC should have the power to allow alternative forms of payment in the future, certainly once the scheme has bedded down and once the other technologies that are coming in are more frequently used for charitable donations.

Q 70

On the issues of the problem of the qualifying period and the linkage to gift aid, and how that might hamper some charities, can I ask if any of you, in the course of your various activities, are aware of how credit unions are treated by the FSA under Treasury legislation, according to whether they are version 1 or version 2? There are different levels of treatment given to credit unions, depending on their size and scale, and the type of services and activities they offer and support: one treatment for smaller, newer credit unions, and a different treatment for bigger, more established ones. Might that same sort of sensible feature translate to how charities are treated? As well as taking money from the public, credit unions get benefits and  grants. They are treated at two different levels; have you considered whether charities could be treated in a similar way?

David Warrellow: I have no knowledge of credit unions, but from what you have said, that would be an excellent point to take up and look at. There would certainly be mileage in looking at having a two-tier system, with one tier for established charities under the scheme and one tier for start-up charities. If start-up charities are, say, fundraising for a village hall, community centre or something like that, where cash donations would be received during that start-up period, they could lose out considerably if they have no gift aid history. So something along those lines would be very welcome indeed.

Darren Spivey: I do not know the history of credit unions, but I agree that no charity is the same, and therefore to try to bracket a large, national charity, which has a substantial amount of money, with a smaller charity is extremely difficult. That is probably where most of the problems are coming into this.

Q 71

To pick up a point mentioned by my colleague, but to ask the question in a slightly different way, this is a scheme that is designed to get a maximum of £1,250 to small charities. Is there a better way to achieve that end, in your view, than to link it with gift aid and require you to jump through all the different hoops that you have just been talking us through?

David Warrellow: I would propose that there could be alternative eligibility criteria to allow charities to participate in the scheme. I do not think that it has to be linked to gift aid necessarily. I can fully understand the reasons why HMRC wants to link it to that, so that we have the anti-fraud measures there, but I think there could be alternative criteria. For example, if a charity already has a history with HMRC, because, say, it operates a pay-as-you-earn scheme for paid employees, a good compliance record there could count. If the charity has been occupying its community building for three years, it could provide evidence to HMRC of, say, having successfully claimed for the mandatory charity relief on business rates, or could provide other evidence of occupation being established at those premises, such as utility bills or bank statements. HMRC should be allowed to accept alternative eligibility criteria if a charity cannot meet the gift aid criterion set out in the legislation.

Tim Leech: I would echo that. I think you have to look at a little more flexibility, which will allow more people to take part and create that parity across the Bill.

Darren Spivey: Again, I agree. The principles are sound with this, and the RNLI certainly welcomes the principles. The more detail you put in, the more difficult it will be. It is fine, to a point: why keep overlaying it with difficulties? I would take it back to where it was a while back, and say, “Don’t try to get down to the specifics of how a charity operates, what it does or what its purpose is.” It is all about the purpose of this Bill, which is to enable charities to get that £1,250 to their centres in the community. We should come back to that, to a higher level, and allow HMRC a bit more leeway to work with charities, to see how you achieve that purpose. That is what I would do.

Q 72

I want to come back briefly to community buildings. One of the jobs that we have to do as a Committee is look at the wording of the Bill.  We have heard quite a bit about things that could potentially be clarified in guidance; hopefully, that would not be pages and pages of guidance, but short and sharp. I wonder if that would be useful in relation to the community buildings clauses, particularly because it seems that, with the best of intentions, efforts to try to simplify that have had unintended consequences for others. Do you now feel—from your organisation’s perspective—that the actual wording of the Bill in relation to community buildings needs to be further amended? Or could the issues that you are concerned about be sorted out in guidance?

Darren Spivey: Personally, I still feel the Bill needs to be amended. Take the RNLI, for example: we save lives at sea. Does that mean that our charitable activity is happening in the lifeboat station, or does it mean that it is happening at sea and the station does not become a community building? To say that charitable activity has to happen there and the cash donations happen there, and people associate with that cause: do we actually have to run 10 first aid courses at that lifeboat station to get it or do we recognise that that is a community building there? A more generic way of wording that would be better than, “You have to do your charitable activity and people have to collect money,” etc., etc.

Tim Leech: I generally agree, but again, our activity is not done in a building—I do not have buildings.

David Warrellow: I agree. I think there are some areas in the legislation that are still open to interpretation. If that is covered by the guidance, fine, but there are some terms in here that would need clarification in the guidance. For example, you use the terms “residential purposes” and “commercial purposes”. Those can be interpreted quite differently in certain circumstances with different charities.

Q 73

In relation to those two examples—residential and commercial—are there concerns that that would impact on the National Trust in particular?

David Warrellow: In the VAT legislation, for example, there is quite a lot of detail about what is and what is not a residential building. We do not have that here. I am not suggesting that we need to transfer all the VAT definitions across into this Bill, but I know that there could be some grey areas with things like hospices or hostels and those types of establishment. Are they residential or not?

Q 74

Earlier, you answered a question about whether cash donations will be replaced by some modern form of technology. Are you aware of any schemes—or are you considering implementing any schemes—that achieve that? I think I have heard of swiping your Oyster card to donate £2 to a charity rather using cash. Do you have any specific examples of that?

Tim Leech: There is text giving and phone-to-phone giving, so it goes straight to bank accounts. Giving by text is quite easy for small organisations to set up and administer, and there is a trial, so that is something we are looking at.

Q 75

Do you see that as an alternative to impulse-giving of cash—that is the old swipe by phone or follow a link or something and just give a small amount, rather than its being an extension of a more formal dimension?

Tim Leech: Yes, lots of times a text-given amount is set at a low level. It will be about a £20 donation. A lot of the time it is in response to something someone sees or interacts with. So it could scan things to say, “Give us this, give a bit more information, make a donation online.” You can do that on a mobile phone, so it can very much be an impulse. That could be another thing. One of the points made was about changing technology. We cannot pre-empt it and we do not know what will happen, but it is good to have a little bit of space in the Bill to make sure that what we are legislating is not out of date straight away. This area is changing so quickly it is worth leaving a bit of room to manoeuvre later.

Do you think that we are a few years from the RNLI collecting tin being replaced with a collecting chip point that you can swipe?

Darren Spivey: I agree entirely that we are in the very early stages. We have actually looked at a cash point at a lifeboat station, where you put in your credit card and however much you want to give, but we are at the very early stages. It was very expensive and people are quite happy to carry around cash, give it to their kids and watch it swirl round and round the collecting thing. That is what the fascination is, not seeing dad put the chip and pin number in. I cannot see that taking over for a very long time yet.

If members of the Committee have no further questions, I will suspend the sitting for five minutes.

Sitting suspended.