Charities Bill [HL]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my long-time colleague at the London School of Economics, the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn, and to confirm that I am a great believer in the creative chaos of civil society and of the charitable sector. I am sorry that I cannot confirm that in my explorations of the English language I have missed the word Weltanschauung. I think that it is in fact quite a good thing that that unfortunate word does not exist in a language which is precise and therefore does not require it. There is a sense of déjà vu, as the first speaker so rightly said. Indeed I was tempted to go a step further and quote the immortal words imputed to the legendary American baseball player Yogi Berra, who was an involuntary wit, to be sure, when he said:"““This is like déjà vu all over again””." Since that applies to me too, I confine myself to three quick comments. The first has to do with public benefit. That is such an important term and quite clearly it is going to be a central term in the Bill and in the Act when we have passed it. A number of comments have been made about it. Since my concern is particularly with small charities and, if I may use another word which could be misunderstood, ““irrelevant”” charities in a certain sense—that is, charities born out of ideas which have very little to do with the intention to improve the world—it is important that as we talk about public benefit in our debates, both in this Second Reading debate and in Committee, statements are made which help the Charity Commission in providing its guidance to be generous to those charities. In the list of 12 purposes which must be included, I am struck by the fact that certainly 10 of them could also describe government action. Therefore, there will be a temptation to understand charities as being concerned with subjects in which they either compete with government or help government in pursuing its purposes. That is not my view of the third sector—the charitable sector. I therefore hope that in interpreting public benefit, the term ““public”” will not be confused with the kind of purposes that are rightly defined by elected government, but will be used in a much wider, more generous way. That would then make way for the truly independent charities which are not always concerned with doing good. I am not entirely sure that in this regard I agree with everything that my noble friend Lord Best said. I usually agree with him but, again, I think there was a strong element of charities having to do good in a certain sense which is too narrow for the kind of understanding of charities which I cherish because I am a great believer in civil society and its strength. My second point is brief and just really a word of thanks or praise for what has happened to the Bill since we first saw it. It follows from my view of charities that it is quite important that the Charity Commission in its behaviour is, as the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, called it in a Committee debate, ““fair, reasonable and proportionate””. I am therefore very pleased that in the Bill as it now stands, at least the word ““proportionate”” has survived. The word ““reasonableness”” is circumscribed in a number of ways, and it is a pity that the word ““fair”” has not survived the discussions we have had so far. However, I understand that new Section 1D in Clause 7 takes account of the points that were made in this connection. I think that that is a great improvement, especially for someone who takes my creative chaos view of civil society. My third point is again an expression of pleasure. Those of you who were present last night in our debate on Parliament and the legislative process, or indeed those of you who have read yesterday’s Hansard, will have noticed that we discussed at some length the question of post-legislative scrutiny and the various methods that could be applied to it. As I expressed last night, I am strongly in favour of a wider use of sunset clauses. But sunset clauses are only one end of post-legislative scrutiny. There are methods of review of legislation that go some way towards achieving the same purpose. I should like to congratulate the Government and the authors of Clause 7 on the quite interesting method they have devised for the review; that is, the appointment of a person to review generally the operation of the Act after five years. I think that that is a highly desirable way forward, one that helps us avoid the long life of unnecessary or mistaken legislation. I look forward to the first review of this Act once it has passed Parliament, which I hope will happen as soon as possible.