Charities Bill [HL]

As I have already said, cases where the commission appoints a receiver and manager are rare, and it is often an action of last resort for the commission where the trustees are no longer in control of the charity. That has been agreed by the Committee as the situation; that it is done only in extremis and only where it is really there to protect the public’s interest and the interests of those involved in the charity. We spent some time in the last Session discussing the requirements on the commission to publish details of its receiver and manager appointments. We have given a lot of careful thought to those appointments, and in essence our position remains the same. The Government agree that the public may have an interest in details of the number and cost of receiver and manager appointments, and the Charity Commission has decided to change its current practice in light of that public interest in receivers and managers, and no doubt partly in response to the propositions advanced by the noble Lord, Lord Swinfen, and others, during the course of our debate. That is a quite proper process. Where the commission completes an inquiry under Section 8 of the 1993 Act, it publishes a report of that inquiry. The commission proposes that in future, its report of an inquiry should include details about the costs of the appointment of a receiver and manager where one is appointed. That will include costs associated with the remuneration of the receiver and manager, disbursements and the cost of consultants. Additionally, the commission is reviewing the style and content of inquiry reports, to make them more informative, transparent and accessible, particularly in relation to the financial impact of the inquiry on the   charity. That has been a feature of some of the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Swinfen, in the past. The Government do not believe that others should be able to append their comments to a statement of the commission once it has concluded a Section 8 inquiry. I made that point earlier when we were looking at Amendment No. 35. The Charity Commission has also recently agreed to publish, on an annual basis, further details about cases where receivers and managers have been appointed. They will include the number of outstanding cases and, for cases closed in the previous year, the name of the charity; the name of the receiver and manager; the dates of appointment and termination of the receiver and manager; the costs; and whether those costs were met by the charity or by the commission itself. It will also include details of additional costs to the charity related to the appointment of the receiver and manager, which will be considered on a case-by-case basis. For 2005–06, details of receiver and manager cases closed in that year will appear on the commission’s website. Details relating to continuing inquiries, of course, will not be published. Prescribing in legislation the level of detail proposed by the amendment would be inflexible and unhelpful, particularly given the fact that the commission has undertaken to publish details itself. We think that the approach proposed by the commission provides for disclosure in the public interest of the relevant details relating to an appointment of a receiver and manager, without the need for legislation. It will be accepted practice and is another example of good regulatory practice working its way through the commission’s procedures. It is welcome and desirable and says a great deal about the internal modernisation that the Charity Commission is undertaking. For those reasons, I hope that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.