Charities Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 48:"After Clause 26, insert the following new clause—"    ““RIGHT OF REPLY TO INQUIRY REPORTS    After section 8(6)(b) of the 1993 Act insert— ““(c)   all persons and organisations referred to in a report which is to be published must be invited on 28 days’ notice to sign their agreement with the report or alternatively to submit a dissenting opinion which must be published as an appendix with the report within a 200 word limit, and no agreement or dissenting opinion or lack of them shall be taken into account by the Commission or the court in deciding whether a trustee subject to an order removing him as a trustee shall be reinstated.”””” The noble Lord said: I seem to be going on a bit at the moment, but that is the nature of the grouping. The amendment would require the Charity Commission to publish with its inquiry reports the agreement or otherwise of the affected parties. The Minister touched on that briefly earlier on. In my view, the amendment is necessary because the commission’s reports are often very one-sided and leave a burning sense of injustice in the people referred to in those reports, with no opportunity to refute unbalanced information. In too many of the commission’s cases, the victims have suffered unjust treatment and have then had to suffer further a one-sided account being published on the much-visited Charity Commission website, where it remains, I understand, for two years. The Minister said in the previous Parliament, when we were in Grand Committee on the previous Bill, that anyone affected by an inquiry was free to publish his own account of it however he wished. That is in col. GC 441 of Hansard for 14 March 2005. That is not good enough. The reputation of the commission’s fairness in its reports is tarnished. That reputation and the quality of the reports will both be improved if the amendment is accepted. The noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote, reminded the Grand Committee considering the earlier Charities Bill of the contrast in approach with the inspection report provisions in the Education Act, where a consensus view was sought where possible. Such an approach does not preclude real disagreement being expressed between the regulator and the regulated, but having dissenting opinions published will help to concentrate the minds of commission staff in addressing real differences of opinion, instead of simply ignoring them. The dissenting opinion will be published on the commission’s website, not just where the charity chooses, because people who look at the website at the moment cannot see which remarks a charity considers unjust. I beg to move.