Charities Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 63:"Page 47, line 26, after ““date”” insert ““(but this provision shall be without prejudice to the efficacy of any commission scheme with regard to such land)””" The noble Lord said: The amendment emanates from the Charity Law Association and, again, deals with the new regime for mergers of charities. I refer once more to the radical vesting of legal title to charities’ assets when they have executed the relevant pre-merger vesting declaration and complied with the notification that we have just been discussing. At present, when one charity merges with another and one of them has a large amount of leasehold property—or it might be one of those charities with a lot of urban land, with hundreds of titles—they will get a scheme from the Charity Commission enabling and facilitating the transfer of those leasehold assets into the merged entity. When the Government responded, as they kindly did, to concerns expressed about the exceptional circumstances in which we felt that the automatic vesting would be unreasonable, they responded by putting in subsection (3). The three classes of cases in subsection (3) will not be subject to the automatic vesting. One of those cases is where leases or agreements require the consent of someone else before the transfer of the lease or agreement can take place. This amendment is slightly in the nature of a probing amendment because it may be that the Government can give an assurance that Amendment No. 63 is unnecessary. If that is not the case then at least Amendment No. 63 will have the effect of making clear that this provision is without prejudice to the present normal course of conduct, whereby a commission’s scheme is obtained with regard to such land and its efficacy. I beg to move.