Charities Bill [HL]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken on the amendment. My noble friend said that the drafting could probably be improved. My drafting can always be improved; I have no objection whatever to that. I am not attempting to produce a subsidy for bad behaviour. There are occasions when obviously the trustees have misbehaved and the funding of an interim manager should come out of their personal pockets rather than those of the charity. I have no objection to that, but sometimes an interim manager needs to be appointed because the trustees and managers have mismanaged out of pure lack of expertise. They have been doing the best they can, but they have not succeeded because they do not have the training or the management skills to deal with it. The noble Lord, Lord Bassam, said that on occasions the interim manager has been remunerated out of public funds. I should be grateful if he would write to me with some examples, because I know of none. My noble friend said that it was wrong for the taxpayer to pay in commercial cases because of a manager who has been put in to wind up a company. There is a difference between taxation and donation. Taxation is money paid to the state for the state to do its work. Donation is money paid to a charity for the charity to use for charitable purposes, and by law those donations can be used only for those charitable purposes. Theoretically, if a charity has enough to fulfil those purposes and wants to use it for another charitable purpose, it should offer that money back to the donor. I have never yet come across a Treasury offering money back to a taxpayer because it feels it has enough. I wish that day would come. I am not entirely happy with the answer given to me by the Minister. I will, however, read carefully what he has said, and I will look at this matter and may well return with a revised amendment at Third Reading. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.