Charities Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 68:"Page 105, line 25, leave out ““the address of its principal office”” and insert ““whether its principal office is in England or in Wales””" The noble Lord said: My Lords, in moving this amendment, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 73 and 74. I am grateful to the Hospital Broadcasting Association for bringing to our attention this and a number of other issues on which we have made amendments. One receives a lot of correspondence on these matters which is most helpful. It is important that the address of the principal office of a CIO is known to the public. Those who have dealings with any corporate body need to be assured that they will have no problems communicating with it. For that reason, the Bill as currently drafted would require the address of the principal office to appear on the face of the CIO’s constitution. But the consequence of that is that any change to that address would need a constitutional amendment. The procedure for constitutional amendments, set out in paragraph 14 of new Schedule 5B, rightly contains a number of safeguards. However, representations have been made to the effect that those safeguards are unnecessary and that accordingly the amendment procedure is over-burdensome when a CIO is simply changing the address of its principal office. We agree that the procedure set out in paragraph 14 is burdensome for the process of simply changing the address of a principal office. The effect of the amendments now tabled will be that the address of the principal office need not appear in a    CIO’s constitution. Therefore, a constitutional amendment will not be necessary to change the address. The need to publicise the address of the principal office can be achieved in other ways. It can appear in the Charity Commission’s register entry for the CIO, any change being effected only when it has been notified to and recorded by the commission. It could be made a requirement that the address of the CIO’s principal office should appear in its correspondence. These are matters to be considered when framing the regulations to be made under Schedule 7. However, since the application of some of the CIO provisions will depend on whether the principal office is located in England or in Wales, we think that the country of location should still appear on the face of the CIO’s constitution. The national location of that office should be capable of change only by the normal constitutional amendment procedure. The second part of these amendments has the effect that all changes to a CIO’s constitution will take effect only on registration by the commission. I hope that the House will agree that this is a sensible set of amendments designed to reduce burdens on charities. I beg to move.