I thank my hon. Friend for that; perhaps he will take this as a complaint from a humble member of the public. If he joined me in trying to get from Fenchurch Street station to Tower Hill in the morning, on the way to the House of Commons, he would see not only the appalling works and the way people are funnelled through, but that the number of charities operating there creates a physical boundary between the two stations, which is a real problem for commuters who otherwise would donate. There are quite a few cases of when I have felt less positive about charities that I am naturally passionate about. I thank my hon. Friend for highlighting the work. Perhaps I could review what has been done while I was looking at other things since 2006, and also perhaps invite him for a cup of coffee on the corner of Fenchurch Street to meet some of my constituents coming into London and encountering the problem.
We are debating the “Small Charitable Donations” Bill, but I am not quite sure what “small” is. A Southend charity set up by Charles Latham and Howard Briggs has looked to provide a capital amount that could be used to provide small loans to micro-opportunities—non-charities but, in some cases, registered charities as well. That developed from a level of £60,000 or £80,000 to become a £1 million or £2 million fund. Even at that level, it considers itself small and has to do all its fund management via the Essex fund. My constituency predecessor, Sir Teddy Taylor, is involved in that fund. It deals with small charities, but I am not sure that it would be helped by the definition of small charities in the Bill.
I am generally a believer in small being beautiful—my wife is very petite—and in relation to charities, the closer the charity stays to an individual cause, the better. The shovels example is, I think, great. Southend’s charity that wants to do some something for targeted HIV/AIDS patients within a certain age category is another fabulous example. There are, however, some bigger charities—I am not going to name them; they do good work—that have somewhat lost their way. These are
the ones that we see on the back pages of The Guardian, in case any of my hon. Friends sully themselves with such things—they are very good for the fireplace. We can often find a job with such a charity paying significantly more than an MP’s salary—shock, horror. This could be running a charity, or doing a junior, second-tier director job, but, as I say, small is beautiful and the more we can help small charities with the sort of provisions in the Bill, the better. At the moment, there is a flight for merging charities, meaning that charities get much bigger. When they do, I fear they move too far away from their communities. We should encourage those charities to stay small but numerous.