My Lords, I thank the Minister for that and I thank all speakers who, on the substance, it seems to me, agreed with what we are trying to achieve. The difficulties are over whether this is the right Bill or the right wording, which basically says that the Charity Commission must make sure that,
“independent charities are not compelled to use or dispose of their assets in a way which is inconsistent with their charitable purposes”.
If the wording can be better than that—if it should be something such as the “best interests” of charities, as the Minister says—I will be very content, if the amendment is passed, to work with him at Third Reading to make the wording correct and acceptable
to the Charity Commission and to the charity lawyers, who know far more about wording than I do.
On the issue, there are two things that I want to say. The first comes from what the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, said. This is a Bill about the protection of charities, and we are trying to protect charitable assets so that the money can be used for what the donors wanted when they bequeathed it. The idea of putting it on to the Charity Commission is that, basically, somebody has to protect charities from being compelled by someone else—not by their charitable trustees—to do something with the money that those who gave it did not intend.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, asked about compulsory purchase for a road. In a sense it is always the public sector that does that; it is nationalisation. The land is taken over so that a road can be built. I said in a meeting with the Minister that it was not normally his party that wanted to nationalise things, so I am interested that over charitable housing that is what the Government want. We are talking about a swathe of housing—not one or two in the way of a new train line—that over time will undoubtedly be held by the private sector.
My second issue is that we are not talking just about housing—albeit that we have heard about the Peabody, Keswick and Sutton housing associations. We are also talking about that wider big society. I used to work in alcohol misuse issues; we ran a lot of social care. It could be our assets, under another Bill, where the Government felt that they wanted to use them in a certain way that we as an independent charity, which had raised the money, did not want to do. We have heard about the National Trust—or indeed, it could be hospitals or hospices.
The issue is not just about housing, which is why it is not appropriate to leave it to a housing Bill. We want to state something very simply: where money has been donated to an independent charity for a particular purpose, the trustees must abide by their trustee duty to make sure that the assets are used there. That is something on which this House would like to take a view.