Charities Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 8:"Page 3, line 19, at end insert ““and, where the charitable purpose is claimed to be the advancement of education, the Commission shall, in determining the public benefit—" (a)   have regard to the need to provide significant and continuing benefits to the educational, cultural, social or economic needs of the national or local community; (b)   consult relevant central or local interests before framing guidance in relation to paragraph (a) above; (c)   review the public benefit provided at regular intervals; and (d)   ensure that every such charity registered by the Commission shall publish annual reports on the public benefit it provides.”” The noble Lord said: The purpose of this amendment—to which my noble friends Lord Wedderburn of Charlton and Lady Turner of Camden have attached their names—is to ensure that if a fee-paying school is to continue to enjoy charitable status after this Bill is passed, the school must establish that it generally gives something back to the community on a continuous basis. It must show that it provides a clear, significant benefit to the local or national community. It is a welcome feature of this Bill, already referred to, that any body established for the advancement of   education—or, indeed, under the various other headings of charitable purpose—will no longer automatically be presumed to be for the public benefit and therefore charitable. As the Bill stands, however, it is entirely left to the Charity Commission to determine what is for the public benefit. I am concerned that, without my amendment, charitable status may well be given to all fee-paying schools except those that exist simply for profit-making purposes, like a cramming institution. A page on the Charity Commission’s website, which I found very profitable to look at, entitled ““Public benefit: the legal principles””, says that public:"““benefit must be to the public at large, or to a sufficient section of the public””." ““A sufficient section of the public”” is, to my mind, a very loose phrase, allowing charitable status when the educational benefits may be virtually confined to a relatively well-off section of the public, amounting across the country to roughly only 7 per cent of the total school population. My amendment will simply give the commission a measure of guidance by setting out some specific, significant criteria to which the commission must, in   the time-honoured phrase, ““have regard”” when considering whether to confer charitable status on any particular school. Many fee-paying schools currently provide a variety of benefits to the wider community—for example, making bursaries available to pupils from less well-advantaged backgrounds; and a range of what might be called outreach work, linking with the local community through sport, music, languages and programmes for gifted children. There are also educational improvement partnerships between independent and state schools, such as those report in last Friday’s Times involving Millfield Preparatory School and Malborough College. There are many other examples. It is sometimes argued that it is quite appropriate that all fee-paying schools—at any rate, those that are   non-profit making—should continue to enjoy charitable status because their existence saves the taxpayer the money that it would otherwise cost to educate their pupils at state schools. I have no doubt that in a free society, parents should be free to send their children to fee-paying schools and that, if they so choose, there is an element of saving to the taxpayer. But I do not think that that justifies the cachet and privileges of blanket charitable status for fee-paying schools, or the incentives provided for tax-exempt covenants for grandparents and others, irrespective of whether the school can demonstrate significant community benefit. Fee-paying schools continue to create or exacerbate social division in this country. They inhibit equality of opportunity. They involve a considerable distortion of educational resources available to the public generally in premises, grounds, libraries, laboratories and, perhaps above all, teaching resources. Unless, that is, such schools enter into arrangements for the significant sharing of facilities by the sort of outreach programmes to which I have referred. That should be the benchmark against which justification for charitable status or its continuation should be assessed. I beg to move.