Charities Bill [HL]

The noble Lord, Lord   Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, made the important point that we have sought to achieve a delicate balance in the Bill. That is exactly what we have tried to do. I have heard what my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours and others have said in setting out the rationale behind the amendments, but many of the issues raised go wider than the Bill. As my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours effectively pointed out, in some respects this debate is in the wrong place. The amendment would single out organisations with an educational purpose from all other types of charity. It would seem to apply to all organisations with an educational purpose that sought to register with the Charity Commission, from the small inner-city pre-school playgroup to the British Council, the Wellcome Trust and many of our largest charities that have educational objectives among their purposes. I cannot see that singling out educational charities in that way would be of great value. If it is to ensure that the Charity Commission takes a different view of what ““public benefit”” means for education purposes as opposed to others, the law already provides for that. One of the beauties of the common law definition of ““public benefit”” is that, within a framework of principles that apply across the board, it recognises that in practice the things that charities have to do to provide public benefit differ greatly according to their purposes. It does that across different headings—say, between the advancement of education and the relief of poverty—and within headings; for example, between two educational charities, one of which helps illiterate prisoners to learn to read and write and the other of which puts on public exhibitions of great art. I am not sure that allowing the commission to take account of cultural, social or economic needs when assessing the public benefit of an educational purpose is right. Would it perversely allow a charity that claimed to be for the advancement of education to provide little or no educational benefits as long as it provided other benefits? That is an important question. Nor is it right to put educational charities under an additional burden of explaining and justifying their public benefit credentials. For the integrity of the charity itself, all charities should be under a common duty in that respect. We are levelling the playing field by taking away the presumption of public benefit that poverty relief, religious and educational charities currently enjoy. The amendment would put rocks and boulders, craters and molehills, into the part of the field occupied by educational charities.