Charities Bill [HL]

I should just like to put in a tiny caveat here. I was very influenced by what the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, said about the numbers involved. I suspect, knowing what human nature is, that it does things under stimuli—and that a lot of the public schools and hospitals and so on have gone out of their way to do charitable things to get charitable status, totally failing to take into account that what they are providing is costing them far more than the tax relief that they obtain. If you take away that slight frisson of worry that those institutions feel about doing charitable things, you might reduce the amount that they give. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, was mocking the concept of Eton as a charity. It was founded as a charitable school for poor scholars, and the scholars are subsidised. It involves itself in a very considerable amount of charitable work and always has done, both in the East End of London and for its own pupils. Funnily enough, although the great public may not recognise it as such, Eton could be genuinely regarded as a charity—and would pass the test involved in the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury. Implied worries can work extremely well as stimuli for the good, and I suspect that what charitable status has done for a lot of these institutions is that it has provided a stimulus for them to be more charitable. They think, ““Oh, we don’t want to lose   charitable status””—whereas if they did lose their charitable status, they might even be slightly better off because they would not have to do the charity. I enter that slightly cynical point of view into your Lordships’ discussion.