Charities Bill [HL]

My Lords, I welcome the amendment, which I think is a good idea, but if it became part of the Bill the Charity Commission would have to take on a considerable number of additional staff to do the additional work that is required and give very sound and good training to those staff to make certain that the work was done well. I am not going to mention schools, as enough of your Lordships have already spoken about schools with regard to this amendment. But I am going to mention local authorities and their legal duty to provide homes for people with disabilities and for the elderly. An awful lot of that work is not in fact undertaken by the local authorities; they buy it in from charities and private enterprises. Some of those charities are, I suspect, doing very little more than the bare minimum. We still need those charities that extend and increase the quality of the homes that they provide for disabled people and the elderly. In that respect, I know that one of the leaders is the John Groom’s Association for Disabled People, because it has for a very long time concentrated on doing what it can to make disabled people as independent as possible. It has not been able to do that purely on the money paid to it by local authorities to house their disabled people. But not everyone is doing that. We need to make certain that those charities that are just doing enough to get their payment by the local authorities do more to justify their charitable status. The tax that they can claw back from some of the donations that they receive should be used to advance the work that they are doing. They should not just tread water and stay where they are the whole time.