Charities Bill [HL]

The noble Lord, Lord Shutt, is quite right. The threshold gets worn and as it is walked over it becomes shallower; time will do the same with this. Listening to the debate, we have got the question of a small charity that struggles to raise an income of £10,000 locally, but with nothing in the way of capital. We have also got the charity that has an income of £10,000 from what in my book is a substantial sum of capital—£100,000. It may not be substantial to some people but to me it is very substantial. I wonder if we can work something out on the income threshold combined with the capital, so that those with a large sum of capital have to register. If they have capital assets of £100,000 they would have to register but you would not have to register until your income was £10,000 if you had no assets at all. I am not asking the Minister to give any sort of decision tonight because this has been thrown at him in the dark from behind, so to speak, and he will need time to think about it.