Charities Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 33:"Page 14, line 20, at end insert—" ““(   )   After paragraph (a) insert— ““(aa)   a charity wholly or mainly concerned with the advancement of the effectiveness and welfare of any of the armed forces of the Crown;””.”” The noble and gallant Lord said: In moving Amendment No. 33, I thank the noble Lord, Lord   Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, for adding his name to it. I will not be long as the hour is late. Noble Lords will have noted that the Government have revised their approach to exempt charity status since the earlier Bill. I welcome that and would like to see all SNPF-type charities grouped in an exempt category. I have three reasons for putting this forward; namely, the complexities that the services will face because charity is a devolved issue; the extra costs; and the additional bureaucracy that SNPFs—initially the 2,000 or so with annual incomes of more than £100,000, but, ultimately, all those with limited incomes of perhaps £5,000 per annum—will have to face. The new Charities and Trustee Investment (Scotland) Bill is complete and is due to receive Royal Assent next month. That Act will not require SNPFs to be registered with the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator at all, regardless of size. I first thought that it would be perhaps a simple process to propose a parallel amendment to this Bill to achieve the same end for SNPFs in England and Wales. However, the Scottish Bill’s approach is to register any organisation established in or controlled from Scotland which the Inland Revenue has already recognised as a charity under current legislation. There will thus be two categories of charitable SNPFs in Scotland. Thanks to the Act, those on the Inland Revenue books will have the statutory right to deregister immediately, whereas those, presumably smaller, ones that have not had dealings with the Inland Revenue will not be automatically registered. The effect will be that all Scottish-based SNPFs may be treated the same and not burdened with additional cost or bureaucracy. Their accounts and audits will still, of course, have to be carried out by the service authorities. Alongside these, in England and Wales, there will be three further categories within the services—those above the £100,000 or reducing threshold; those below that cut-off; and a further group of SNPFs known as military Crown charities. The Armed Forces will face a complicated mix of legislation and registration requirements unless Her Majesty’s Government are prepared to take account of the Scottish legislation and agree to treat English and Welsh SNPFs in a similar way to those originating in Scotland—in effect, not requiring them to register with the Charity Commission. A further point arises from subsection (14), which gives the Secretary of State the power to mitigate the risk of dual accounting requirements. Even if the SNPFs do not register with the Charity Commission, they will still have to account to their own services. If they do register, they will in effect have a double accounting regime. One solution within the structure of the Bill would be to put all service SNPFs originating in England and Wales into an exempt category. That is the purpose of my amendment. I beg to move.