My Lords, I begin by declaring my interests. I have worked both as an executive and as a volunteer in a number of charity and voluntary agencies. I was director of VSO, director of Oxfam and more recently I am a trustee of Saferworld. My activities have mainly been in the international realm but also very much nowadays in the environment role as well.
I think that we are in a grave situation tonight. My noble friend in winding up what I thought was a very good opening speech, promised that we would work constructively and hard to try and make this a better Bill. I hope that that is possible; I have some doubts. The Government will have to do a lot of work to persuade us that we can make this a better Bill because there is tonight’s well argued issue about the complete incompetence and failure to think through and to analyse the consequences, and the unintended consequences, and how they will be dealt with. There is also a question about the underlying purpose of the Bill. At best that could be crudely party political and at worst it could be quite sinister. I have done a lot of work in the North Caucasus region and Russia in recent years and I am horrified to be looking at what is being proposed here and seeing how it relates to what is happening to civil society in Russia.
At times like this it is important to go back to the grassroots and listen, and I am going to ask the House to bear with me while I do that. In all the plethora of representations that have been made to us, there is one that has registered strongly with me. It is from the Newcastle Council for Voluntary Service, and other noble Lords may have seen it. I shall quote from what the council says:
“It isn’t clear which elements of our work could be classified as campaigning. For instance, we are involved in research on the impact of welfare reforms. Is that campaigning? We regard campaigning as one of our legitimate efforts, as our focus is about using voluntary and community action to improve the lives of people in Newcastle. It would be impossible to designate/attribute an economic value to this element of our work. There would be
potentially disproportionate amounts of administration involved. The Act would effectively be a deterrent as there could be confusion over what was classified as campaigning. Obviously we are bound by Charity Law and do not engage in party political campaigning, but we have signed up to campaigns previously which want change or strengthen policy during election time, eg support for housing homeless people”.
At this point I want to make my own intervention and say that I really do not understand this nonsense about the election period. If there is a valid role for voluntary agencies and charities in informing the public, it can be particularly important in an election year. The parties have to take into account the realities that are being beamed at them from the voluntary sector. I shall continue the quote:
“(Shelter Campaign) or addressing Child Poverty (Child Poverty Action Group) and general anti-poverty work”,
are all among the council’s concerns. It goes on by saying:
“It is sometimes difficult to attribute exact staff costs to different workstreams. Would we be deterred from joining in partnerships and working in collaboration with others as it wouldn’t be clear if a joint piece of work was subject to the new Act and we could be unintentionally drawn into this? As part of our general work, we try to engage in public policy discussions, this could inhibit us from doing so in future. For instance, we promoted the hustings sessions around the election of the Police and Crime Commissioners locally; in particular the sessions aimed at the voluntary sector. Would this count as campaigning under the Act in the future? … currently we are involved in the Living Wage Campaign; the Who Benefits campaign; doing studies on the impact of government policy on our members ie other local charities; working with disability charities looking at how to minimise the impact of welfare reforms on their users; doing studies on local organisations to improve the case for funding voluntary and community organisations. All these pieces of work fall well within our charitable objectives. All of these could fall subject to the Act”.
I see the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, shaking his head. The noble Lord and others have to face reality. Whatever was intended, the perception is that this is going to happen, so to rush this Bill through without having had any consultation with the organisations concerned is a political and constitutional disgrace. What these remarks indicate is how important it is to consult, so that you have the good will and involvement of the people who are doing the work at the frontline; not pontificating in this House, but actually doing the work at the frontline. I am absolutely dismayed that this Bill is before us without consultation, but I am not surprised. It is all too characteristic of the arrogance which is around: “We know and we can do it”. I am afraid that for a sane, decent, modern society, we must have a government approach which says, “Here is a problem that deeply affects people. Here are real issues of proper accountability during elections and the duties and responsibilities of trustees”. How can we sit down together and find a solution that we are all happy with and which we see as constructive? That is the mature and self-confident thing to do, not this lack of self-confidence which means that things have to be driven through rather than gathering up and involving people in a solution that is wholesome and rooted in our society.
This issue of campaigning and charities is not new. I was director of Oxfam and I wonder how many people remember where Oxfam started. It started in the university church in Oxford in 1942. There was the threat of invasion, with everyone geared up to defeat
the enemy. I was a youngster at the time and I can remember the signs and slogans for victory. There was a great atmosphere. A cross-section of society came together: academics—Gilbert Murray among them—trade union leaders and church leaders. They were deeply disturbed about the appalling famine which they knew was happening in Greece. They went to the Government and said, “We want to get relief to Greece”. The Government said, in effect, “You must be mad. Greece is occupied by the Germans. How can you talk about doing that in this context?”. They said, “It’s not the Germans we’re concerned about, it’s the Greek people”. The Government said, “Look, there’s a blockade of Greece. How can we break a blockade to get assistance through?”. So in 1942 they went out with a petition and gathered thousands of signatures in Oxford and beyond. They got the public’s support and went back to the Government and said, “We want to do something about these people in Greece”. The Government caved in and said, “Well, if you can organise something with the Red Cross and you do it through the Red Cross, we will let you do it”. How would that have happened if there had not been a determination—a conviction—to drive through the objectives which they thought were there in the organisation they were forming and to take whatever action was necessary to garner public support for what they were doing?
More recently, when I was director of Oxfam, I went on a visit to Latin America in the bad and ugly years—sinister and horrible years in many ways with the things that were happening. I was meeting our own people and the brave partner agencies with which we were working. I ended up in San Cristobal in Mexico. I met the brave Roman Catholic bishop of San Cristobal. He was a tough guy. Open-necked shirt, wooden crucifix, but my God, he was a strong man. He was frequently in conflict with the Government of Mexico because he was standing by the Indians in their terrible predicament in Chiapas. He was being threatened physically and verbally all the time.
We got into a very good conversation. I asked him if he had a message he wanted me to take back to Oxfam and to the British people and he said that he had. He said, “You talk of your partners here. You talk to people here. You talk about them. How often do you talk with them and speak for them? I believe that solidarity is the real meaning of charity. You cannot be neutral. You have to stand up and be counted. You have to tell it as it is”.
That is an historic, inescapable duty and responsibility for those of us doing serious charitable work. Otherwise we are caught up in a conspiracy in which we are satisfied with treating symptoms; in doing so perhaps masking what is really wrong and failing to speak out on the underlying issues that arise out of our work. Of course, any charity and any voluntary agency campaigning must ensure that what it is saying is rooted in its own experience. That is not only right in principle but it brings strength to their campaigning because it brings the strength of experience.
If, intentionally or not, we are doing anything that is quenching the spirit of charities at their best—because advocacy can become the best way to serve the poor—we are doing the country a very serious disservice.
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