My Lords, good afternoon. I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, to his first Committee. No doubt he has been briefed extensively and told that these are occasions on which their Lordships are allowed to do absolutely anything they like. I think this is the point of maximum terror for the spokesperson, although I am sure we will treat him gently.
This might well seem the most pedantic amendment that noble Lords have ever seen but we are dealing with charity law, are we not? Let us start as we mean to go on. However, it is a rather important amendment. I want to start the Committee’s deliberations by trying to ensure that, throughout our proceedings, we do not stray into the realms of viewing this legislation simply in terms of the extent to which it adds to the arsenal of weapons at the disposal of the commission and without thinking of the impact that some of these measures can have on trustees.
When some of us undertook the work of the scrutiny committee, under the able chairmanship of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, we were presented with witnesses who were, by and large, people with professional interests from around the charity world. At times, we rather lost the sense that on the end of this legislation will be individual trustees, the majority of whom we know are perfectly decent and honest. Just a few are not.
On the committee, we considered at some length whether this power to issue a formal warning was really necessary. In the end, we were persuaded that on balance—it was on balance—perhaps the Charity Commission could make fair and good use of it to
issue a warning rather than open a statutory inquiry and go through all that that entails. Simply having the power to issue a warning to trustees where it was considered that the actions in which they were engaged presented a fairly low-level risk to the charity or to charities in general is absolutely fine. I agree with that. However, it is still a public warning. It is still something likely to cast a shadow over, if not leave a stain on, a person’s reputation. The majority of trustees hold the commission in very high regard. They take very seriously the actions of the commission. For the majority of trustees the prospect of a public warning would actually be quite difficult for them personally if not professionally.
We deliberated long and hard, and were influenced a great deal by the wisdom of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson. He argued that this was meant to be a proportionate response to very minor misdemeanours, albeit recurring ones, and because this is not meant to be a draconian power, we should not allow an appeal mechanism, making the process a bureaucratic nightmare. I agree, but that makes it all the more important that trustees are alerted in good time that they may be the recipients of a warning, giving them a chance to put right their failures. That is what this power is supposed to be about—the prevention of fairly minor misdemeanours.
For that reason, it is important to ensure that people know where and when the warning will be published. It is one thing for a notice to be published on a part of the Charity Commission’s website, to which only those of us who are sufficiently intrepid or boring to make our way there will find it. It is quite another for it to be published prominently somewhere in a local paper, for example—if local papers still exist—in which the charity operates. That could have quite a profound and damaging effect on the charity’s reputation.
In putting this apparently small and fussy amendment before your Lordships, I am trying to echo the points made by the Charity Law Association which thinks that trustees ought to be given fair notice that they will be subject to this so that they can try to put matters right. If we do that, this power will serve to act in the preventive way that was envisaged rather than being a rather heavy-handed hammer to crack a nut. In that spirit, I beg to move.