I will certainly take up that offer. I want to make only a couple of comments. I thank noble Lords who participated in this debate. My noble friend Lady Pitkeathley quite rightly said that this is about concentrating the mind. If we do not get this movement, I hope nobody reading this in a few years’ time says that the Minister was being very complacent. I do not think anyone who spoke was complacent, but the feeling coming across is that everything is fine as it is, and I am not sure that that is correct. It is quite right that the case was five years ago but the charities that have dealt with abused children have been with us this week and last. They retain those concerns and will not be reassured by some of the things that they have heard along the lines of, “Don’t worry, it’s all there”.
I was not suggesting that the Charity Commission had to check that charities were doing their job with DBS; I was suggesting that it has the power to do so.
I want to read Hansard very carefully about whether it has that power or not. At one point the Minister was saying that there was a power for the regulators that had not yet been implemented, but at another point he seemed to be saying that the commission could do this. Whether it could, short of an inquiry, I am not certain. Perhaps that is something we could clarify. I think that I read out some of the stuff that was said. The charities concerned have been told that these spot checks, if you like, could not be done.
There is also something beyond the charity itself. We have seen the damage that was done both to the NHS and to the BBC by their complete failure over Jimmy Savile. I would hate to find that a charity where this sort of thing happened then damaged the whole of the charitable sector. That risk remains.
I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, for his comments. I certainly think that the wording of this could be greatly improved. It would be about serious sexual offenders. I think that some of the comments about being on the register for life probably affect other things even more than this particular one, and that is more a question about the register itself. I think that I emphasised the word “waiver” a few times, not only for ex-offenders in general but for here. A waiver to get someone back into charitable work or into civil society is great. As people know, I was and still am very involved in alcohol misuse. If we did not use ex-offenders working for us, we would be rather short of hands to do it, so the waiver is very important.
My concern remains that we are more concerned about money than about people. We are adding money-launderers to the people who will be barred and we are very worried about people’s ability to look after funds, but beneficiaries are probably rather more important.
The issue remains that we do not know which charities these people could be involved in—even, I have to say, a charity working to restore historical buildings and churches. If a woman gets raped in one of those buildings, I would not want to be the Minister who said, “Oh well, that’s a safe charity because it doesn’t see children”. Those are empty properties late at night. As a woman I would be very worried if someone who could have been on the sex register, not for a child but for a serious sexual offence, looked terribly respectable in preserving an old building, and I was the one there late at night. Having said that, though, I welcome the offer from the Minister to discuss this further, particularly Amendment 7, because, as I say, I am very worried that debtors, money-launderers and terrorists, or the people who help to fund terrorism, should be excluded but people with perhaps quite serious findings, not just about children but about women, would be able to be a charitable trustee unknown to all of us. I look forward to discussing that further, but for the moment I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.