My Lords, I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, that I do not think anyone in this House feels that the whole matter of child abuse has been done and that there are no more protections to be had. There is a question about the extent to which we need to change the law as opposed to the extent to which we need to give advice and change practice within organisations. I rather think that large organisations, such as the BBC, and indeed small organisations, are very far from having fully worked out their response to the revelations that have come out over the past couple of years.
I, too, take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson: I think that the order in which things appear on the Charity Commission website, to be fair to the commission—and we are not always very fair to it—is as much to do with history as with anything else. In the time of Anthony Trollope, financial misdemeanours were at the forefront of the commission’s mind, not child abuse. I really think that the climate has changed. I shall not repeat the arguments that I made about older people under the previous group, because I misread the groupings, but I take the point about the protection of vulnerable adults.
I wanted to ask the noble Baroness about her Amendment 11—and perhaps the Minister might help with the answer to this—and the power to disqualify all trustees of a charity. My understanding is that it is a basic tenet of charity law that trustees are jointly and severally liable for decisions that are made or for failures within the charity. So I am surprised to learn that trustees can be removed only as individuals. I should have thought that their joint and several liability would mean that, if something as bad as the examples given by the noble Baroness were to happen, the whole board of a trust would be equally affected by it and would therefore they would all be removed. But maybe my understanding is slightly out of date.