My Lords, I have listened carefully to the noble Baroness, and I understand the frustration and disappointment that underlines much of her speech. Before I go any further, I remind the Committee of my tangential connection to Pell & Bales, which is involved in the charity fundraising sector.
My review had a whole chapter—15 pages or more—concerning fundraising. It is one of the areas which caused the most angst, difficulty and comment. The conclusions were that we need to drive forward ways to improve self regulation because that is probably the most flexible and cost-effective way of regulating the sector, that there needs to be changes in the way that public charitable elections take place and that there needs to be a clear programme for implementing change and monitoring progress towards it.
I shall be making some relatively disobliging remarks about the charitable fundraising sector in the next few minutes. However, before doing so, there is a case for the defence which ought to be put on the record this afternoon. The first point is that charities must have the right to ask. If they cannot ask, then the amount of fundraising that charities will be able to do will fall dramatically. That is balanced by the right of the public not to be unduly hassled. It is that nexus which we are seeking to find in any fundraising regulatory system.
Secondly, the public do not really like any money being spent on fundraising. They would like every pound that they give to go straight to the beneficiary of the charity, not even to be used by the administration of the charity—hence the concerns about the salaries of chief executives in the sector. That is an issue which the sector has not been able to address. There is an argument for explaining to the public that, in order to have effective fundraising, it is possible that you will need to pay someone money for it. The statistics are that a direct debit signed on the street—the so-called “chuggers”—on average lasts for four years or 48 months, and the charities expect to pay 10 to 18 months of that for the work that is done to get the donation in the first place, which amounts to between 20% and 33%. The public would say that it is outrageous that it costs that amount of money, but from the charity’s point of view, they are getting 67p to 80p in the pound that they would not be getting otherwise. There is a difficult philosophical balance to be established.
Thirdly, the legislation is very uneven. The cash collection—the tin-rattling, as we might call it—dates from 1916, and the charitable collections door-to-door regulation dates from 1939, but local authorities have entirely different standards. Some local authorities will give permission in a week or two, others want two years’ notice, and of course in London local authorities do not do it at all as the Metropolitan Police are the licensing authority. Meanwhile, while we are agonising, quite appropriately, about charitable collections, commercial collections have no regulation whatever. They are free to behave as they wish.
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Therefore there is a more complicated issue here than first appears. I will just explain how it looks. Essentially, four different types of collections and appeals take place. There are what we might call episodic national collections; that is to say, you have an earthquake in Nepal, or a tsunami, and you need to have a national appeal quickly; in six or eight weeks the need for the appeal is probably dying away. The public are interested at the time the disaster takes place, but it is a short-tail event. Then there are the national collections, which go on all the time—for example, cancer charities—or others which come round at a certain time of year, such as poppy day. Then there are regional collections, such as to save the local hospice, which may cover two or three parliamentary constituencies, and perhaps four or five local authorities. Finally, there are local collections: Mrs Jones of 27 Acacia Avenue, who is raising money to repair the village hall roof. It is an excepted charity. Everybody knows and likes Mrs Jones—with the possible exception of Mrs Hunt
who lives at 15 Acacia Avenue and who hates her beyond poison because they fell out many years ago—and she is well known in the community.
Therefore you have four different types of fundraising appeal, and then you have the ways you can raise the money. You can raise it door-to-door; by collecting on the street, either on public property—on the highway—or on private property, when there is tin-rattling in the local supermarket or in a railway station; by direct mail; by telephone; or by email and the internet. Therefore there are six ways you can raise the money, and we can see that there are 24 regulatory boxes to fill in. That is quite a complicated thing to do. With respect to the noble Baroness, when she says that that all charities belong to the Fundraising Standards Board, Mrs Jones in Acacia Avenue can never join the Fundraising Standards Board and probably does not even know what it is. To try to find ways to get her to comply with some national arrangement would be almost impossible. She is fundraising for a charity—it will be an excepted charity, but certainly a charity. Therefore while I understand what the noble Baroness is driving at, she has a sledge-hammer here which is not hitting quiet the right—