My Lords, Amendment 15A is in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. The purpose of the amendment is to enable claims for compensation to be made against the assets of a charity where wrongful acts have been committed in the course of that charity’s activities. There is a gap in the current law, in that unincorporated charities are not liable since they have no legal personality, in contrast to incorporated charities or other companies or incorporated bodies.
It is clear from the Explanatory Notes to the Bill that the Government’s purpose with the Bill is in part to look at and perhaps clean up, if that is the right phrase, some unsatisfactory aspects of the charity/extremism nexus. The purpose of this probing amendment is simply to see if it is possible to add further gentle assistance in that project. However, I should add that the amendment is inspired not just by concerns about the relationship between charities and terrorism but also by concerns about certain cases of sexual exploitation.
In fact, it is best to start with that, as it is the best way to illustrate the key difference between incorporated and unincorporated charities. The Scout Association is a national body and, like many of the older charities, is in fact incorporated by royal charter. It has therefore been possible for victims of sexual abuse by scoutmasters to claim damages from the national body, the Scout Association. However, many local Scout associations—dozens of them, in fact—are unincorporated. Victims of sexual abuse therefore may well find it much more difficult or impossible to recover compensation. That creates an obvious unfairness and anomaly, and it is to that problem that proposed new Section 284A is directed.
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I return to the debate about charities and terrorism. In recent years, there have been a number of well-documented moments. In the case of the Tamil Tigers, it is eloquent enough simply to look at the Charity Commission’s actions. Some noble Lords will remember the controversy in 2009 about Interpal and Hamas, the debate which followed the work of John Ware for “Panorama”, the Charity Commission report on Interpal and the subsequent debate in public, among many different sources. In recent times, there has been mention of Boko Haram in this context. In April 2014, the Home Affairs Select Committee concluded:
“We are deeply concerned with the potential for ‘bogus’ charities to dupe members of the public into raising funds which are eventually used to support terrorist activity”.
I am well aware that the Government have made more material resources available to the Charity Commission to deal with that sort of problem. It is also clear, as I have said before, that the Bill in a number of its provisions is intended to deal with that difficulty, and that the Government are well aware of the problem. The amendment is simply an attempt to see whether
something else can be done and whether it is possible to have a constructive debate about that. The essential point is that although individual employees and trustees of unincorporated charities can be made personally liable under current law, that is of little comfort to victims if, as is commonly the case, they have no significant assets. I acknowledge that it is possible under current law to claim indirectly from the charity’s assets via an indemnity to the trustees or from insurance covering the trustees. However, even where that is possible it is certainly cumbersome and expensive, and it is not possible where the trustees are themselves implicated in the wrongful conduct or have been reckless. In some ways, the irony is, the worse the governance of the charity, the less prospect of a remedy for the victim. I beg to move.