My Lords, all those who have spoken have made the case for the amendment moved by my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley: this review is clearly needed. The Charity Commission has itself published some interesting research, either this week or last week, which gives an interesting insight into the views of the public and charities themselves on the concept of charging for charity regulation. A significant proportion of charities do not presume that the costs of charity regulation should continue to be met entirely from public funds. The wider findings of the study indicate a public appetite for charities to be regulated effectively. This leads one to question whether the Charity Commission can do that without sufficient funding. However, the report also shows that charities and the public are rather split on how to fund regulation. As my noble friend has indicated and as the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, referred to, it is unusual for a regulator to be funded by taxpayers rather than the regulated community. We have the example of the FCA, but the Legal Services Board, the accountancy regime and the CQC are funded by their regulated communities.
The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, made the point about a regulator feeling part of the regulators’ community, sharing benchmarks and the whole of that attitude.
She also drew on the point about user involvement. I have been a member of some regulators, and I chaired a consumer body of one of them. We benchmarked the different ombudsmen in various sectors. The Charity Commission is an ombudsman in that sense but this was a different issue. There was a feeling that it was a useful exercise not only in how they could compare themselves with each other, but also in how as their users we could influence how they were working for us. It would be nice if the commission could see itself in that environment.
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I turn to the Charity Commission’s published research. It is interesting that not 100% but two-thirds of charities want regulation to be funded entirely by taxation—no surprise there, except perhaps the fact that it was not 100% of them. However, only one-quarter of the public agreed, and I am afraid that says something about the relationship between charities and the public which we dealt with in the discussion on fundraising. In fact, two-thirds of the public support regulation being partly or fully funded by a charge to charities compared with under one-quarter of charities. Key stakeholders are similarly divided on this: there is some support for continued government funding while others are open to the idea mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, of a more mixed funding model. I think we hear his warnings about the Treasury getting its sticky hands on that.
For ourselves, we will be very interested to hear the Minister’s view on this. As my noble friend says, we worry about the lack of independence for the Charity Commission that the current funding model creates. We are concerned by the many complaints that we hear from charities about the cutbacks in the advice service offered by the commission and delays in dealing with correspondence and queries; it is not just about the letter to which my noble friend Lord Lea referred earlier, which was written in February and answered only in June. However, when I have picked up the phone to the Charity Commission there have been helpful staff who have made an effort to fast-forward things when I know that charities have been waiting for replies. Still, if you cut an organisation’s funding by 50%, that sort of fall-off in advice is not surprising. It is almost bound to happen.
We favour robust but flexible regulation, we want to see it effectively delivered, and we want to see the optimum use of resources. We are therefore very interested in the points made by my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley. As I am sure everyone knows, she probably has more experience with charities than the rest of the House of Lords put together, so we should listen seriously to the points she makes. Others have suggested different regimes —a percentage of gift tax, perhaps, or the fee for service plans referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson.
Following on from what the noble Lord said, in the earlier debate my noble friend Lord Lea mentioned that he had paid £6,000 for legal advice in putting an application together. We are talking about whether a charity could afford perhaps £100 to pay for its annual fee, but it may be paying £6,000 to lawyers. This is not an issue that will go away and my noble friend is right to ask for a review. We will be interested to hear the views of the Minister.