We would all agree in principle that the beneficiaries of a charity should surely be involved as far as possible. My difficulty is where it is reasonable. Who decides, particularly if an investment goes wrong, whether or not it was reasonable to have consulted them?
I turn to Amendment 20, which is in my name and that of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, who cannot be with us today as he is required elsewhere: I am sure that the Committee, like me, will be happy to know that he was today confirmed as the new Convenor of the Cross Benches. I declare my interests: I have worked for and with a number of UK and international charities for much of my life. Latterly, in about the last eight years, I have moved much more into the investment world, where I look after some quite substantial investment portfolios for clients that include charities.
I am going to take a slightly different approach from some of the other speakers, which may or may not make me popular. I shall approach this amendment in three steps: first, what happens currently; secondly, what I think the Bill as it stands would mean for trustees; and, thirdly, why I think the amendment is needed. So what happens currently? Much of what is called social investment already probably happens in two ways. The first is that some charity investors seek to use various degrees of what we might call “ethical overlay” to their investment portfolios. At its simplest that is an ethical portfolio, and you can buy them off the shelf. It might involve avoiding certain companies or sectors, and tobacco and arms are obvious examples
of that. These are available now; you can buy them online as a private investor if you wish to, or a charity could do the same. A common difficulty, of course, is the divergence of opinion about what is an ethical investment; I do not propose to dive into that today as I suspect we could spend most of the evening on it.
However, the provisions of the Bill go well beyond this type of investing. Moving perhaps closer to what the Bill envisages, some trustees invest in projects or activities where there is an expectation of some element of financial return beyond mission-related benefits. I agree about “mixed motive”; I prefer “mission-related”—it is a case of potayto/potahto. One might cite social enterprises, revolving credit funds, concessional lending to development projects or just models of work that require an element of repayment by the beneficiaries to recycle the money and ensure that they treat the money that they receive responsibly.
Last week I chaired a group in Birmingham for the Prince’s Trust, which advances modest sums to individuals seeking to start their own businesses. These loans are repayable to the trust to fund further such work, and that is made very clear to the beneficiaries when they receive these loans. My view, however, is that realistically these types of projects fall within the spending activities of that charity rather than being classed as investments, for reasons that I will come on to—the “two pockets” approach that the Minister referred to earlier. Nevertheless, the 2006 report of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, showed that there is anxiety among some trustees about how such activities fit within their responsibilities to invest charitable resources prudently. His report suggests specifically that a fear that social investments might not be within these rules is holding back and inhibiting investment into them and that it should be put into law that social investments are in line with trustees’ responsibilities—something that most of us have touched on already today. The Law Commission came to a very similar conclusion in its 2013 report and the wording of this section of the Bill follows very closely what it said. It comes as little surprise that the Minister told us that it had drafted this section. I am also glad to hear that better guidance, associated with that, is on its way, because my first instinct on reading the Bill was that this might be better dealt with through guidance than law. However, I bow to the far greater expertise that has been deployed on that matter than I have to offer.
So far, so good, but there are four other aspects of social investing that cause disquiet for trustees. Simply passing a Bill to say that they can make social investments does not sufficiently address those. First, social investing is poorly defined. It lies somewhere between charitable spending on worthwhile activities and investing for purely financial return. It is widely covered elsewhere, particularly in the Law Commission report, where one witness stated that it is,
“an unclear concept and capable of being used by a proponent to mean precisely what the proponent wants it to mean”.
The Bill seeks to define it; we have agreed to discuss that point separately, on the head of a pin, so I will not elaborate further today.
The second issue is that the returns on a social investment can be extremely difficult to quantify. The old cliché that two economists in a room will give you three opinions multiplies exponentially in this sort of area. Measuring and attributing a numerical value to social benefits, which trustees are going to have to compare between, can produce a very wide dispersion of arguably equal returns, depending on which criteria you use, how you weight them and—let us be candid—how keen you are to promote that particular investment to whoever is listening to you on the other side of the table. The prospect of asking trustees to leave the realms of quantifiable financial return, which they could then use for good works, and enter the world of social, environmental and other forms of accounting puts off as many as the worries about whether they are entering into something they should not be doing. The whole idea ends up, very quickly, in the “too difficult” box or, as I suggested earlier, allocated to the spending committee, a topic touched on widely in the Law Commission report.
Thirdly, if social investing takes off as a significant asset class—and it is already well on its way—it is, inevitably, going to attract an increasing number of purveyors and advisers who want to attract funds, recommend certain types of investments or manage funds within them. That is no bad thing in itself, but only if it is properly regulated. If it is not, whole new areas of mis-selling arise, where social investments could be knowingly or just irresponsibly hyped to investors and trustees. The danger in that is exacerbated by the difficulty in calculating, quantifying and comparing returns.
Finally, the Bill gives the power to make social investments, but it does not look at the possibility that some charities themselves may well want to use this as a fundraising opportunity and market them to other charities or the public. Add to this formula a situation where a trustee is involved both as a trustee of a charity marketing a social investment and as a trustee being invited to invest in it and you can see the complexities. I have not put forward a specific amendment on that point but I urge the Minister to think about whether we could address it at the next stage in terms of enabling charities to use social investments to raise much-needed funds, without the hideous cost of compliance which will probably come with it, but at the same time restrain them from being overexuberant in doing so.
That brings me to my underlying concern and the reason for the amendment: in pretty much every case, charities that have traditional investment portfolios have highly regulated individuals managing those portfolios. I believe the noble Lord worked with the FCA—FSA as was—so he will have background on this but an individual recommending investments has to be very specific on the expected returns, the level of risk, the previous track record of this type of investment and the previous track record of the person, object or company providing it. You have to be able to evidence that you know your customers in great detail and that what you are recommending to them is suitable. That may not be the case in the world of social investment. Social investments may be more risky, more volatile, more concentrated and certainly
less liquid—an important consideration for charity trustees with bills to pay—than what I might call mainstream financial investments. You can sell a blue-chip investment at the press of a button but if you are putting money into a 10-year health project in a developing country, pulling your money out halfway through because you need the cash is not only technically but reputationally and morally a very difficult place to be.
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Where does that leave us? My contention is that as soon as trustees are asked to put money into something that offers a financial return—rather than being, for example, a grant of money—they are entering the highly regulated world of financial investments. My concerns are not only that social investments end up being poorly understood but that there is a temptation to overegg the returns and underplay the risks, both of which would be offences in the world of regulated investing.
The first part of my amendment seeks to save both the providers and the trustees from themselves. It does not preclude them from making social investments, which would be completely perverse in a Bill that seeks to enable them, but it requires them to ascertain whether the investment they are going into is subject to the same scrutiny and reporting and FCA requirements as their financial investments are. If they are, that is a comfort to the trustees. If they are not, they may well wish to proceed anyway but they need to recognise what they are doing. My concern is that we make explicit to trustees the permissibility of social investment but that they are required to get clarity on the regulatory status of such investments.
The second part of the amendment, on which I will be far more brief, is linked to the first. The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, referred in his report to trustees wanting to make social investments having to fight their way through the serried ranks of accountants, lawyers and investment managers for whom risk aversion is the default setting. I am not sure if that is a verbatim quote but I think it is pretty close. I sympathise with that a great deal but it arises directly from the fact that commercial investments are made in a highly regulated context and it is not clear from the definition in this Bill of social investments—however it emerges—that they are going to be so regulated. If that is the case, it is the role of those serried ranks of advisers to sound those notes of caution to trustees. As the number of providers specialising in social investment vehicles increases—and the Bill creates the opportunity for them—there is a risk, at least in an intervening period of a number of years, that trustees are going to be faced with conflicting advice from different advisers and they are going to have to reconcile that situation and record it in their decision-making processes.
This is a probing amendment. It seeks to encourage trustees to reflect transparently on what they are doing in making their decisions. I am grateful for your Lordships’ patience in letting me walk through it. I hope my comments have given a bit of colour to my concerns about this very exciting area of investment and the steps that need to be put in place to protect both the trustees and their beneficiaries.