Tuesday 15 December 2015

The Protection of Charities

Today marks the first sitting of the Public Bill Committee for the Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill. This is our chance to inform the discussion around the bill. And a chance to stop some hugely damaging changes to charity regulation.

This bill is far from perfect. ACEVO have submitted evidence to the committee reflecting this. And we are not the only ones. Across the sector, organisations are speaking out. It is vital that we stop these damaging changes before they take hold.

There are two clauses in the bill I particularly worry about. The first is the power to issue warnings. This is so vague as to be almost indecipherable. It would be left to the Charity Commission to decide where a warning was due. There would then be no right of appeal. Combine this with the public nature of these warnings, and then charities may see themselves dragged through the mud, without ever putting their side of the story across.

Second is the power to dismiss trustees. It is unclear on what basis, or even by whom, these decisions will be made. This new power, unrestricted, could see the Charity Commission become a law unto itself. As we saw with the CAGE case recently, this type of over-reaching is not entirely alien to them.

As it stands, this Bill would give the Charity Commission unprecedented new powers, which would allow them to pursue agendas as they feel is appropriate. This particularly concerns me in light of William Shawcross’ near fanatical pursuit of the Muslim charity sector.


For all these reasons, it is crucial that this Bill gets amended by the committee. As such, I am encouraged to see many of the MPs sitting on it are friends of the sector. What we must hope now is that they listen to the evidence being submitted by the sector, and produce a Bill which works for, not against, charities.

1 comment:

The Mother. said...

Something that us being discussed elsewhere online is something you should be addressing.

Those detained in ATUs etc under the MHA are often inexplicably 'moved' to another unit or hospital, somewhat mysteriously iust before they have a tribunal about to be heard. The result being that the tribunal is cancelled and they are back to square one.

If you are going to do something useful then maybe you could start by ensuring that people can not be moved prior to a planned tribunal hearing.

We live in hope!