Joint Committee on the Draft Charities Bill Written Evidence


DCH 108 Help the Aged

Draft Charities Bill

A one page summary of

the Help the Aged Response

We are pleased to summarise our response to the draft Charities Bill in one page, as requested:

1. We welcome the publication of the draft Bill and hope that it will pass into law in 2005. We believe it is important for the Scottish and Northern Irish Bills to be passed and brought into force at or around the same time to prevent different regimes operating within the UK which could cause difficulties to large charities operating throughout the four nations.

2. However, we are disappointed by the thinness of the drafting of the Bill in many places, the lack of detail and the fact that so much is left to be done in secondary legislation. This paucity of content creates considerable uncertainties and makes it hard for us to judge the impact of the Bill. This is reflected in the considerable number of questions that we raise in our detailed response. The Bill is of fundamental importance to the charity sector and we are anxious to see complete and comprehensive, workable and well thought through legislation passed.

3. The Bill will go some way towards reducing red tape but there is much more that could be done.

4. Public confidence in charities will, along with developments such as the Standard Information Return, be improved by the Bill. The new regulation of public collections will help to combat negative publicity.

5. We believe the "public benefit" test should remain undefined in the Bill and reliant on existing and to be developed case law.

6. We share the reservations of the NCVO in respect of the "social and economic impact" objective.

7. We believe the objectives of the Charity Commission are drafted in a woolly and confusing way and feel there needs to be a great deal more clarity in the wording of such objectives.

8. It is clear that, to be effective in is enhanced role, the Charity Commission must be adequately funded.

9. We continue to believe that charities should be allowed to trade as part of their normal activities; the current system of use of trading companies is complex, expensive and confusing.

10. The proposals to regulate public collections are workable if all definitions and criteria for capacity assessment and fitness tests are in a national framework, operating consistently and fairly by local authorities across the country.

11. However, we question if registered charities should be required to obtain a Certificate of Fitness.

12. The proposed new rules relating to professional fundraisers statements of remuneration will be very difficult, if not impossible, to implement owing to the complexity of such remuneration arrangements.

13. The requirement to notify exact dates in advance of each collection of goods is bureaucratic and we believe it is unworkable in practice.

14. We believe that objective criteria for establishing that self-regulation of fundraising has failed should be inserted in the Bill and that the power to control fundraising by regulations should be subject to such criteria having been met.

15. We are disappointed that the CIO proposals do not give the opportunity for flexible structures, to be utilised at a charity's choice, such as allowing members and trustees to be combined into one role or retained as separate roles or adopting either a two tier board structure or the executive/non-executive model used in public limited companies.

16. The remit of the Tribunal should be extended to enable all legally binding decisions of the Charity Commission to be capable of being appealed to it.

17. The proposed power of the Charity Commission to enter premises and seize material is inappropriate.

18. We are pleased to see that it is not proposed that trustees should be paid for being trustees.

19. We would like to see provisions clarifying section 36 of the Charities Act 1993 inserted.


 
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