Charities Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2021-12-14
Topic: Government Operations
Jeffrey Rooker (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I am very pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Grabiner, in supporting the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson. I have played no part in the Bill, but, when I saw the amendment and the background to it, I thought that it was worth supporting at whatever time, as it were. I am not bothered about what time it is; if we worried about the time, we would never get any legislation done I am not a lawyer, and it is almost 50 years since I was a PPS in the law officers’ department. I remember that, when I went there, it was explained to me what law officers did and did not do and how they were different from other Ministers. In this case, it seems to me—again, as a non-lawyer—that the Attorney-General is operating as a supervising Minister, not a law officer. That is a completely different function I have not checked, but, if I remember rightly, the Charity Commission is nominally still a department. It is not some quango that is too big or a body that is of no significance; it is one of, I think, 21 non-ministerial departments. I do not know how many other regulators that we think are doing their job on behalf of the public and Parliament are actually hemmed in by this kind of power. Twice I have put forward proposals for a Select Committee on regulators, because no one looks at regulators systematically in Parliament to check that what they do is what is says on the tin and to see what the difficulties are. We wait for the odd scandal to come, and then there is a Select Committee—that is not good enough With this one, the fact of the matter is that the Attorney-General is not, and cannot operate as, a law officer. It is the role of a supervisor. I have been in six government departments: I know the difference between a Minister supervising an external body, developing its own policy, and coming up against the law officers. There is a difference, and in this case it is absolutely clear that the Attorney-General is not operating in the formal structure as a law officer If it is the Law Commission, we are used to hearing the other place say, "Oh, don’t bother about that. It’ll get nodded through. We can trust it. It’ll have done all the homework". You do not do the time, simply because that is what the Law Commission is there to do. I cannot see any damage to it from this. This is a Law Commission Bill, and, as the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, said, he has used its report to construct the amendment. There has got to be a better reason. It is no good the Attorney-General hiding behind the law officer role when she is not performing that role. That bears some scrutiny, but of course we cannot do that in this place; it will require someone in the other place My final point is on the regulators, which we have to trust. There are a lot of regulatory bodies. The top 20 or 30 regulators look after billions of pounds of other bodies’ expenditure. Parliament delegates that role to those regulators The Charity Commission is a regulator; it is an awkward one, in the sense that the uniformity of charities is crazy. There are some 180,000 charities and the top 2% or so are probably dealing with half the money—there are loads of tiny charities which do not get a look in. When you get something such as the example of the Royal Albert Hall, raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, and which I am aware of from previous debates, you cannot ignore it. It is not right for Parliament or the regulator to ignore that—it is a failure of public duty. Therefore, the Minister will need to have better reasons than those given in the past for opposing this It is actually quite easy as a Minister at the Dispatch Box when you have an open and shut case such as this. I fully admit that I did it only twice in eight years when I was on that Bench in this House, but you can report back to the boss in the department: "Well, they were all against me; we were going to lose; it uses Government time; it was easier to accept the amendment because it was overwhelmingly agreed to". You can do that, and if they are cheesed off with it, they can alter it down in the other place, because it is an open and shut case. So I invite the Minister to try it out; it can work. You can accept an amendment at the Dispatch Box on the strength of the debate and survive as a Minister, and the amendment can strengthen the Bill. That is what we are here to do.