It may be too soon to be passing judgment on the Cameron government. But it does sometimes look as if we are back with the impatient legislation of the Blair era, along with the facile soundbites, the eye-catching initiatives, the whitewashed sleaze, the fawning towards the tabloids (in Blairspeak, ‘managing the relationship’), and the unwillingness or inability to think through the implications of under-researched policy decisions – tendencies which in the end came to be deplored by many of Blair’s one-time supporters as well as his opponents. The U-turn over Osborne’s attempt to cap the amounts that rich taxpayers can save by donations to registered charities is, as U-turns go, a little one. But it is symptomatic of a disposition to tinker for a short-term reason with an issue that cries out for long-term thought. A veteran Conservative stalwart, Lord Hodgson, has been appointed to conduct a review of the 2006 Charities Act, and he is on record as having announced that ‘nothing is ruled in, and nothing is ruled out.’ But it requires no supernatural gift of prophecy to predict that the opportunity missed in 2006 will be missed again.
Charity law is a mess. The relief of poverty, which you might think is what it’s all about, remains the first criterion, as it has been ever since the 1601 Statute of Charitable Uses. But it’s always been supplemented by religion, education and a catch-all category covering whatever case law may decide. In a survey conducted by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations in 1998, 89 per cent of respondents agreed that ‘charities are about raising money to help the needy’ and 91 per cent with the statement ‘I respect what charities are trying to do.’ But how many of them knew what it is that charities do try to do? Or how they set about doing it? Osborne was foolish to try to justify his proposal as a punitive crackdown on unscrupulous tax-dodgers. But he was right both that tax breaks for givers to charity are in effect a charge on other taxpayers and that many rich donors use their ‘charitable’ donations not to help the needy in any recognisable sense but to buy themselves publicity and status.
Far from clearing the decks, the 2006 Act (which a 2011 Act has clarified but not tampered with) started from the status quo as set out by Lord McNaughten in 1891, extended the list of charitable purposes to 13, including ‘other purposes currently recognised as charitable’, and added the proviso that a charity must ‘provide a public benefit’. This could, and did, only make matters worse. It introduced a criterion which is impossible to define clearly in law, and can be argued to conflict directly with several of the items on the extended list. What benefit does the public derive from a donkey sanctuary which qualifies under ‘advancement of animal welfare’, or a rowing club which qualifies under ‘advancement of amateur sport’? The proviso can be, and has been, invoked to put pressure on public schools to establish more bursaries for children whose parents couldn’t hope to afford the fees. But however much that may help a small number of children to pursue more rewarding careers than they would otherwise have been able to do, there would be a more readily demonstrable public benefit in withdrawing charitable status from fee-paying schools in order to allow them by their continued existence to pay tax for the Exchequer to spend on improving state schools. Parents with the means to enhance their children’s prospects always have, and always will, do it. But that is ‘charity’ of the kind that not merely begins at home but stays there.
Come to that, what is the public benefit in donations made for the advancement of religion? You don’t have to be Richard Dawkins to query how much of what religious organisations do in the name of a chosen deity or charismatic spiritual leader is of benefit to the rest of us, or to wonder why the beliefs of the members of the British Humanist Association should deny it the charitable status accorded to bodies whose members believe (if they do) that an all-powerful, all-knowing male God who created the universe decided to father a son on a Palestinian carpenter’s wife in the reign of the Emperor Augustus. Besides, donors to religious causes typically give to their own church, chapel, synagogue or mosque, not to other people’s. If what some of them do is directed – as it undoubtedly is – to the relief of need, isn’t that the heading under which donations explicitly directed to that aim should qualify for tax relief?
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