Kathy Evans, chief executive of Children England, has said her charity will ignore the Lobbying Act and not let it “quell” the voice of the charity sector.
Evans was speaking at yesterday’s launch of the final report from the Panel on the Independence of the Voluntary Sector.
At the same meeting Sir Stephen Bubb, chief executive of Acevo, called the Act the ‘single most important threat to our independence’.
Evans told an audience of charity sector leaders that her charity will not be tied down by the act and will refuse to follow its demands. She argued that, although she is all for repealing the act, it “was brought in to quell voice now, and repealing it after this election is just leaving it to do what it says on the tin”.
She went on to say: “The underlying premise of it, that politics should be left to the politicians, I can’t agree with. As a citizen and as a voter I really can’t accept that the quality of our political debate as we head into the election is good enough to exclude or make quiet the voices of the voluntary sector and the challenge that they can bring, so as Children England we are not going to go quiet.
“We will have eleven weeks of election campaigning and I will not be assessing now much time we spend on tweeting or anything else to see if we fit the criteria because the point of the bill was to quell voice now and the right voice of the sector is to ensure they can speak out. And then repeal it as soon as possible.”
Bubb said that the Panel is “absolutely right” to call for a repeal of the Act. He referenced the work by the Lord Harries Commission on Civil Society and Democratic Engagement which concluded that the Act has had a "chilling effect" on campaigning.
When talking about the review of the Lobbying Act which will be led by Lord Hodgson, Bubb said he was pleased with the appointment of Lord Hodgson as official reviewer, but in his opinion you “don’t review a bad act, you repeal it”.
Bubb said that the Lobbying Act is “absolutely in my view the single most important threat to our independence and that is why it is so important that we get a repeal”.
Paul Streets, chief executive of the Lloyds Banks Foundation, echoed Evans’ views about the Lobbying Act, saying “let them bring a voluntary organisation to task for doing what voluntary organisations have been set up to do”, although he went on to say that we need to get the Lobbying Act in perspective and that it “matters not a jot to 97 per cent of charities”. However, he did say that “of course the Act should be repealed”.
However Stuart Etherington, chief executive of NCVO, questioned whether it was necessary to jump into repealing the Lobbying Act at this stage, despite calling it a “bad act”, saying that now it is known what it is in the Act it is best to look at “reforming the whole package”.
