The charitable status of public schools was back in the spotlight at yesterday’s meeting of the Public Administration Select Committee, as Matthew Burgess, CEO of the Independent Schools Council and Labour MP Paul Flynn traded arguments.

Burgess was one of the witnesses giving evidence to the Committee on the issue of public benefit and charitable status, when Flynn asked him: “How do you equate educating the sons and daughters of Prime Ministers with feeding the starving in Africa?”

Burgess retorted that Flynn was making a “serious mistake” and reminded him that Lord Hodgson introduced his Charities Act Review report by stating that the oldest charity in England and Wales was the King’s School in Canterbury. “It is the quintessential charity,” Burgess said.

Flynn said the Charities Act 2006 was intended to “make fee-paying schools accountable to justify why they are entitled to charitable status” but “now that has not happened”, and asked Burgess to suggest how the “new Labour government in 2015” might get it right next time.

Burgess said the Charities Act was not intended to disestablish independent schools as charities and if it had been, the ISC’s legal challenge would have been quite different to the one that went ahead. Instead of a judicial review of the Charity Commission’s public benefit guidance, it would have been a challenge to the removal of the “fundamental human right of parents to choose the education system for their children”.

Committee chair Bernard Jenkin steered the debate away from the pair by asking the other witnesses, charity lawyers Francesca Quint and Philip Kirkpatrick, what they thought the purpose of the Act was. Quint said the Act did intend for charities to have to demonstrate that they are set up to benefit the public, but she added that this “could have been expressed more clearly and definitely if Parliament had chosen to do so”.

She said it would be extremely helpful if there were one definition across the UK of charitable status, including public benefit and for the purposes of tax relief.

Jenkin revived the idea he first mooted at last week’s hearing, that to promote better harmonisation of the public benefit principle between the various nations, there could be a passporting system whereby a charity that is registered in England can be a charity in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and vice versa.

Kirkpatrick said it would be “an attack on the devolutionary principle” and would need some issues to be worked through but it “could work and should work”.