Homelessness charity Crisis was warned against campaigning against government benefits policies by Andrew Lansley when he was leader of the House of Commons, the charity’s former director of policy and public affairs said this week.
Duncan Shrubsole, who is now director of policy, partnerships and campaigns at the Lloyds Bank Foundation, said during a fringe event at the Conservative Party Conference that he and a Crisis trustee met with Lansley last year.
The meeting took place while the Lobbying Act was making its way through Parliament, after several of the charity’s campaigners wrote to Lansley expressing concerns about the bill.
The Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014 limits the amount which can be spent on political campaigning in the lead-up to the general election, and many charities have said it could limit their ability to speak out on behalf of their beneficiaries.
Shrubsole said when he met Lansley, he raised the example of Conservative proposals to withdraw housing benefit for younger people, which George Osborne had mooted not long before. Shrubsole told Lanlsey that this plan would increase homelessness and so Crisis would want to campaign against it.
“Lansley said he completely understood our right to campaign but we should think about how we raise issues,” Shrubsole said. “He said it wasn’t our job to get involved in political debate and that staff and trustees should think very carefully about how we approached it.
“The implication was that we should potentially be nervous and think twice about whether to campaign on that issue.”
Shrubsole said this was “a classic example of what people call the chilling effect” of rules around lobbying.
Shrubsole made the comments during a discussion on campaigning and the Lobbying Act at the launch of The Blue Book of the Voluntary Sector, a collection of essays about sector policy written by Conservative politicians, published by chjarity leaders body Acevo and the Charities Aid Foundation. He spoke further about it after the event to Civil Society News.
“My overall conclusion about this is that there’s a failure to understand what campaigning is really about,” he said. “They seem to think we should campaign by just kind of robotically repeating again and again that homelessness is wrong, rather than addressing individual issues.
“But if you actually want to achieve change, you have to campaign in a way which responds to particular issues which are in the public debate at the moment. As a campaigning organisation you have to react to what politicians are saying.”
Matt Downie, the current director of policy and external affairs at Crisis, said he could not comment directly on what Shrubsole said.
But he added: “Central to our mission of ending homelessness is standing up on behalf of homeless people to the government of the day – whoever they may be – and for more than 40 years we have done just that.
"The Lobbying Act won’t stop us from campaigning but it does introduce unnecessary rules that could put some charities off speaking out.”
A spokeswoman for Lansley said that he had told Crisis that campaigning on non-partisan issues was entirely acceptable and should not be constrained.
However he also said charities should be careful not to campaign on a partisan basis, and if they wished to, they must comply with the new legislation.
'Stamp out' Lobbying Act objections
During the same fringe event other Conservative MPs said the Lobbying Act did not restrict charities' abilities to campaign. But they also warned that charities must restrict their own campaigning, and not make it the reason for their existence.
Penny Mordaunt, MP for Portsmouth North, said: "There is absolutely no legitimate activity that a charity wants to undertake that will be in any way be hampered by the Lobbying Act. We need to stamp on any suggestion that this isn't the case."
Dominic Raab, MP for Esher and Walton, said he believed that charities "have to be very careful about over-zealous campaigning" and held up the example of a recent Oxfam advert which said people in poverty faced a “perfect storm” of difficult circumstances, which was reported to the Charity Commission by Conor Burns, Conservative MP for Bournemouth West.
"That was bang out of order," Raab said. "The sector needs to be very careful or it will lose people like me who are incredibly well-disposed."
John Glen, MP for Salisbury and South Berkshire, said it was right that charities explained the effect of policy on their beneficiaries.
"But when campaigning becomes the primary activity, charities are going to lose support from their base," he said.
