Dame Suzi Leather is chuffed with the level of response to the Commission's public benefit consultation.
The response to the Charity Commission’s consultation on public benefit has been tremendous.
Surprisingly, instead of being inundated with responses from those for and against independent schools and hospitals, responses about faith groups have predominated.
The number of responses to our public benefit consultation has been many times the average for our usual consultations. While this has been incredibly encouraging, they provided clear evidence that the removal of the public benefit presumption is giving many Christian charities great cause for concern. Some of these organisations even felt that it was part of a Government ploy to abolish religious charities altogether.
Looking again at the consultation document itself I find it puzzling to work out how these conclusions could ever have been drawn, but – having identified this level of concern – I hope we can now provide reassurance.
Advancing religion is, and will carry on being, a recognised charitable purpose, clearly identified as one of 13 in the new Act. In removing the presumption of public benefit from charities advancing religion, education or relieving poverty, the Act seeks to create a level playing field where every charity must show that it is for the public benefit. In return for charitable status, religious charities will have to do what other charities do; no less and certainly no more.
The Commission has no intention of setting the bar any higher for religious charities.
The point is that all charities – whatever their purposes – should start thinking now about how they meet the public benefit requirement.
The consultation document explicitly states that it’s not within the Commission’s remit to change or ‘modernise’ traditional, long-held religious beliefs – specific religious beliefs and practices remain outside our consideration of public benefit. But the public nature of beliefs and practices matter. Like all charities, those advancing religion must benefit the public, or a specific section of the public. There are many ways in which this is, and can be, done.
There have also been questions raised about our intention to consider what is relevant and appropriate for the modern social conditions of the day when deciding what is charitable and of benefit to the public. Yet this is surely the history of charity itself. Helping the poor was once seen in some circles as encouraging idle pauperism, children born out of wedlock were stigmatised or hidden from the eyes of polite society and sculpture was created for private gardens rather than for municipal parks.
Church institutions themselves have been interpreting their services in the light of modern social conditions throughout their history, which is why their services remain relevant to the needs of their beneficiaries today. Visiting some of the most deprived parts of northern England recently, I was struck by how little infrastructure seemed to exist yet struck also by the prevalence of churches. Not as museum pieces, or converted into high-price apartments but living, breathing organisations serving communities where other agencies might have given up.
There are at least 25,000 charities on the register set up for the purposes of advancing religion. That’s a huge amount of charitable activity going on, whether it’s providing a community resource, delivering outreach services, or simply providing a place of worship.
As I told the Catholic charity conference in June, undermining religious organisations would be to undermine one of the very foundations of charitable activity. That’s not something a charity regulator would do. And no charity – whatever its purposes – should feel reluctant to tell the world about the good it does.
Dame Suzi Leather is chair of the Charity Commission
