Ms Alice Murphy:

I will not restate the opinions of the other speakers, with which I agree. Nevertheless, as a charity lawyer, coming at this strictly from a legal perspective, the removal from the register, as drafted within the legislation, requires no reasons for a removal. From a legislative robustness perspective, at the very least, inserting a requirement for reasons would be helpful. Taking a forensic look at the long list that currently applies whereby removal can be invoked as a sanction, we can clearly see some offences that are disproportionate to the sanction of removal. There is an offence of refusing or neglecting to ask the Charities Regulator whether a charity may make a change to its name. Many charities make changes to their name each year. At the moment, as drafted, our legislation provides for an automatic removal from the register for a charity that fails to seek approval for its name change. It is our view at Mason Hayes & Curran that the full list of events that can result in removal ought to be scrutinised, that only events that are proportionate to the sanction should be included at all, and that a process backed up by an obligation to provide for good reasons should be instituted.

I might comment briefly on the provision relating to “significant events”. Efforts have been made in the Bill to define the phrase "significant events" but three quite general definitions are given, including loss of property and, even more broadly, something that may have a reputational risk for the charity. We had some concerns about the broad nature of those definitions. I am sure work could be done to specify what type of event is a significant event. Having conducted some comparative analysis with similar legislative regimes in charity law, we noticed that generally in other jurisdictions, the obligation to report a significant event is put into guidance from the regulator. From a policy perspective, one might think guidance from the regulator, which can be easily amended over time, might be a more appropriate home for this obligation of reporting a significant event rather than primary legislation, which is so difficult to amend. Furthermore, in the other jurisdictions, the requirement is not retrospective and charity trustees are not required to make a compulsory report on something that might occur in the future. From a legal certainty perspective, that is very difficult and certainly quite chilling.