Ms Helen Martin:

The Charity Appeals Tribunal is at the moment available only for a limited number of decisions, mainly the decisions we make where, for example, we refuse an applicant for charitable status. We have done that in only a few cases, and none of those cases have been appealed to the tribunal. Obviously, we provide reasons. There is a whole process and numerous levels of processes around registering a charity. When we write to applicants, we do so in advance and tell them we will be recommending that their application be refused. We give them the reasons and an opportunity to come back to us. That is something we have done ourselves. It is not provided for in the Act but it is an additional level of fairness and procedural fairness that we think is required. We have the option to remove charitable status if, for example, someone were to do something that moved an organisation from being a charity to being an excluded body. There are excluded bodies under our legislation. They are entities that cannot be registered as charities. For example, a political party or anything that advances a political cause is not a charity under the Act and will be excluded. Similarly, sporting bodies are excluded. Therefore, there could be decisions whereby, as I said, people might inadvertently do something or carry out an activity or start carrying out activities that are not charitable. They may be good and well worth doing but they are not strictly within the four corners of the Act, and in that case we may have to remove charitable status. We have not done that yet, but that is potentially something that would come up. That would go to the Charity Appeals Tribunal, which is entirely separate to the Charities Regulator. The former is an independent statutory body. Although it was established by the 2009 Act, it is completely separate to the regulator. It has its own members, who are appointed by the Minister. I think the committee was advised at an early committee meeting on the general scheme of the Bill that the Department provides the secretariat for the Charity Appeals Tribunal.

We are in favour of it being possible for any decision taken that is of a similar effect, such as an organisation being taken off the register for a particular reason, to be appealed to the Charity Appeals Tribunal. I anticipate that this will be worked through by the drafters of the legislation, who will be very familiar with this, and by the Department itself. We are always happy to provide input to that. We absolutely recognise the importance of this, and what we see in the general scheme is an extension of the kinds of decisions that could be appealed to the Charity Appeals Tribunal.