Carte Blanche for ambitious bureaucrats

A new bill to change the way charities are governed is well on the way to becoming law in Britain. The bill has some horrifying new powers for the Charities Commission:

Next week, the new Charities' Bill will finish its passage through Parliament. It should become law before the end of the year. In spite of being billed as "the biggest review of charity legislation in the past 400 years", it has generated very little comment. This is surprising, because the Bill will vastly increase the power of the Charities' Commission to dissolve charities, confiscate their endowments and assets, and give them to what the Commission considers a more genuinely "charitable" cause.

That threat is alarming and real. It used to be taken for granted that organisations devoted to education, to religion, or to the relief of poverty, were automatically providing a "public benefit". The new legislation dissolves that assumption. Even more worryingly, it also leaves it up to the Charities Commission to decide what constitutes a "public benefit". There is no guidance in the legislation on how that slippery notion should be defined. Ministers and members of the Commission have referred to "case law", but there is almost none, precisely because, for the last 400 years, there has been so firm a consensus that education, religion and the relief of poverty constitute public benefits.

Read that again: dissolve charities, confiscate their endowments and assets, and give them to what the Commission considers a more genuinely "charitable" cause. Does that sound like something you want a bunch of bureaucrats doing? I certainly wouldn't!

Update: Perry de Havilland at Samizdata writes:

The fascist approach has clearly won out over the old socialist approach of simple 'nationalisation'. In the fascist way of doing thing, individuals and companies and indeed 'private' charities could remain in 'ownership' of the means of production, but only if they actually used them in accordance with the government's national objectives. Clearly this is Britain's future. You can set up a charity and get endowments from willing people, but if the state decides it disapproves, it will simple take the money are give it to someone more politically correct. Can you imagine a charity in the future saying anything that might displease or embarrass a future British government?