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Charities Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 2:"Page 4, line 24, at end insert ““unless and until it registers as such, in which event it shall cease automatically to be a registered sports club””" The noble Lord said: My Lords, I hope that I can move this amendment speedily. This is the same amendment as I advanced in Committee and on Report. For those noble Lords who want the reference, we last debated it on 12 October, as reported at cols. 321 and 322 of Hansard. The point of the amendment is to make it easy and smooth for a CASC—a community amateur sports club—to register as a charity without having first to dissolve and then reform as a new charity. The argument that the Minister advanced against that on the previous occasion was twofold. He admitted that the amendment would smooth the transition from a CASC to a charity, as indeed it will. But the objections were, first, that there could be a tax charge on a charity becoming a community amateur sports club, and, secondly, that that would therefore create practical difficulties for a charity that follows that route. My amendment covers only the route I indicated: a CASC wanting to become a charity. It does not affect a charity which would become a CASC. Indeed, for a charity to become a CASC would be an odd thing to happen in any event but to do it—and the Minister was right—it would have to wind itself up; the disposal of its assets would not be liable to tax; it would have to dispose of its net assets for charitable purposes, and that would not, or might not, allow it to transfer all its assets to the new CASC. If it did, the assets would have to be ring-fenced so that they could be used only for charitable purposes by the CASC. This amendment will not affect many CASCs because most of them will not want to become charities. The main category of CASCs that might want to become charities are those who want to get major grants from those grant-making bodies that can only make grants to registered charities. That might induce a CASC to seek that new and slightly different status. I beg to move.