These Schools Don't Need Our Charity

Christopher Price - ex-MP, sometime vice-chancellor and perpetual educationist - is leading a one-man campaign to improve the charities bill. His anxieties, naturally enough, concern its application to "independent schools", for which "charitable status" provides a tax exemption that amounts to a government subsidy.

Price's proposals do not seek to end the scandal of low-income families contributing towards the cost of sending young gentlemen to Eton or Harrow. His plan simply attempts to ensure that those institutions give something to the community in return for the benefits they receive. Yet it seems the government is determined to resist a proposal that is as moderate as it is reasonable.

It is so moderate that out-and-out opponents of public schools will worry about its consequences. The convention on human rights enshrines parents' freedom to send their sons and daughters to schools of their choice. Outright abolition is, therefore, impossible. But there is no reason in law or logic why fee-paying education cannot be reduced - with the removal of charity status as a first step - to a level at which its products are no longer influential in society.

On the other hand, the Price proposals will help to legitimise the independent sector by ensuring that it makes a real contribution to the education of the whole community. His proposed amendments to the bill have been welcomed by the more far-sighted public heads. They are an ideal subject for a cross-party consensus, which would make the government see sense or be defeated in the Commons.

Charity law defines all non-profit-making schools as charities. That was fine when they were run, as was their original intention, for the education of the poor. Now they are the preserve of parents who can afford their fees - averaging, for boarders, more than £20,000 a year - so the idea of a Treasury handout is absurd. Public schools, almost everyone agrees, must provide a "public benefit" in return for their public emoluments.

Thirty years ago, a select committee of the Commons recommended that charitable status be restricted to schools that "manifestly devote the education they provide towards meeting a range of clear educational needs throughout the community". Similar sentiments appeared in the long title of the bill that was "lost" when parliament was dissolved for the general election. However, the government refuses to define in law what public benefit means.

Before the lost bill began life in the Lords, a joint committee of both houses examined the notion that parliament should lay down criteria against which public benefit could be measured. The attendant minister rejected the idea out of hand as undesirable and impossible. Deciding what public benefit means must, she insisted, be left to the Charity Commission. The chairman of the committee, Alan Milburn, responded more severely than the very junior minister deserved.

Parliamentary secretaries (unless they are called Adonis) exist to sign letters, reply to debates at uncongenial hours, and read briefs approved by their elders if not betters. But Milburn's trenchant conclusion was entirely justified. "Because independent schools ... are already protected under case law and are deemed to be charitable, the lack of a definition of a public-benefit test means they will continue to enjoy special privileges." In short, nothing much will change. The public school subsidy is safe. Floreat Etona.

The fear, it must be said, is that the government - or at least the people who run it from Downing Street - wants public schools to retain their privileged status. The No 10 strategy unit has already examined the question.

According to one independent headmaster - who resents his more famous counterparts' determination to remain aloof from the real world - the unit has suggested that "lending out a playing field for a few days a year" should be enough to make a school qualify as a charity. MPs who do not agree can bring a little sense and social justice into the charities bill by securing the amendments that Price has drafted. They set out the criteria to which the Charities Commission must "have regard" when it confirms charity status.

The public benefit must be "significant" and "continual", provided after consultation with local interests and regularly reviewed. If Price's proposals have a fault, it is their generosity towards public schools. When consideration of the bill begins in the Lords, peers could prove how up to date they are by making the changes before the bill reaches the Commons. But the same bill emerged, unscathed, from the Lords before the election.

So the hope of equity lies with elected MPs. They have to decide whether or not they want their constituents to subsidise public schools - with the schools doing nothing in return. They should not find it difficult to make up their minds.