Policy Change, Public Benefit, and the Charities Act 2006---A Case of the Emperor's New Clothes

This thesis analyses the policy-making processes leading to the Charities Act 2006 that introduced a renewed focus on the "public benefit" that charities need to provide. It addresses the empirical puzzle why a period of over 400 years of stability in the definition of charitable status ended in 2006 and what factors caused the charity reform that culminated in the 2006 Act. The discussion centres on the two most affected groups of charities, which are fee-charging education and healthcare charities. For this purpose, the thesis compares two radical change theories, i.e. punctuated equilibrium theory (Baumgartner et al., 2011) and path dependency (Pierson, 2000a), and evaluates how they perform against the alternative account of gradual transformation theory (Streeck and Thelen, 2005). Empirical evidence is presented for each of the key stakeholders, the government, the charitable sector, the legal community, and the media. Throughout, the thesis adopts an interdisciplinary multi-method research outlook, including a specifically designed survey, systematic review, statistical analysis, content analysis and archival research. These data are corroborated through in-depth elite interviews with key personalities who were involved in the charity policy reform process. The "crucial case study" (Eckstein, 2009) is then juxtaposed to the parallel Scottish charity policy reform, leading to the Charities and Trustee Investment (Scotland) Act 2005, to corroborate the findings. In the light of the evidence, the thesis concludes that policy change theories need to differentiate between the concept of legal and political change in order to provide meaningful explanations. Moreover, it finds that welfare state traditions play a key role in charity policy change and that the English Charities Act 2006 is a further instance of the increased judicialisation of politics and the politicisation of judicial bodies. On a theoretical level, the thesis introduces a classification of change at different stages of the policy process.