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Last updated: 3/9/2007
The Government has a long term commitment to supporting charities and enabling people to donate money to good causes. Traditionally this has been through tax incentives, which are an important tool for charities, however they are not the whole solution.
There are a number of reasons why the Government believes this work is important. Evidence shows that the numbers of people who give to good causes and the average donation have remained relatively constant for many years. During this time a number of campaigns and measures have been brought in, and whilst these have had success, it is clear that we need a longer term strategy in order to encourage a change in culture towards greater giving by the public. We would also like to see more donations being given tax effectively.
A Generous Society, the Office of the Third Sector's charitable giving strategy sets out our plans for working in partnership with the voluntary and community sector to foster a deeper culture of planned, regular and tax–efficient giving.
The UK has one of the most generous charity tax regimes in the world, with a wide range of reliefs available to individual donors and the charities they support. The combined impact of these reliefs in 2004–05 were worth over £2.4 billion a year, including £625 million tax paid to charities on Gift Aid donations, £270 million relief to higher–rate taxpayers, £20 million relief to donors on payroll giving and £390 million of inheritance tax relief.
But the Government's support for charitable giving goes beyond the development of existing and new tax reliefs. The Giving Campaign and more recently the Payroll Giving Grants Programmehave demonstrated how the Government can work in partnership with the voluntary and community sector significantly to enhance people's awareness and use of the range of tax–efficient methods of giving available to them.
The Giving Campaign concluded in its final report, A Blueprint for Giving, that “there is no single big idea that will dramatically change the culture of giving in the UK”, and that “the way forward lies with a set of targeted initiatives”. It also threw down the challenge to double charitable donations in real terms over the next ten years. The Government agrees with this analysis and is committed to playing its part in meeting the Campaign’s challenge. ‘A Generous Society’ sets out how.
Centre of excellence
The £2 million centre was launched on 16 October 2006 and is being created by OTS, Carnegie UK Trust and the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) with support from the Scottish Executive.
There will be a further stakeholder consultation in partnership with Carnegie UK Trust from November to January to seek views on the centre proposal.
The aim of the centre is to support high quality research aimed at developing the necessary evidence base to better understand charitable giving and philanthropy issues, and to influence policy and practice decisions in the UK. The centre will develop knowledge, capacity and expertise through in–depth longer term research and development, and will deliver short and longer term analysis with sufficient rigour and relevance to inform policy and practice decisions. It will produce syntheses of existing knowledge to ensure maximum benefit is obtained from research expenditure.
The Giving Nation Challenge
Giving Nation is further developing the charitable giving citizenship curriculum materials available to secondary school through the Giving Nation Challenge. The Challenge will bring together the goals of educating about charities in the classroom and enlivening the school environment through extra curricular charitable activity. The first full year of use will be from September 2007. Schools using the challenge will automatically be entered in to the Giving Nation Awards.
Go Givers
Giving Nation has developed curriculum materials for primary schools through ‘Go–Givers’. Go Givers has a dedicated website containing lesson plans for teachers and interactive involvement for children. A small number of schools are currently using the materials with full roll out from April 2007.
Tax-effective giving
The Office of the Third Sector funds the Institute of Fundraising’s tax-effective giving initiative, which supports charities to take advantage of tax relief and maximise their income.
The tax-effective giving initiative includes training workshops for small charities, which have successfully trained over 1,000 individuals in the first year of the programme.
The institute is working with partner organisations to train and provide materials to a network of up to 1,000 individuals holding senior voluntary positions in two or more organisations, so that they can embed tax-effective giving into their charities as well as pass on information to their volunteers.
The institute has also revised its publication ‘The trustees guide to fundraising’, which contains advice on tax-effective giving.