A new deal between the Government and the Catholic
Church will see millions more of taxpayers' money flowing into the
church's coffers.
Recent changes to the Gift Aid scheme mean that charities can now claim Gift Aid on smaller donations.
Catholic
parish churches will be able to claim from HM Revenue and Customs
(HMRC) an extra 20% for each donation of up to £20 without requiring the
giver to complete a form.
It is estimated that every church could
benefit by up to £1,250 a year. If all 2,400 Catholic churches in
England and Wales claim, around £3 million could be claimed each year.
The money could help dioceses cope with the loss of thousands of pounds
following the cut that could be claimed in Gift Aid in 2011 from 23p to
20p in the pound.
Under the scheme, which came into
effect last month, parish churches are for the first time being treated
as individual charities.
Previously the Church's 22 dioceses were each
treated as registered charities rather than the parish churches within
them. The Church of England already benefits from this scheme as all its
churches are registered as individual charities.
Under the new scheme, each church can claim from HMRC for every £1 of a "small" donation.
HMRC
said that it hoped the new scheme, which was agreed in consultation
with representatives of the Catholic Church, would make it easier for
small charities to claim top-up payments. It said that in the past,
churches found it difficult to claim gift aid, because collection
donations might be too small to warrant a Gift Aid declaration.
Large
dioceses such as Westminster and Birmingham, which each have more than
200 churches, could benefit to the tune of hundreds of thousands of
pounds. Jim Whiston, the finance director in the Diocese of
Middlesbrough, said that they hope to raise £80,000 under the new
scheme. "It's going to make a difference," he said.
Robert
Meakin, a trustee for the Diocese of East Anglia and partner at charity
lawyers Stone King, told The Tablet magazine that the change was good
news for the Catholic Church.
"The scheme took into account the
peculiar structure of the Catholic Church which has 22 diocesan
charities administering parish churches which are not constituted as a
separate charities," he said. "If the scheme only allowed charities to
claim then the Catholic Church would have been prejudiced (only having
22 diocesan charities) so it allowed each charity to make a claim in
respect of each and every 'community building' which it owns which in
the Catholic Church opens the scheme up to approximately 2,500 parish
churches."
Meanwhile, the Church of England
announced some of its best financial results in recent years this week,
with a 9.7% return on investments for 2012.
The Church commissioners
manage £5.5 billion in assets for the Church of England.
Terry
Sanderson, President of the National Secular Society, said: "The
Archbishop of Canterbury – a former banker – lectures large financial
institutions about the morality of their practices. But he doesn't seem
to think that the vastly wealthy organisation he heads should pay taxes
like the rest of us have to. Similarly with the Catholic Church – one of
the wealthiest organisations in the world – why are they getting even
more tax breaks when the country is on its financial uppers and front
line services are being destroyed?"