Church of England parishes collectively receive nearly £90 million in Gift Aid tax rebates each year, around £40 million more than the amount collected in the year 2000, and sufficient to fund 1,600 stipendiary clergy! This is a great tribute to the hard work of volunteers running Gift Aid programmes in parishes throughout the country, as well as a testimony to the value of the Gift Aid scheme. It’s important to get it right, and this page seeks to help you do that.
Action needed:
It’s important to check periodically that you’re operating the Gift Aid scheme in line with good practice, and we’ve produced a simple checklist to help you ensure you’re adopting good practice with Gift Aid. One of the most important things to do each year is to remind your donors to check that they are still taxpayers, and notify you if they are no longer paying sufficient tax – the personal allowance has risen in recent years, taking a number of people on lower incomes out of the tax bracket.
Gift Aid Fact Sheets:
These 12 Fact Sheets are to help you make the most of Gift Aid.
- 1 Getting Started with Gift Aid – an overview to the scheme. You may also find our introductory video helpful…
- 2 A Job Description for a Gift Aid Officer
- 3 Gift Aid Declarations and a Gift Aid Declaration template in Word
- 3a Gift Aid Declarations – Verbal and by Email
- 4 Record Keeping
- 5 Gift Aid for Higher Rate Taxpayers
- 6 Can we Claim Gift Aid on …??
- 7 Basic Principles and Donor Benefit – don’t fall foul of the rules
- 8 HMRC Audits
- 9 HMRC’s ‘Fit and Proper Persons’ test
- 10 Guidance on Claiming Gift Aid – there are now three ways of claiming Gift Aid, and we have produced guidance on each of these.
- 11 Making Aggregated Claims – bundling together lots of small donations.
- 12 The Small Donations Scheme – allows a Gift Aid style payment from HMRC on cash donations of £30 or less (£20 pre April 2019), where no Gift Aid declaration has been received. Guidance for single church parishes and for parishes with more than one church.
- 13 Contactless donations Gift Aid form
However, you may not need to operate Gift Aid yourself as some dioceses offer a Diocesan scheme. These include Canterbury, Lichfield, Liverpool, Manchester, Peterborough, Portsmouth, Southwell & Nottingham and Worcester. If you are in one of these dioceses, you might like to contact your Diocesan Office to find out more about them.