Sarah J spoke with Stewardship to find out what the current situation is

Kevin: Yes you're right. A number of charities and fundraisers have expressed concern with the Gift Aid scheme, particularly the very small donations, in that to be eligible for a Gift Aid donation the donor has to fill out something called a declaration, which is declaring that they've paid sufficient tax on their donation, which is then reclaimed by the charity. The fundraisers have been saying, well look, if someone gives £5 or £10 into a bucket collection or into their offering at church, then it can be quite difficult to then get them to fill out that form. The Government have responded to that in proposing something called the Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme. This will come in from next April and what it will mean is that for loose cash collections, up to £20 per donor will be eligible for a relief like Gift Aid, so it will still be the 25% coming back for the pound given. That will be permitted up to £5,000 a year worth of charity income without any paper work at all. All the charity has to do is total up its cash donations and put in a claim alongside gift aid for up to £1,250 of relief a year.

Sarah J: Tell me a bit about the work that you do at Stewardship.

Kevin: We run a range of financial banking services for charities, particularly focused on the Christian charity sector. A major part of our work is to run charitable giving accounts. We're a top 100 UK charity; as I say we're very much rooted in the Christian charity sector. Our prime mission is to support a community of generous givers whether they're giving £10 a month right up to the large scale philanthropist. The way that we do that is that they can have an account with us that makes their giving easy and tax effective. They have one account with us. They give in to Stewardship. We recover the tax under gift aid or whatever tax relief is applicable. It's rather like having your own charity bank account and they can make requests to us to make gifts, whether it's to UK charities, overseas charities, churches, bible college students, or full time Christian workers. There's a whole range and we have about 25,000 donors doing that and that generates about fifty three millions pounds a year.

Sarah J: Does your organisation also help people to think about where they might sow their finances?

Kevin: I think there are two things there. The first is that someone can give away now; say they want to give a proportion of their income away for example, they can give it into an account with Stewardship and they don't have to decide at that point who is ultimately going to benefit. It sort of parks the giving. In some cases it crystallises the tax relief at the right time. We are in the process of rolling out an on-line giving service, which will enable givers to search for particular types of charities. We don't as yet do a one to one giving service, helping people to find ways or destinations to give to, but there will be that, but sort of more global soon. If someone wants to give to children's charities in Africa for example, they can do a search on-line on key words to find out which charities are involved there and they will be able to drill down to those charities and find a little bit of profile about them that the charities themselves have generated.

Sarah J: If people want to find out a little bit more about your organisation how can they do that?

Kevin: The prime way would be by visiting our website, which is www.stewardship.org.uk. If they have a more detailed query they can email us on enquiries@stewardship.org.uk or give us a call and the telephone number is on the website.