Why you should never tick the Gift Aid box

It's tempting to bump your charitable gift with a little extra from the Treasury. But anything spent on your favoured things doesn't get spent on the NHS, defence or education.

Over Easter I visited the particularly pretty Cambridge University Botanical Garden. Absolutely glorious glasshouses. Fascinating Winter Garden. Loved it. No idea why I didn’t spend more time there as a student. However there was one bit about it I did not love. The admission fee. I wasn’t paying much attention on the way in. I was asked for £8.50. I paid £8.50. But on the way out I stopped to ask about student prices with a few to sending a few over the next day. Adult price if you aren’t a Cambridge student I was told, so £7.70. But I was charged £8.50? It turns out that this was because I had involuntarily paid a “voluntary” 10% donation on top of the price. The cashiers are supposed to check that this is OK with you but I guess as everyone says yes, they don’t always bother.

You’ll be wondering what the point of multi pricing system is - why not just set the price at £8.50 and be done with it? Here I am afraid we get into the murky world of UK Gift Aid. If you make a voluntary donation of part of the ticket price the rules then allow the entire price to be designated a charitable donation and, assuming the “donor” is a UK tax payer and hands over their details, Gift Aid can be claimed by the charity. On a £8.50 ticket that means that £2.12 moves directly from the Treasury to the bank account of the Botanical Garden. You have effectively hypothecated the income tax you say you have paid to the garden. Quite right too you might say. The garden is a very good thing. Sure, but is it so much of a good thing that you think it your income taxes should be diverted to finance it over the NHS? Over Education? Over the filling in of the UK’s endless potholes?

If you ever call for more to be spent on these things (and which of us does not…) should you first be asking yourself whether you should be filling in the gift aid form? I think so. Because every time you fill it in, you divert the income tax that should be going to the kind of services that benefit everyone to the things you happen to like. Which isn’t either particularly democratic or particularly financially helpful to public services (although it is fair to say that a lot of charities do provide what we might call public services). A number to remember every time you are tempted to tick: in the tax year to 2023, total gift aid paid out by the Treasury to other people’s chosen charities came to £6bn. That is around 10% of the UK’s not quite high enough defence budget and by coincidence almost the exact amount that Jeremy Hunt topped up the NHS with in the Spring Budget. Real money. Go to the Botanical Gardens. Make the extra donation. But maybe stop there.