The Charities Advisory Trust has scrapped the Scrooge Award for retailers that give the least amount to charity from charity Christmas cards after the vast majority of retailers responded to the campaign and boosted their contributions.

The Charities Advisory Trust is the architect of Card Aid which has produced and sold charity Christmas cards for more than 30 years. It began campaigning against ‘Scrooge’ retailers 12 years ago after discovering that some passed on as little as 2 per cent of the price of the card to the charities named as beneficiaries.

Over the years the campaign received widespread coverage, including questions in Parliament, and forced retailers to increase their contributions to a minimum of 10 per cent to charity.

So this year, according to the Trust’s director Dame Hilary Blume, there will be no Scrooge Award because “the battle has been won”.

“Now retailers are vying for the Good Fairy award, for the most amount going to charity, and amounts have mounted to 25 per cent,” she said. “We knocked them into shape; it’s been a very powerful campaign.

“It’s nice to see something work. We estimate that the Scrooge Awards mean literally millions of additional pounds were raised for charity.”

Collapsing Christmas card market

However, she admitted that the increased goodwill of retailers was being offset by the general collapse of the Christmas card market. “People just don’t send Christmas cards any more.  Royal Mail has said that the market is down by a third.

"It’s because of the cost of postage and changing technology – people can construct these terrible online cards now and print them off at home.  So the traditional Christmas card market has just dissipated.”

Statutory minimum for charity campaigns

Dame Hilary also lamented the fact that the Christmas card campaign had not succeeded in persuading the government to introduce a statutory minimum for amounts cited as “for charity” in corporate marketing campaigns.

“You can’t call a pie a meat pie if it’s only got 1 per cent meat in it, so why should you be able to call something a charity campaign if only 1 per cent goes to charity?” she said.  “There is a need for legislation to set a minimum level of contribution whenever anyone sells anything in aid of charity.”