Business leaders have called on other businesses to embrace payroll giving as a new survey shows that three out of five workers think the scheme should be available to all employees.

BT Group chairman Sir Michael Rake and Whitbread chief executive Andy Harrison have encouraged other employers to embrace the scheme which sees workers give to charity before tax is taken out of their pay.

Sir Michael said that payroll giving constituted “the simplest and most effective way to give to charity”.

“Many more British businesses need to get behind the scheme if it is ever to truly deliver on its massive potential,” he said.

Harrison added: “I would encourage every employer to be a force for good by helping their people support the charities of their choice in this way.”

Earlier this year the HMRC revealed that the number of payroll givers had dropped by 4,000, to 720,000 or 3 per cent of the workforce. A survey commissioned by Payroll Giving in Action, however, found that 62 per cent of workers in Britain think they should be able to access the system at any employer.

The statements from business come as the Reverend Dr Giles Fraser, canon chancellor of St Paul’s, called on companies to be more broad in the kinds of charities they support. In the St Paul’s Institute report Value and Values: Perceptions of Ethics in the City Today, the Reverend writes: “Much of the focus of corporate giving is not upon the effects of poverty per se, but, in the words of one charity professional I spoke to, overly concerned with ‘kids and orchestras’.

“A greater emphasis on charitable causes that were less sentimentally compelling would no doubt be a challenge to many corporate organisations, but would enable them to engage with the question of “social usefulness” in a broader way.”