Figures released today by HM Revenue & Customs show the provisional amount raised from donations through payroll giving for the year 2013/14 has fallen by £21m to £134m.
The statistics, produced from information provided by payroll giving agencies, also show that the number of people donating through payroll giving rose from 1.022 million in the year 2012/13 to a predicted 1.12 million this year. The cost of income tax relief remained consistent with the last two years at £40m.
Increasing awareness
Speaking yesterday at the Institute of Fundraising’s payroll giving conference, the financial secretary to the Treasury, Nicky Morgan MP, said that charities need to push payroll giving on to MPs, as well as potential donors and employers.
She said: “Members of Parliament get bombarded with information, I get an average of 150 emails a day to my parliamentary account as well as a lot of letters, and there are an awful lot of demands on MPs' time.
“My understanding of politics is if you want people to hear a message you have to repeat it ad nauseam and only when we are completely sick of it as politicians, does it begin to just about cut through.”
The MP for Loughborough added that the best time to contact politicians is next year just after the general election, when all the MPs and staff are renewing their contracts and payroll information. She said: “That is the time to hit them, and hit them hard.”
Morgan added that charities are not doing enough themselves to make donors aware of the option of payroll giving, but added that the lack of a centralised web page with a list of employers who are part of the scheme is an issue. She said gathering this list would be difficult, but not unachievable.
She acknowledged that there is currently a lack of information available on payroll giving and that she wants to find out the total amount of money coming in and the total number of charities that the scheme helps, as well as more about new and existing donors and employers.
Morgan said that payroll giving, which has raised £1.5bn so far, isn’t as widespread as it should be and is nowhere near its potential, but it is a good scheme that is becoming more widely known and more successful.
An investigation by Civil Society News in early 2013 found that just nine of the 650 UK MPs gave to charity through their payroll.