The Small Charitable Donations and Childcare Payments Act 2017 makes a number of amendments to the legislation which underpins the Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme (GASDS), introduced in April 2013. The purpose of these changes is to simplify the scheme and extend access to smaller and newer charities. The Act also makes a few technical amendments to the legislation which establishes Tax-Free Childcare, the Government’s scheme to support parents’ childcare costs, scheduled to be rolled out from early 2017. 
Under Gift Aid charities are entitled to claim 25p tax on each £1 they receive from individual donations. This represents repayment of the basic rate tax that donors have paid on this part of their income. Individuals who are higher or additional rate taxpayers claim the extra tax they will have paid from HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC).
To support any Gift Aid claim, charities must have a Gift Aid declaration from the donor, confirming they have paid the same amount or more in tax in that year. If a donation has not been made out of taxed income, tax has to be paid by the donor to HMRC. Clearly those donors who are not earning enough to be paying income tax will not want to use Gift Aid. There will also be circumstances where charities may find it difficult to get a declaration from donors – say, when collecting small cash gifts in a collecting tin. The GASDS allows charities to claim a top-up payment on donations equivalent to Gift Aid in these situations.
In the 2011 Budget the then Chancellor George Osborne announced “a new scheme where Gift Aid can be claimed on small donations, up to a total of £5,000 a year per charity, without the need for donors to fill in any forms at all. This means Gift Aid on the contents of the collecting tin and the street bucket, and 100,000 charities will benefit to the tune of £240m.” Statutory provision for the GASDS was made by the Small Charitable Donations Act 2012. As there is no link to the tax paid by the donor, the GASDS is not tax relief but is treated as public expenditure; this is why the legislation to establish the scheme was not included in the annual Finance Bill.
The Act sets a number of rules for eligible charities and qualifying payments, to minimise the risk of fraud and to provide a link with Gift Aid: setting standards for a charity’s compliance behaviour, and, capping the size of a charity’s annual claim under GASDS by reference to its annual claim under Gift Aid (the ‘matching rule’). In addition, a charity that is connected with one or more other charities has to share the annual £5,000 main allowance.
Finally, the scheme allows a charity to make an additional claim in respect of donations it has raised as part of its charitable activities in a community building – such as a village hall, town hall or place of worship. The aim of these rules is to allow ‘groups’ of charities to claim equivalent amounts if they are structured in different ways. As a consequence national organisations, like dominations of churches, may claim similar amounts whether they are structured as a single charity nationally, or as a ‘group’ structure made up of individual charities.
Only cash donations of up to £20 may qualify for a top-up payment. This limit remains in force, although the annual ‘main allowance’ for donations was increased to £8,000 from April 2016.
For further information, visit: http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/CBP-7711