Gift Aid

Gift Aid is a Government scheme which means that if you’re a UK taxpayer, a charity/charities of your choice can claim back the tax you’ve paid on the donations you make to them if you give them permission to do so. You give your permission for this by signing a Gift Aid Declaration in favour of the charity/charities in question.

None at all! Gift Aid means that the Government pays back to the charity any tax already paid on eligible donations, so your chosen charity benefits from the tax you’ve already paid. There’s no cost to you at all, but the charity gets an additional 25p from the Government for every £1.00 you donate.

Just ask your parish Gift Aid Organiser for a Gift Aid Declaration form, complete it and hand it back to them and we’ll do the rest!

You can also sign up online at GAD Online Form.

If your parish has a contactless machine, you can sign up for Gift Aid directly on the digital plate, where your details will be securely stored.

No! You only need to sign up once and there’s nothing else you need to do – your Declaration will remain in place unless/until you tell us you’d like it to be cancelled.

No. The only restriction is that you must be a UK taxpayer. Any taxpayer of any age can sign a Gift Aid Declaration.

Absolutely! If you’re a taxpayer, it doesn’t matter whether you’re currently working or not.

Yes – Gift Aid Declarations are specific to the charity they’re signed for, so you need to sign one for each charity separately if you want more than one charity to benefit from claiming Gift Aid against your donations.

If you sign a Gift Aid Declaration, we can’t check whether you’re a taxpayer so we will go ahead and claim Gift Aid against your donations to your parish based on the completed Declaration. HMRC carry out random checks on Gift Aid amounts reclaimed in individuals’ names, and if they identify that Gift Aid has been reclaimed in your name and you haven’t paid income or capital gains tax in that financial year, or haven’t paid enough tax to cover the amount reclaimed in your name, they will write to you and ask you to repay the difference.

Gift Aid Declarations relate to individuals, not to couples, as they are set up based on that individual’s tax status. Donations made in association with a Gift Aid Declaration can come from an account held in joint names and the Gift Aid claim will be made in the name of the individual who has signed the Declaration, so there’s no need for both holders of the account to sign a Gift Aid Declaration.

Of course. You can cancel a Gift Aid Declaration at any time, and for any reason – for example, if you’re moving away from your parish and will be attending Mass elsewhere in future.

You’ll also need to let us know if you’re no longer eligible for Gift Aid, i.e. if you’re no longer a taxpayer, so we can make sure we don’t reclaim anything in your name when you haven’t paid tax against the donations. You can either let your parish Gift Aid Organiser know, or you can contact the Diocese direct at gift.aid@diocesehn.org.uk and we’ll cancel your Declaration for you.

Definitely. If you sign a Gift Aid Declaration in favour of your parish, any eligible donations you make by any method will be included in the parish Gift Aid claim; you can choose any method you like to donate, e.g. envelope, standing order, BACS payment, or a mixture of methods – whatever is easiest for you.

Absolutely – signing a Gift Aid Declaration is not a statement of intent regarding frequency or amount of future donations, it is simply a Declaration that allows your parish to claim Gift Aid against any donations you do choose to make. You can continue to donate whatever you want, whenever you want, with no additional obligation at all.

As Gift Aid Declarations are set up based on an individual’s tax status, they aren’t transferable and must therefore be cancelled when someone passes away. Even though a couple might have been financially interdependent, a surviving spouse will therefore need to complete a Gift Aid Declaration in their own name if they would like to Gift Aid their donations and are eligible to do so.

We can claim Gift Aid against those Special Collections where the collection benefits Diocesan charitable funds, so if you contribute to these collections your parish can include those donations in the parish Gift Aid claim. Where the collection relates to a third-party charity however, the monies collected are passed over to that charity directly and they claim the Gift Aid in their own right. Your contributions to these charities won’t therefore be included in the parish Gift Aid claim, but the charity in question might claim Gift Aid in your name (if you have separately completed a Gift Aid Declaration in their favour).

When you complete a Gift Aid Declaration, the Diocese registers you as a Gift Aid donor at your parish and issues a unique donor number to you. Your Gift Aid Organiser uses this number (alongside any envelope number issued to you, if applicable) to log any donations you might make to your record on our systems. At the end of each financial year, we compile the parish Gift Aid claim using these records; the total parish claim is made up of the amounts donated throughout the year by each parishioner who holds a Gift Aid Declaration in favour of that parish. We then submit the claim to HMRC.

When the parish claim is accepted by HMRC and the reclaimed tax paid, the Diocese produces donor acknowledgement letters in respect of the claim made which are sent to the parish for distribution to parishioners. Each donor whose donations were included in the parish claim will receive a letter, which details the name of the parish, the financial year in question, the donation total we claimed against in their name and the amount of tax we reclaimed in their name.