UKC

Please do not take this as a criticism of Captain Tom, it is not. 

Of the £30M raised, c£5M is from gift aid support. This is tax revenue, taken from the public purse and given to the charity. 

Captain Tom's money is being donated to the NHS charitable arm, which is used to provide desirables. Tax revenue is used to fund essentials within the health service.

Funding desirables over essentials is poor portfolio management is it not? 

Whilst I have a working knowledge of portfolio management, I have little knowledge of NHS charities and how transferable to general NHS budget it is. 

I assume you mean Colonel Tom?

Are honary ranks used? Prince Charles manages to be an Admiral, a General and an Air Marshall or some such, but we don't refer to him as such.

Yeah, yeah. If I had my way we would be stripping knighthoods fro Branson, Green and several more with lower profiles and redistributing them to the likes of Tom. 

Anyway, back to topic... 

I think if you are a major or higher you can keep the title on retirement. 

Viewed like that, I have always considered 'Gift Aid' a very weird thing. But it exists as part of our (very complicated!) tax laws, so it's the way it is for now - and affects a whole host of things apart from the specific case you mention here.

Possibly, but in this case the essentials are desirable so it'll probably be okay.

Although more broadly gift aid does take away tax money for general spending and forces it to be used for a charity of the the donators choice which may not always be where it's really needed. For example of you donate to a donkey sanctuary and use gift aid, tax money which would in part go towards helping poor children or something will be diverted to help donkeys.

Separately from Captain (Colonel) Tom's hugely impressive fundraising

GiftAid is probably a good idea, but it's a bit of a double edged sword.  I'm slightly uneasy with high profile donations (e.g. from highly paid management et al "donating" part of their salary) grabbing the headlines, when, in all probability, there'll be a tax reclaim for GiftAid, which is money reclaimed from the govt (HMRC), which is money from the Exchequer that might have gone to the NHS.  When some high profile personality or celeb grandstands in the media about their "donation", perhaps it should be a requirement to declare how much GiftAid (tax reclaim) they are claiming back: give with one hand and take (back) with another....

I agree about the high profile, large donations. I disagree that gift aid is a good thing. As in the op, it takes from essentials to fund desirable. On a domestic level, not paying the mortgage to finance a holiday.

There may be some overlap between NHS and NHS charities, this is what I am unsure about. Even if 100% is transferable back to the essentials arm, the inefficiencies introduced bouncing the money backward and forward would be shameful. 

Anyone who fills in a tax form claims tax back on regular charitable donations, surely ? Noone chooses to pay more tax than they are required to, do they ?

Asking this as a genuine question, as I’m not very well informed on the intricacies of tax and gift aid...

Is it not the case that (in normal times at least) the tax fraction apportioned to the NHS is approx 20 per cent of total tax? So the question about gift aid becomes a question of: is approx £1m of contribution to essential NHS expenditure of greater value than approx £5m of desirable spend? 
 

Or is my understanding of how gift aid and tax work incorrect?

Better tell Captain Mark Phillips

GiftAid costs £1bn a year, the NHS costs something likle £125bn a year. Even if Gift Aid costs doubled it would have no effect on the NHS budget. They would probably halve the government contribution to 12.5% or reduce local authority budgets or something. 

Gift aid is not the government giving.

I pay tax on what I take for myself now. If I give it to a charity it's my donation entirely. I tell HMRC because why would I pay more tax than someone who took the same for themselves and gave nothing.

Secondly, since the Tories decided to decimate many social service, charities are providing these roles. So for anything I donate, I'm not robbing the state of 40% I'm supporting society with 60%. Added to that I still pay NI on the money too!

When you talk about celebrities making large donations, the problem isn't the large donations, it's the crazy incomes. The bit they're doing right is the charity part.

Captains and above. It's in Debretts.

https://www.debretts.com/expertise/forms-of-address/professions/the-armed-f...

you're right up to a point although the advantage of charitable funds is that each trusts charitable fund can be spent on what the clinicians actually want rather than what they are told to have. An example would be that I was able to buy 60 ECG monitors that work with patients own smartphones for a pilot study from charitable funds, something that would not have been authorised from central funds as it hadn't been planned for. We can also apply from charitable funds for personal development courses and conferences that again wouldn't be paid for as they are not "essential" for the job role. Any application has to be approved by your peer group.

I for one like having lots of money in the charitable pot as it gives us some say over how it is spent. We are lucky in cardiology as we receive quite a lot of donations, other less glamorous areas of medicine do struggle though. Its why air ambulance organisations are charitable, it gives them some control over how the money is spent rather than being dictated to by govt and NHS England.

Beware you can't both claim tax back and make Gift Aid donations...

It's important to realise that if you make Gift Aid donations to charity (and they claim and receive the 'tax paid' as an uplift),  you actually have to have paid that amount of tax in the relevant tax year. If for any reason you haven't, HMRC comes knocking for the 'extra' money the charity received. I received such a bill one year when Gift Aid exceeded my tax paid (even though I wasn't claiming personal tax relief on dnations).

In short, the funding for your Gift Aid donations has to be available from the income tax you pay. If not, you have to reimburse HMRC.

Cheers Dave, that is the bit where I lacked knowledge, the portability of the funds. 

Am I right in saying that a trust can be overspent in its budget, whilst holding significant funds in its charitable arm? 

Cheers - I remembered it wrong. 

yes thats right

That would be because we have another title to use: Prince (which outranks colonel...).

You may only keep your captaincy upon retirement if you served in the cavalry. So technically, it was really just Tom until CDS promoted him.

That £5m won’t be coming from the NHS budget, it’ll be coming from the Gift Aid budget. 

It will be coming from the treasury who could have allocated it to the NHS or any other public service.

A quick Google tells me 24% of public spending is NHS so a loss of £1.2M from NHS, £3.8M from the rest of the public sector. 

Like I said in my OP prioritising desirables over essentials is poor portfolio management. 

I’m not sure that’s how it works. If you have set aside £1bn for charities then it’s not being taken from the Tax allocated to anywhere else. It’s not as if that money was going to go to the NHS. It was always going to go to a charity somewhere, or sit in an account for future use.