Charities and VAT
Sir: As Director Secretary of Registered Charity No. X97009A, may I draw the attention of my fellow secretaries to the fact that members' subscriptions to all bodies will be liable to value added tax at 10 per cent from April 1973?
This includes clubs of all kinds from the Tail Waggers to the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral and horticultural bodies from the RHS down to allotment societies whose subscriptions include plot rents and whose trading activities bring them a turnover of more than £6,000 a year. The tax will be especially hard on such sufferer's societies as those for asthma, migraine and cancer, for it will be charged not only on subscriptions but on fees for research. A commerical firm has a research department and this will presumably be regarded as tax free, but a charity financing the press comparable to that not. Therefore when you give £10 for cancer research, the Government will take El tax on the value you have added to medical knowledge for the benefit of all humanity.
The newspaper tax was regarded as iniquitous as a "tax on knowledge' and I look forward to an outcry on radio, television and in the Press comparable to that which was raised on the relatively minor iniquity of admission charges to museums and art galleries. Can we afford to tax research in an age of technology?
May I suggest that the charities of Britain form a Union and demonstrate on the roof of the House of Commons as the only way to secure the publicity and attention that Parliament gives to convicted criminals?
Lawrence D. Hills Director-Secretary, Henry Doubleday Research Association, Bocking, Braintree, Essex
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