On the day of the Budget George Osborne proudly boasted that his policies to encourage philanthropy amounted to “the most radical and most generous reforms to charitable giving for more than 20 years”.
The package of measures he trumpeted included plans to make it easier to claim Gift Aid (tax relief) on charitable donations; a move likely to benefit charities by tens of millions of pounds each year. What he did not mention, however, is that feeble regulation of charities means that the taxpayer is subsidising some very dubious causes indeed.
A case in point is the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.
Last year Times Money found that this Pentecostal church, which has about 10,000 members in some of the poorest parts of the UK, was encouraging followers into debt or to sell everything they own so that they could donate more money to the church. Pastors even used weekly sessions that were supposed to help congregants with their financial troubles to elicit more donations. Disaffected worshippers told us how they had seen their family members brainwashed and driven into poverty because of the church. We also discovered that pastors were using false testimonies of miracle healings to encourage donations.
This year Times Money has found that the very same church has benefited from almost £8 million of taxpayer support through the Gift Aid scheme (see our report). Last year alone the church claimed £1.7 million in Gift Aid on donations of £9.8 million. And what does the church do with the bulk of this money? Alleviate poverty? Help the poor? No. It buys buildings. Last year three quarters of all donations went on purchasing “fixed assets” — ie, leasehold and freehold properties. In only 16 years in the UK, the church has accumulated a property portfolio worth more than £33 million. Furthermore, at least one of the buildings —an Art Deco former cinema in Walthamstow — has been left to ruin because the local authority has so far refused to grant planning permission to convert it into a church.
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Any right-minded taxpayer will find it appalling that the public purse is being used to subsidise a church that impoverishes its congregation and spends most of its income on expanding its asset base rather than helping people. When the Government is running an annual budget deficit of £150 billion and valuable public services are being cut, it is plain madness that this church receives a penny from the taxpayer.
To make matters worse, the church has failed to explain adequately how it justifies claiming Gift Aid on 61 per cent of donations when on average only 40 per cent of donors use this tax break. When you operate in the poorest parts of the UK and a large proportion of your congregation are immigrants on low incomes, such a high “recovery rate” is surprising to say the least.
With this church set to benefit from even more taxpayer support after the changes announced by Mr Osborne in the Budget, there is a pressing need to rethink how charities are regulated. The current regime run by the Charity Commission is woefully inadequate, undermined by a lack of resources and stifled by political correctness.
Last year Times Money presented our original findings about the church to the commission. Last month it finally got around to telling us that it planned to do nothing about our concerns, seemingly ignoring large swaths of evidence that we presented.
The commission’s principal justification for allowing this church to continue its questionable practices at the taxpayers’ expense is because it does not define the church’s followers as “vulnerable”. Only the young, old or ill are vulnerable, according to the commission. What cowardly, weak-minded nonsense. Since when has brainwashing the low-paid and using their money to build an absurd property empire been charitable work?
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This church may do a relatively small (compared to its income) number of good deeds and offer religious “salvation”, but its operations as a whole clearly work against the public good.
A charity must be operating for the public benefit to receive and retain charitable status.
The only conclusion to draw from the Charity Commission’s apathy is that it is suffering from the dogma of cultural relativism and does not want to be seen to judge what is acceptable practice for a “religion”. No doubt, it is also scared stiff by the thought that it might be accused of racism by acting against a church with a membership comprised mainly of black Africans.
On both counts the commission needs to think again. The cloak of religion should never be allowed to justify conduct that would be deemed unacceptable in a secular charity. And though most of the church’s congregation are black Africans, most of the church’s senior hierarchy, including the billionaire founder, Bishop Edir Macedo, are white.
Furthermore, the commission is acting with no consistency. There is no obvious distinction between the operations of the Church of Scientology, which has been branded a cult and was denied charitable status by the commission, and the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. If anything, the Church of Scientology is less insidious because it, at least, receives a significant chunk of its donations from wealthy benefactors and gullible celebrities, as opposed to dirt-poor immigrants.
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By failing to act against this church, the Charity Commission is effectively giving a green light to religious and other charities to act with impunity at taxpayers’ expense. At a time when the Government is short of money and is giving charities ever more generous tax breaks, that is unacceptable.