Gift Aid

If the purpose of the loan is help them practice in their own time it would count as part of your group’s musical activity. If the loan was about helping members sing/plan in another group this might be considered an individual benefit

No - it is about personal use of services and facilities. HMRC highlighted that this might include tuition in their written guidance, and we think it is something groups have to consider. But personal use of services and facilities could include other things, such as free tickets or personal use of instruments.

The previous guidance was about calculating how much of the membership fee went towards providing personal tuition. HMRC did not offer blanket guidance on what might constitute tuition, but the general expectation was that most groups would be providing some personal tuition. This involved some complex calculations:

• Deciding what constated personal tuition and working out how much of a rehearsal provided personal tuition
• Giving that amount of time a monetary value

Whatever that monetary value was would be subtracted from the total membership fee, and what was left could have Gift Aid claimed on it.

The new guidance is simpler. The decision is: does the membership fee give personal access to services/facilities (which includes tuition)?

• If it does – you cannot claim Gift Aid
• If it doesn’t – you can claim Gift Aid on the full amount of the membership

What might count as providing tuition has also changed, and the focus is now more on personal tuition rather than the rehearsal process (see Can we claim Gift Aid under the new guidance if we have previously been claiming under the old guidance?).

We had bespoke advice from HMRC in 2012 about Gift Aid on membership subscriptions, which we used to produce our previous guidance. We felt this was overdue for review, but HMRC would not review the guidance with us.

Instead, we based the review on HMRC’s publicly available written guidance and worked with tax specialists to get it checked.

We have removed the previous guidance based on bespoke HMRC advice from 2012 and replaced it with the new guidance.

The new guidance is simpler to follow and implement and for most groups will mean they can claim more Gift Aid.

Gift Aid does generally apply to donations, but there are special rules within the Gift Aid legislation that allow charities to claim Gift Aid on membership subscriptions if certain conditions are met. As detailed in our guidance above.