Charity shops: a bad deal for charities, a worse deal for taxpayers

Despite all their advantages – discounted business rates, free labour, free stock – charity shops raise very little money for the causes they are supposed to support. But still cost taxpayers up to £1.6bn.

I've written several times about the problems with the way in which the taxpayer finances the charitable sector via the state (all in it costs us a minimum of £6.5bn a year in lost tax revenue). But this week brought one of the most maddening illustrations of the way all this works yet.

The True and Fair Foundation (which lobbies for more efficiency in the charitable sector and is much loathed by much of the sector) has been having a look at the finances of the charity shops that line pretty much every inch of our high streets.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.