Time for another look at tax relief on charitable giving

Tax relief on charitable giving should be abolished completely. It amounts to vast unaudited and uncontrolled public spending.

When George Osborne suggested that there should be a £50,000 cap on the tax relief permitted on charitable giving, we approved of the idea wholeheartedly. We even felt that this wasn't going far enough.

As far as we can see, all tax relief does is allow donors to channel what is effectively public spending (with taxpayer cash) to their own pet causes that's undemocratic and open to wide abuse. You can read our original post on the matter here.

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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.