VAT AND CHARITIES

Motion Text

That this House takes careful note of the logic professed by successive governments over the past 25 years to the long-running fiscal sore of irrecoverable VAT and its consequential impact on the work of charities; notes with equal care that the common and oft-recited rebuttal to successive pleas for regulatory change has been to pray in aid the specious justification that `there are something like 250,000 charities and a general exemption for all of those would produce astronomic costs'; further notes with a measure of restrained anger and impatience that some charities such as the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) and other search and rescue agencies, staffed as they are by well-trained and highly skilled volunteers, invariably operating in conditions that are by definition extremely hazardous, save lives frequently by the very act of putting their own in mortal danger; and calls upon the Government for this reason if for no other to take this previously neglected aspect into account as a component of a further review of this issue so as to redress the circumstances which can cost the RNLI the loss of their cash as well as their crews.