The coalition government has unveiled a year-long awareness campaign to encourage employers to support payroll giving among their staff as part of the latest re-launch of its ‘Big Society’ concept.

 
At an Every Business Commits Forum event in Milton Keynes yesterday, Prime Minister David Cameron said that the aim was to make it easier for “workers to give money to charity automatically through their pay cheques”.
 
While about a third of employees in the US already did this, in the UK, the figure was only around 3%. “We want that to be a lot higher”, Cameron said.
 
As part of its campaign, the government intends to work with the Institute of Fundraising to re-launch the national Payroll Giving Awards on 18 October this year, which will include the introduction of a new platinum award for top national performers and recognition of organisations achieving the largest percentage point increases in employee giving.
 
The government will likewise explore whether to re-launch a kite mark scheme for those businesses with payroll giving schemes.
 
But its white paper entitled ‘Giving’ also identified obstacles that could act as a barrier to increasing charitable donations via this means. For example, it said that charities lost out on about £71 million between 1999 and 2007 because employees simply failed to re-register for payroll giving when they moved jobs.
 
As a result, the government intends to work with payroll giving agencies, which administer such schemes, to see if the problem can be reduced. It also plans to ask the Every Business Commits Forum to explore whether there are particular admin barriers today that prevent small-to-medium enterprises from setting up their own schemes.
 
A further governmental aim is to create a £10 million Social Action Fund to “support new models that incentivise people to give such as ‘complementary currencies’ that offer people credit for volunteering’, the white paper said.
 
Ministers have been asked to lead by example in pledging to volunteer for one day every year and civil servants are also being encouraged to take part.