(Image: PA)
THE Budget is now only a week away and the airwaves are now full of various industrial sectors pleading with the Chancellor to help them, to cut tax on this, to reduce rates on that.
All of them are deserving cases. With fuel prices so high, the economy is tough for everyone, be they businesses or private individuals. All could do with some shelter from the economic storm.
One sector that doesn’t get onto the airwaves in the same way as businesses which are worried about huge job losses is the third sector – charities.
In today’s paper, we report how the immediate threat facing Age UK North Yorkshire and Darlington, which feared it was going to close at the end of this month, has been eased due to a generous donation of £5,000 by Darlington Lions and other donations from members of the public.
Thank-you one and all for your help.
But the charity, which is used by 16,400 people a year, “is not out of the woods yet”.
Last week, we had a similar plea from Mike Renton, the former Darlington councillor who is now chief executive of Tandem, a charity which for 30 years has helped people into work through mentoring, training and job support – a charity, in this age of youth unemployment, that must feel its time has come.
Yet it too is struggling. Mr Renton said: “We need local businesses to step up and take corporate social responsibility seriously. The charity sector is in its hour of need, and if that support isn’t there, the brutal reality is that charities like Tandem will simply vanish."
Cutting taxes and reducing rates are obviously going to cost the Treasury revenue, but is there a clever way the Chancellor can incentivise business to do more for charities in their areas?