Around 30,000 small churches run largely by volunteers will have to register with the Charity Commission by March 2031, and ministers have no plans to give them more time.
Scout and Guide groups and student unions keep a permanent exemption, and the Commission has not asked for any extra staff or money to handle the workload.
The figure was given on Tuesday by the culture minister Vicky Foxcroft, in written answers to Marsha de Cordova, the Labour MP who speaks for the Church Commissioners in the Commons as Second Church Estates Commissioner. Ms de Cordova asked about the more than 9,000 small Church of England parishes that would have to register, and whether ministers had decided to extend their status for another ten years.
The minister replied that the Commission estimates ‘around 30,000 church charities across all temporarily excepted Christian denominations will need to register by 31 March 2031’. She added: ‘There are no current plans to further extend the deadline for registration.’
At present, churches linked to the Church of England, the Church in Wales, the Methodist Church, the main Baptist and Congregational bodies, the United Reformed Church and the Quakers do not have to register as charities if their income is £100,000 a year or less. They are still charities, and their trustees, usually the members of the parochial church council, must still follow charity law. But they do not have to register or submit annual returns to the Commission.
From 31 March 2031, every one of those churches with an income above £5,000 will have to register. For many small parishes, that means the treasurer and churchwardens, usually unpaid, taking on another layer of paperwork.
Other excepted groups are treated differently. The minister confirmed that ‘Scout, Girlguiding, and student union groups operate under permanent exception arrangements’. The Commission’s own guidance says that of all the excepted categories, only the one for certain churches has an end date.
The deadline is not new. The exemption for churches was granted in 1996 as a temporary measure and has been extended several times, most recently in 2021 under the Conservative government, which pushed it back from 2021 to 2031.
The reasons given then still matter. The explanatory memorandum for the 2021 regulations said there were about 35,000 excepted charities, ‘roughly five times the Commission’s annual registration capacity’. It said many lacked ‘the capacity and resources to manage the administrative burden’, and that it would be ‘inappropriate to impose a regulatory burden on these small charities at this time’. Ministers took the same view in 2014, when they extended the exemption to avoid ‘an unnecessary regulatory burden’ on small excepted charities.
Ms de Cordova also asked whether the Commission had asked for more staff or a bigger budget to deal with the work. The minister said the department ‘has not received a request’ for either. The Commission is working with the churches on ‘a phased approach to voluntary registration’ before the deadline. The Church of England tells parishes that a new and simpler process for joining the register is expected to begin in 2029.
There is an argument on the other side. Churches of other denominations and faiths already have to register once their income passes £5,000, and supporters of registration say all charities should be treated alike. The Church of England itself notes that some parishes choose to register early because a charity number makes it easier to open bank accounts and use services meant for charities.
But that is a choice parishes can already make. The question for ministers is why the burden for those that have not should be imposed in full in 2031, when the same exemption is permanent for Scouts and Guides, and when the regulator has not said how it will cope.
Many are small congregations kept going by a handful of volunteers, who often also look after the buildings their communities rely on.
Unless ministers change course, the exemption that has covered them for 30 years ends on 31 March 2031.
