UK | Age UK has called on the Government to make more financial help available to local charities, as outlined in its "Nothing Left to Trim" report.
Age UK’s financial-related report ‘Nothing left to trim’ has shown the Government’s Budget measures will cost the 69 local Age UKs who responded to a survey from the national charity GBP £6.27 million this year.
Some essential Age UK services, which help highly vulnerable older people and their families and unpaid carers, will be forced to scale down or close as a result of the Government’s decision to increase Employer NICs (from 13.8 percent to 15 percent in April 2025) and to lower the salary threshold at which they become due.
This is the stark conclusion of Age UK’s new report ‘Nothing Left to Trim’, which sets out the findings of its recent survey of local Age UKs and National local Partners In total, Age UK received 69 responses to their survey, giving creditable response rate of more than 50 percent. Through their replies, many made it clear that as a result of their increased costs brought about by the Budget, they will have to let go some staff, increase the charges levied on older people who pay for their own services, and ultimately close some services, if they can no longer see how to make them viable, given their increased cost base. Sadly, for a few, their survival as local charities was also at risk.
The 69 local Age UK groups which responded to Age UK’s survey said that the increase in their costs brought about by the Budget would cause £6.27 million total additional financial costs annually. Seven in 10 respondents indicated that that these changes will decrease their ability to deliver services to older people. Seven in 10 respondents said that the changes mean they need to consider reductions in staffing. Five in 10 said they are now having to consider cutting services or handing back contracts to the NHS body or their local council that commissioned them, because they are no longer able to afford to deliver them on the terms agreed before the Budget was announced.
The Government’s decision to increase Employer NICs and lower the salary threshold at which these start to be paid inevitably hits employers of relatively large numbers of low paid staff particularly hard. Unfortunately, this is a good definition of the situation in many charities, meaning that the charity sector as a whole is being seriously impacted by the changes, far beyond Age UK.
The knock-on consequences of this could be severe for individuals and for communities, given that statutory services have diminished in recent years, meaning that in many cases a voluntary sector-run service is all that is left. If this also has to close there will often be no alternative to go to instead. In addition, the voluntary sector itself has been struggling to keep going over the last few years, many organisations having been battered firstly by the pandemic, then by the cost of living crisis. And this against a context of austerity in the public sector, which has often resulted in less financial support for charities from local authorities, as they too struggle to make ends meet. Meanwhile, these events have also, in many cases, increased the demands on charities from local people who are desperately in need of practical and emotional help – a really difficult situation for charities to navigate, small local ones especially.
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