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THOSE withYour browser does not support the element. exquisite taste in will be familiar with the scene in “The Muppet Christmas Carol”in which Dr Bunsen Honeydew and his sidekick Beaker solicit Ebenezer Scrooge for a donation to the poor. Scrooge refuses and is then haunted by three ghosts who remind him of the importance of having a charitable heart.British fund-raisers are experiencing similar difficulties to Muppets. The Charities Aid Foundation, which tracks charitable giving in Britain, reported that 58% of people donated in 2023, down from 69% in 2016. Businesses are also giving less. Although profits from Britain’s top companies have grown by 13% over the past decade in real terms, their charitable giving has declined by 34% over the same period. And yet the need, if not quite Dickensian, remains great. A study published in early 2024 by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, for example, suggested that more than one in five adults, and 30% of children, in Britain lived in poverty.Charities may find some hope in demography. Baby-boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) have amassed wealth and been stingy with it during their lifetime. In the next three decades those boomers will leave behind an estimated £7trn. And, thanks to historically low fertility rates, a growing number of them will die childless. So there will be a lot of money with nobody obvious to pass it to. Rather than try to squeeze money from Scrooge on Christmas Eve when he’s alive, charities might do well to focus more of their efforts on getting him to leave money behind in his will when he’s dead.Many are already doing just that. A survey published in April 2024 found that marketing investment in legacy giving had increased by one-third over the previous year, resulting in a 40% increase in the number of charitable gifts left in wills. Legacy Futures, a consultancy that helps charities understand the potential of legacy giving, has found that gifts in wills have quadrupled since the early 1990s to around £4bn expected in 2024, and it predicts that this will rise to £10bn by mid-century. Britain’s top 1,000 charities now receive 28% of total donated income from legacy gifts.However, although legacy giving is rising, relatively few gifts are going to the poor. Health charities receive the bulk of legacy gifts, followed by animal and conservation ones respectively. Charities providing end-of-life services are also benefiting. “Catastrophe clauses” in wills can produce a bonanza for some causes. In 2018 a catering boss, Richard Cousins, died in a tragic helicopter crash with his two sons. With no heirs left his will stipulated that £41m of his fortune should go to Oxfam, which focuses on famine relief.Modern Scrooges have a choice should they wish to change their ways. They could give generously in their lifetime—like the donors in west Belfast, an area in Northern Ireland where over a quarter of children live in poverty, who in 2023 gave four times more to charity as a proportion of their income than the far wealthier residents of Kensington in west London. Or they can go to a probate solicitor before, as Charles Dickens put it in the opening lines of his novella “A Christmas Carol”, they are dead as a doornail.
