LAST month, I wrote about PCC expenditure excluding parish share and capital spending. While one-seventh of that expenditure goes to charity, if parish share is included in the expenditure, charitable giving in 2010 is only an estimated 6.4 per cent. But how often do we hear the comment that averages can be misleading? Often the average is a good guide and one finds a majority of whatever we are looking at fairly close to this average.
On other occasions, it can be misleading and one such case is in the percentage of take-home pay given by church members to their PCCs. The commonly quoted average figure is about three percent but in the December 2009 edition of The Month I showed how a sample survey had shown this to be quite misleading since most members gave at either two per cent or less or five per cent or more. Only 10 per cent of members gave at around three per cent. I wondered whether this might apply also to the charitable giving of PCCs. So taking the 348 parishes which have submitted parish finance returns for 2010 so far, I set about some analysis, the results of which appear in the chart. This shows quite clearly that the 6.4 per cent average for charitable giving is not typical of a majority of our PCCs. For example, 43 per cent of PCCs give in the range 0 per cent to 2.9 per cent and only 16 percent in the range 5.0 per cent to 7.9 per cent. I often hear of PCCs where their giving is a tithe of their regular income. The chart suggests, however, that only 11 per cent of parishes have outward giving which reaches this level of 10 per cent or more of regular income.
