Accounts

THE LEONARD LAITY STOATE CHARITABLE TRUST

FEBRUARY 2006

TRUST ACCOUNTS

The Trust's accounts are prepared annually to the 5th April, and are examined by the Trust's accountants Grant Thornton, to ensure that they comply with the Charity Commissioners' "Statement of Recommended Practice".

I have prepared a reasonably digestible summary of the accounts for April 2005.

The full accounts are also available, as sent to me by the accountants, but they might seem heavy going! (Please note that although they are shown as "draft", the draft accounts were approved without amendment at our September meeting.)

The trust's capital is invested in about 30 different unit trusts and open ended investment companies, and a few investment trusts. This gives the trust a very wide spread of mainly UK equities, and a reasonable yield of about 3.5% income. The yield would be rather better had the Chancellor not decided to tax charities (and pension funds) by the abolition of tax credit relief on dividends. There has been a phased reduction of the relief for charities from its original 20% in 1998 to 4% in 2004, to nothing in 2005. The loss of this relief represents a reduction of about £12,000 per annum in trust income, which could have gone to good causes.

Tom's legacy to the trust came in 1997-98, at what represented a peak in the stock market. The value of the trust fund at 5^th April 1998 was an all time high of £1,781,848. The subsequent slump saw that value fall to £1,207,296 by April 2003, but happily the value recovered to £1,660,073 by April 2005. Since then, the fund has finally broken the April 1998 high and at time of writing stands at about £1,850,000. Interestingly, the fund has out-performed both the FTSE-100 and the FTSE All Share indices over this period.