A coat in October, a quieter year, and what we changed.

We are obliged, in law, to file an annual return with the Charity Commission. This year the return we filed for the financial year ending 31 March 2025 was peculiar. Total income, for the year, was zero. Total expenditure, for the year, was zero. The five-year-average distribution figure of about £4,260 a year had been wholly absent. To a casual reader of the Commission register, this looks like a charity going quietly to sleep. It is not. It is, in a small parish trust, something a little stranger and a little more honest, and I want to use this note to explain it.

Farndon Charities is, in financial terms, a very small instrument. Our combined endowment across the four funds yields, in a normal year, roughly £4,000–£5,000 of distributable income — rent from the Poor's Allotment, the COIF accumulation on the Coal & Bread Charity, a small parish subscription to the Apprentice Bequest, and a steady drip of gifts to the Sick & Aged Fund. Our expenditure, in a normal year, is broadly the same. We do not aim to grow the corpus. We aim to use what we have, year by year, in the parish where it was given.

2023–24 was an unusually active year. We made distributions of close to £8,600 — about double the recent average. There was no single dramatic reason for this; it was a confluence of a hard winter (and so a busier Coal & Bread season), three larger-than-usual Apprentice grants, a couple of urgent Sick & Aged interventions, and a particularly generous Quiet Hearth Appeal that we ran in December 2023. We were, by Easter 2024, sitting on noticeably lower reserves across the four funds than the prior trustees thought prudent.

So the three of us — Margaret, Clive, and myself — made a deliberate decision, in the April 2024 trustees' meeting, to take a quiet year. We agreed to defer the December 2024 Christmas distribution; to redirect Apprentice applications to the Cheshire Community Foundation where possible; to deal with urgent Sick & Aged need by drawing on the previous year's small surplus rather than current income; and to rebuild reserves through the year so that the next active year would not catch us short. We did, of course, continue to meet quarterly. We did, of course, continue to read every application. We simply did not, between April 2024 and March 2025, write a cheque from the four constituent funds.

A small charity, well kept, does not measure itself by what it has spent this year. It measures itself by whether it can be reached for in the year that follows.

The one exception · a coat in October

There was, in fact, one exception in that quiet year, and I want to record it. A young mother — I shall call her Leila, with her permission and a slight change of details — moved into a rented house off the High Street with her two children in August 2024. She came to us via Mrs Watkins, one of the church wardens at St Chad's. The October cold came early, before the school had issued its annual cold-weather reminder to parents, and Leila's children were arriving at school in summer cardigans. Mrs Watkins called me at the rectory on a Friday evening.

It was an unambiguous case. The need was small (a winter coat each, plus boots, for two primary-age children), specific (the children were starting Year 1 and Year 3 the following Monday), and bounded (we could see exactly what the grant would do). It was also, very plainly, in the spirit of the Poor's Allotment — the parish's oldest fund, dedicated to general relief. I rang Margaret on the Saturday morning. We agreed on a grant of £140 by chair's action; Clive logged it in the ledger when we met for the December meeting. The coats and boots were bought at the Chester branch of a well-known children's outfitter the same week. Leila tells me they are still wearing them, eighteen months later.

So our financial year did not, in the strictest sense, have zero distributions. It had one. It was not, however, captured in the annual return, because the £140 was paid from the small carry-forward surplus of the 2023–24 Quiet Hearth Appeal rather than from the four constituent funds' income. (We accounted for it under restricted-fund movement; the Charity Commission instructions for SORP-style accounts treat carry-forward appeal money differently from current-year endowment income.) That is a fine technical distinction, and we are not, I admit, entirely comfortable with how it reads on the public return. It is one of the reasons for this note.

What we have changed

The trustees met for a long evening in February 2026 to think the question through. We are agreed on four small changes.

First, we will publish, alongside our annual return, a single-page note in plain English explaining what the headline numbers do and do not mean. This will go up on the website at /reports/ and on the parish notice-board outside St Chad's.

Second, we will return to a normal distribution rhythm from Easter 2026. Reserves are now rebuilt to the level the trustees consider prudent (about eighteen months of average distribution, held across the four funds in a notice-account ladder), and we expect our 2026–27 income statement to look much like the long-run average.

Third, where we make a grant in a quiet year from a Quiet Hearth carry-forward surplus, we will record it both in the restricted-fund movement and in the narrative note, so that a casual reader of the Commission record does not draw the misleading conclusion that we made no grants at all.

Fourth, and most importantly, we will be more open about the quiet years when they happen. A small charity in good order will sometimes choose not to distribute. That is a quietly responsible thing to do; it should not be a thing we hide.

A short word of thanks

Several neighbours wrote to me through 2025 to ask, with great care, whether the silence on our newsletters meant something was wrong. It did not. It meant we were doing the unglamorous work of small-charity treasury management. I am very grateful to those who asked. We will, in 2026, be quicker to say in our quarterly dispatches what we have decided and why; and slower, I hope, to make our reasoning visible only at year-end.

To Leila, her children, and to Mrs Watkins, my own quiet thanks. They reminded me what a year that looked dormant on the ledger could still hold.

Ledger ref · PA-2024-10-006 (Quiet Hearth carry-forward) · Grant · £140 · Fund of record · Poor's Allotment