St Michael & All Angels
Organ and Parish Rooms Project
Update by Jane Trigle, churchwarden, October 2014.
Not more fundraising.....
We have been enjoying our new organ for over a year now. It has made a marked difference to our worship, particularly at the ‘big’ services at Christmas and Easter, Festival Mass and other celebratory services. It has also attracted other organists and musicians to come and play the instrument, and give us our series of Organ Recitals on the first Friday of the month.
But with the project looking as if it is finished, and the new vestry and sacristy rooms in full use, it is easy to forget that we are still paying for it.
In the end it will have cost us £1.15m and of this we still owe £223,898
That figure is made up of:
- Loan from St Michael’s Trust Fund £135,000
- Loans from congregation £52,100
- What we still owe the manufacturers £36,798
Where is this money coming from? Well, thanks to everyone’s generosity at the Blue Sky Ball the profits from that will help enormously with our debt to the Organ makers. Also, profits from our Hall lettings are being ploughed back into this fund. We are hopeful that we will have paid off the St Martin Orgue debt by Christmas; and from the beginning of 2015 we will begin staging repayments for the Congregation and the Trust Fund.
Where are we on the VAT question? Well as Messrs Sellars and Yeatman (1066 and all that) would say, just as we get close to an answer - they change the question! The VAT on the Import Duty - £66k - is still rumbling on. This is a very complex issue to do with St Martin’s VAT registration and how their previous imports have been treated. We have a VAT specialist advising us on this, and it is currently with HMRC to consider. We have made progress on this and (hopefully) it should be resolved in the forthcoming months. The other VAT question relates to the building works themselves. For this we were zero rated by HMRC. The period we undertook the works spanned 2 years during which the method for reclaiming this VAT altered and we are caught up with their transitional relief. We think we have now sorted this, and Mitre Construction Ltd have put in their reclaim for the VAT we paid them, which they in turn will pay back to us. This is in the region of £52k, and we are anxiously awaiting news any moment now. Obviously this combined total of £118k would make a significant dent in the amount we owe.
So..... the fundraising continues. We will carry on organising various events to raise funds, and the profits from next year’s Green Days and Festival will go towards the remaining debt. But it is still a long haul, and our obligations to the organ makers and our own congregation members and Trust fund will remain a priority for us.
Jane Trigle, October 2014
Back to Organ & Parish Rooms Appeal page
How the Project was announced in 2009