Tasburgh United Charities.

Tasburgh United Charities was established under a Scheme from the Charity Commission in 1928, bringing together the administration of the Poor's Land Trust, the Thomas Clabburn and Miss Bateman Charities and the Fuel Allotment Charity.

The Scheme provided for there to be five trustees, four appointed by the Parish Council, plus the Rector who can now appoint a deputy. The income was to be used to provide the poor of the parish with fuel but could also be used to provide clothes, boots, linen, bedding, tools, medical supplies, food and other items as the trustees felt appropriate, although a subsequent change to the Scheme replaced that specific list with any payments at the trustees' discretion. Minutes of the trustees' decisions were to be kept, and are complete form 1928 onwards, apart from a gap between 1944 and 1958, for which the Minute Book has been lost.

The first set of Minutes records that 45 households received either one or two hundredweight of coal, and 30 of those also received one or two loaves of bread, depending on the number of persons per house. This was all paid for out of net rents totaling just £8.90!  With a total village population in 1928 of about 340 people including children, 45 households probably represented about half of the households in the village being classified as in need of support. By contrast, in 2022 the trustees had a net income of almost £12,000 from investments, having sold all of their land, but only received requests for assistance from four households, plus four students, out of a population approaching 1,200.

Distributions of coal or bread continued until 1965 but even as early as 1935 a cash payment was being made to pensioners at Christmas, and now almost all distributions are made in half yearly cash payments towards heating and household expenses, with the occasional funding of specific items. Following the increase in further education, the trustees in 1997 also began making grants to students from the village, and another change, mirroring the social make up of the village, is that the majority of applications are now from single parent or young families, whereas until 1995 almost all grants were to pensioners.

In 2022 the trustees applied  for permission to merge the four constituent charities into a single fund with greater flexibility to provide benefits for residents in need of financial assistance, which the Charity Commission agreed to in 2023 with the grant of a new Scheme.