Would the following be legal?
I have an item which would fetch 1000 (I expect - might be more) if I were to sell it on, say, ebay.
However, instead of selling it, I'd like to donate it to a charity that could use it[1].
But instead of giving the item to charity, I give them 1333. With gift aid tax relief that is worth 1666 to them. They then buy the item from me for 1000.
At the end of the year I then reclaim the additional 333 as a higher rate tax payer.
As a result of this, I'm in exactly the same position as if I'd given the item to charity but they're 666 pounds better off.
I would expect that there are restrictions on doing this as it could be abused - for example I could give the charity 10x as much and then the charity could buy the item from me for 10x its value.
Or, alternatively, is there any way of declaring a "non-cash gift" on my tax return. Then I could just give the item to charity plus 533. They'd then claim gift aid relief on the 533 and I'd claim 400 of tax relief on the item and 133 on the cash gift.
The obvious way to do this is just for me to sell the item and donate the proceeds to the charity and they then buy an equivalent item from somewhere else. However, there are very few oportunities to buy second hand and new the items are in the 3-4K price bracket.
Tim.
[1] This is very hypothetical at the moment - I've offered to loan it to someone to see if it could be of benefit and it might turn out to be completely useless.