A superhuman effort

Last summer, Britain’s Paralympic athletes won the hearts of millions in the UK, proving that 'yes, they could' as they took home a whopping 147 medals at the 2016 Games in Rio.

The British Paralympic Association (BPA) has supported disabled athletes as the National Paralympic Committee for Great Britain since 1989. Its responsibility is to select, prepare, fund and manage the Great Britain & Northern Ireland team at each Paralympic Games. Find out about how our work with the BPA has helped our athletes to excel on the world sports stage and ensured the organisation has the funds to support them on their road to victory.

Winning medals

Our support to the BPA over the past two Paralympic cycles has included raising funds and providing staff to support the organisational side of things. To raise funds, our people and clients took on the Deloitte Ride Across Britain – a 969-mile, 9-day cycling challenge that runs from Land’s End to John O’Groats. Since kicking off this bucket-list adventure in 2010, we’ve raised £1.8 million for the BPA.

At Games time, BPA staff numbers swell from 30 to over 280. In 2016, Deloitte created the BPA’s Team Leadership and Manager Development programmes, using our expertise to help prepare the unsung heroes who support all the athletes. Rio 2016 proved to be the most successful Games for our Paralympians in 28 years, and we were very proud to support the BPA in this achievement.

A look behind the scenes

What happens backstage may not be as exciting as the on-field events, but it’s certainly just as important. VAT can be a significant cost to the charitable sector due to the complexity of the regulations – and it’s particularly acute for the BPA because of the diverse ways it is funded. This created some technical challenges regarding whether VAT should be accounted for and how much VAT the BPA could recover on its own costs.

So we helped the BPA maximise VAT recovery to make savings that could be spent on supporting disability sports instead. BPA had always taken a prudent view on VAT to ensure it was compliant with the requirements, but our review discovered some additional areas that it had not yet considered. We spoke to HMRC on BPA’s behalf, and secured an additional VAT recovery of around £130,000.

Our Charities VAT team comprises a national network of specialists working to support UK and international charities to reduce their tax burden and release much-needed funds for their causes. For the BPA, those savings are already being put to good use: supporting grassroots disability sport, sponsorship for athletes, work with schools and nationwide sporting initiatives for disabled athletes.