The Grace Trust presents itself as a grant-making charity that supports education, relieves poverty and provides humanitarian relief. Its own annual report says it was “established by a member of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church”. Every year it publishes a list of every institution it has paid, and that list tells a clearer story than the report around it.
Brethren Intelligence has extracted every grant from the Trust’s accounts for 2021 to 2025, 2,134 entries in all, and reconciled each year to the total the Trust publishes. Between them, those grants come to £241.4m. In our assessment, £234.8m of that, 97%, went to bodies within the Brethren’s own network: its schools, the education trusts that own and run them, its welfare and hardship funds and its disaster-relief charity.
Two kinds of grant
The list splits cleanly in two. Most entries are small: £750 to a children’s hospice, £1,000 to a mountain rescue team, £3,000 to an air ambulance. Over five years there were 2,028 grants like these, to 1,435 different organisations, adding up to £6.7m. They are the grants that appear in the Trust’s publicity, and they are real. When we examined the 2019 accounts in Eye of the Needle, external charities received less than 1% of the money. Five years on, the pattern holds. They are also, taken together, 2.8% of the money.
The rest went to a few dozen recipients, in sums running to millions. In 2025, 24 Brethren bodies received £65.5m, while 416 grants to other charities came to £2.3m.
Grace Trust grants by year
Where the big money went
The single largest recipient was NAF UK, the National Assistance Fund, which received £94.3m over the five years. NAF is the Brethren’s own welfare fund, supporting members of the fellowship.
The second largest destination was the Brethren’s school system. OneSchool Global UK received £51.5m directly. From 2023 the accounts also begin listing a string of separately named education trusts, among them Copsewood, Mereside, Oakhill, Eastbrook and Cambrian. These are the trusts behind OneSchool Global’s campuses, and several received millions in a single year: Mereside £9.7m and Copsewood £7.3m in 2025 alone.
Two further Brethren welfare bodies took large and rising sums. CHART, the Central Hardship and Relief Trust, received £5.9m over the period, rising from £96,000 in 2021 to £3m in 2025. The Caledon Trust received £7.0m, including £3.6m in 2025.
One 2025 grant stands apart. The accounts record £80,040 paid to a “Scottish Poverty Trust”. We can find no registered charity of that name. The closest, Poverty Trust (SC007843), reported total income of £21,067 in 2025, a quarter of the grant. In our assessment, the payment went to a Brethren body.
The Rapid Relief Team, the church’s charitable arm, received £8.6m. The Trust’s 2025 accounts disclose, as a related party, that an RRT director is the son of a director of one of the Grace Trust’s own corporate trustees.
The twenty largest recipients, 2021–2025
Where the money comes from
The Trust’s income is itself largely Brethren money. Its 2025 report says its principal funding came from donations by individuals and companies, together with a donation from UBT (EU) Ltd, the Brethren’s business services company. Until 30 June 2022 the Trust owned UBT (EU) Ltd and UBT Accountants Ltd outright, through its subsidiary The Grace Trading Group Ltd, when both were sold to UBT Holdings Ltd. In 2021, UBT (EU) had turnover of £97.7m. The related-party note for 2025 records a further £1.66m donated by the trustees, or by businesses and organisations they control.
Put together, the accounts describe a loop: Brethren businesses and members pay money in, the Trust claims charitable status on it, and 97p in every pound goes back out to Brethren schools, Brethren welfare and Brethren relief.
Search every grant
The full list is below. Search for any charity, or filter by year.