For over two decades, the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme let any listed church, chapel, mosque, synagogue, gurdwara, temple, or other place of worship anywhere in the UK reclaim the VAT — usually 20% — on repairs and maintenance. It closed to new applications on 31 March 2026, with the final year's £23 million budget fully allocated. Around 60% of all listed places of worship in the UK used it at least once in the preceding decade.
What replaced it is not one UK-wide scheme — it's three very different outcomes depending on which nation a building is in, and that split is genuinely contentious, not just an administrative detail.
This split was raised directly in Parliament: in a House of Lords debate on 25 June 2026, the Bishop of Leicester pressed the Government to explain how it plans to support churches in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales now that the replacement fund is England-only — and noted the new fund is expected to support only 100–150 places of worship a year, against roughly 5,000 a year under the old scheme.
The Places of Worship Renewal Fund, funded by DCMS and run by Historic England, provides £92 million in capital grants over four years (to 31 March 2030) for repairs to listed places of worship. Grants run from £10,000 up to £1,000,000. But it works nothing like the old scheme: instead of any building being able to reclaim VAT on demand, this is a competitive fund targeted at areas of greatest need and least ability to raise funds locally — so a well-supported urban church with a repair bill is far less likely to get anything than it would have under the old scheme.
Historic Environment Scotland launched Scotland's Places of Worship Fund on 1 October 2026 — a pilot offering up to £1 million in total, specifically to help cover VAT costs on repairs, for the 2026/27 financial year only. That's a fraction of what Scotland received under the old UK-wide scheme, and proportionally far smaller than England's £92m fund. HES has said it will review how the pilot goes before deciding whether to fund it again — so there is currently no guarantee of anything beyond March 2027.
Neither Wales nor Northern Ireland has launched anything equivalent to the old scheme or to Scotland's pilot. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport's own closure guidance points places of worship in both nations toward the National Lottery Heritage Fund, which is open to applications from places of worship across the whole UK but was not created in response to this closure and has not had its budget increased to absorb the extra demand.
In Wales, Cadw runs general historic-buildings capital grant programmes that have, in past years, included places of worship open for wider community use among several eligible building types (alongside village halls, libraries, and war memorials) — but we could not confirm a currently open round with firm 2026 figures specific to places of worship, so we have not added it as a dataset entry here; check Cadw's own site directly for the latest round.
In Northern Ireland, the Department for Communities' Historic Environment Fund repair and regeneration streams are currently closed, and the National Churches Trust's dedicated Northern Ireland partnership scheme ended in 2025 with no direct successor — congregations there are currently directed to the National Churches Trust's main UK-wide grants programme instead.
If your place of worship is in England, a genuine (if more competitive and much more selective) replacement exists. If you're in Scotland, a real but small and time-limited pilot has just opened. If you're in Wales or Northern Ireland, there is currently no dedicated replacement for the VAT relief you lost — this is a real, acknowledged gap, not something this directory has missed.