MARKS & SPENCER has teamed up with the charity DisabledGo to launch a website for Britain’s 8.7 million disabled people.

Founded by Gregory Burke, a young wheelchair-user, www.disabledgo.info will allow disabled people to log on and check access to thousands of cinemas, pubs, restaurants, shops and services in Westminster, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Brighton and Croydon; it will expand across the country this year. The guides have been funded by a partnership between M&S and local authorities. Nothing as extensive or detailed has been attempted before.

People can check, for example, whether a cinema offers wheelchair access and a hearing loop, whether the lifts in an hotel have Braille markings, and whether a restaurant will welcome guide dogs.

• MEMBERSHIP of the Legacy Promotion Campaign, which aims to encourage more people to include a donation to charity in their wills, has reached 91 with the addition of five new charities.

  The Royal Medical Benevolent Fund, British Institute for Brain Injured Children, Mayhew Animal Home Esther Benjamins Trust and the Nutritional Cancer Therapy Trust will join the likes of Scope, Oxfam and the Royal National Lifeboat Institutions in promoting legacies. A further 177 charities have inquired about membership.

  More than 40 per cent of income for the top ten charities comes from legacies; however, only 14.3 per cent of wills that go to probate each year contain a charitable bequest. The campaign aims to raise that by two points to 16.3 per cent within two years.

  Any money left to a charity in a will is exempt from inheritance tax, making legacy donation a tax-efficient way of giving to charity. The campaign, which was launched two months ago, includes among its founding members key professional groups. These include the Association of Independent Financial Advisers, Society of Financial Advisers, Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners and Association of Private Client Investment Managers and Stockbrokers.

• THE Internet Content Rating Association, which aims to help parents to protect children from potentially harmful material on the internet, has been recognised as a charity by the Charity Commission.

  The move marks a departure for the commission as it is the first time it has recognised protecting people using the internet as a charitable purpose.

  Stephen Balkam, chief executive of the rating association, said: “I hope it will pave the way for other organisations working on the net, particularly in child protection, to apply for registration with the Charity Commission.”

  BRITAIN’S charities missed out on £372 million in the last financial year because consumers did not make the best use of tax-efficient ways of donating, according to IFA Promotion, the organisation promoting the benefits of independent financial advice.

  IFA Promotion’s annual was- ted tax campaign shows that just over £2 billion was donated via covenant, Gift Aid and payroll giving, the three most tax-efficient methods of giving.

  More than 18 million Britons gave to charity in 2001. Of these, about 13.6 million are taxpayers, yet just 504,000 employees donated a mere £145 each on average (£73 million) via the payroll giving scheme. IFA Promotion’s conservative calculations reveal that if just one in five employees who donate more than £5 per year to charity did so by means of tax-efficient payroll giving, charities would be in for an additional annual windfall of £152 million.

• A NEW Compact Advocacy Programme has opened for business and is inviting voluntary organisations to seek its support over breaches of the national compact by government departments and agencies.

  Breaches could include a government agency unreasonably delaying a funding decision, a department threatening to withdraw grants because an organisation is campaigning against its policies, or failure to consult an organisation on policy changes that would affect it.

  The programme will negotiate with the Government on behalf of voluntary organisations and, with the support of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations and its partners in the voluntary sector, take their complaints to the highest level.

  The compact, signed in November 1998, is a written understanding between the Government and the voluntary sector, setting out a framework for their relationship.