Year of €˜strong growth' for sector, says Charity Trends

Howard Lake | 16 July 2007 | News

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• Giving/Philanthropy

The year 2005/06 was one of ‘very strong growth’ for the UK’s Top 500 charities, according to CAF’s analysis Charity Trends 2007.

Total income to the UK’s top 500 fundriasing charities has grown in real terms by 8.6% to £10.9bn – triple the rate of both GCP (2.8%) and the Consumer Price Index (2.5%). Expenditure grew by 8%. This is despite the sector employing 1.8% fewer staff and spending 1.9% less on salaries than in 2004/05.

Half of the income of the Top 500 was from voluntary sources, with legacies up 3.2% and other voluntary income by 5.4%

The top two charities remain Cancer Research UK and Oxfam, with all of last year’s top 10 still in the top 15 this year. The Top 100 absorb two-thirds of the total income of all charities in the Top 500 as they did in 2004/05. Because the income data has been aligned with the Charity Commission’s SORP 2005 some comparability of data between this year and last year is not possible.

New analysis shows differences between the income of the Top 500 and charities outside this list and reveals that smaller charities (with voluntary incomes below £2m) are almost a third more reliant on voluntary income.

International charities still top the list with £888m of voluntary donations, followed by arts and culture, cancer, religious, religious missionary and children.

The breakdown of spending for the top 500 shows 81% is direct charitable expenditure, with 9% on fundriasing and publicity, 7% on trading and just 1% on both governance and events. The report says that 63% of direct charitable expenditure is on service level agreements.

Charity Trends also looks at corporate giving, but although there was growth here, the actual number of companies giving 1% or more of their pre-tax profit to charity fell from 57 to 47. The banking sector still dominates the list of corporate givers, with half of the top 10 donors being banking institutions.

For individual tax-efficient giving, payrolll giving remained static, but Gift Aid added £750m to the pot – a real terms increase on the previous year of 16.9%.

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.