# Year of ‘strong growth’ for sector, says Charity Trends

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2007/07/16/year-e%cb%9cstrong-growth039-sector-says-charity-trends/
- Published: 2007-07-16T23:00:00+01:00
- Author: Howard Lake

**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%

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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 £750 million to the pot – a real terms increase on the previous year of 16.9%.

 * **[Charity Trends lists UK’s most popular charities](https://fundraising.co.uk/2003/06/18/charity-trends-lists-uk039s-most-popular-charities/)(
   18 June 2003)**
 * **[New Charity Trends uncovered by Charities Aid Foundation](https://fundraising.co.uk/2003/06/26/new-charity-trends-uncovered-caf/)(
   26 June 2003)**