Summary information
Study title
Assessing Financial Vulnerability and Risk in the UK’s Charities During and Beyond the Covid Crisis, 2020-2022
Creator
Mohan, J, University of Birmingham
Rutherford, A, University of Stirling
Clifford, D, University of Southampton
Study number / PID
855941 (UKDA)
10.5255/UKDA-SN-855941 (DOI)
Data access
Open
Series
Not available
Abstract
We advise that users familiarise themselves with the reporting requirements of the regulators on whose data we have drawn for this work. Some variables are easily understood (headline income and expenditure figures, or dates of registration and dissolution); others less so (e.g. familiarity with definitions of the components of income which charities are required to report would be desirable for work on the exposure of charities to specific income sources).
We carried out work on various aspects of the financial vulnerability of charities and charitable companies, as follows:
1. patterns of registration and dissolution, as measured by the dates on which these events are recorded by the regulators.
2. the extent to which organisations held reserves prior to the onset of Covid-19. We used measures of "unrestricted reserves" which are usually provided only for larger organisations and expressed these as a proportion of the organisation's annual expenditures;
3. financial vulnerability, expressed in various ways - substantial (over 25%) fluctuations in incomes, or fluctuations in the excess of expenditure over income;
4. exposure of organisations to particular income streams.
We define these in "VariableDescriptions_covid19_project.doc", attached to this deposit.
Note that for time series analyses, the Charity Commission website data on the incomes and expenditures of charities only contains data for relatively recent time periods; a longer time series providing charity financials from the late 1990s to 2012 is available in the Third Sector Research Centre data collection at https://reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk/850933/ and we recommend this is linked to the current data from the Charity Commission. Financial histories are not available for as long a time period for Scottish charities since the regulator was not established until 2006.
Other data of relevance to work on this project would be a publicly-available classification of charities at...
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Keywords
Methodology
Data collection period
01/07/2020 - 14/03/2022
Country
United Kingdom
Time dimension
Not availableAnalysis unit
Organization
Time unit
Universe
Not availableSampling procedure
Not availableKind of data
Numeric
Text
Geospatial
Data collection mode
Data were downloaded regularly from the following sources. (1) The Charity Commission: the majority of charities which operate within England and Wales are legally obliged to register with the Charity Commission, whose data are now available publicly. The Charity Commission provided a comprehensive data extract which is updated regularly. Dissolutions and registrations of organisations are updated daily. Financial information is updated as and when returns are submitted by charities; there is a timelag because charities have a grace period within which to report their financial results and because there are then internal checks, which can take longer. This means that more detailed returns on which we have relied for analyses tend to take longer to appear in the publicly-downloadable files. (2) The Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator: all organisations wishing to operate as charities in Scotland must be registered with the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator. There are differences in the characteristics of registered charities between Scotland and England / Wales, because the Scottish regulator has no income threshold above which reporting is mandatory (in England and Wales only organisations with incomes or expenditures greater than £5000 are required to do so) and because in England and Wales there are various categories of charity which do not report to the Charity Commission (because they have a different principal regulator – e.g. universities). (3) Companies House: the majority of the organisations registered with, and/or regulated by, Companies House are for-profit organisations but some are of interest to third sector researchers, such as Community Interest Companies and Companies Limited by Guarantee though the precise allocation of these to the third sector is a matter of judgement; Companies House offer, through their website, a complete list of active registered companies as a free download, updated monthly. In our work we have focussed on Companies Limited by Guarantee.
Funding information
Grant number
ES/V004859/1
Access
Publisher
UK Data Service
Publication year
2022
Terms of data access
The Data Collection is available from an external repository. Access is available via Related Resources.
Related publications
Not available