Mapping the non-profit sector in the United Kingdom: lessons from large-scale data linkage of registry data

• In Event: Mapping the third sector

Abstract

The combination of the effects of the Covid pandemic, a decade of fiscal austerity, and a cost-of-living crisis in the UK has provoked a revival of interest in efforts to map the scope of the nonprofit sector and to do so across the four nations of the UK, the better to understand its potential contribution to social renewal.

The voluntary sector encompasses very large numbers of entities taking a range of organisational forms. However, we lack a comprehensive mapping of these entities and this paper describes the construction of a single data resource that covers the totality of the formalised voluntary sector. Despite scepticism about the utility of such mapping exercises, we argue that important claims about the contribution of the third sector require firm empirical foundations.

We know a great deal about the pattern of UK registered charities (entities which are broadly comparable with internationally-used notions of charit, e.g. the USA's ‘public charities’ ). However, far less is known about the numbers, types and resources of other registered third sector organisations.

We respond by creating the first national database on the population of third sector organisations through bringing together information about charities with information about different kinds of noncharitable civil society organisations (including Community Interest Companies, Co-operatives and Mutuals, and non-profit Companies Limited by Guarantee).
Drawing on records for over 25 years we link together and and deduplicate an organisational database containing some 700 000 discrete entities.

The ultimate goal is to link the deduplicated database to government datasets containing information on employment and turnover of entities above a certain size, and also a regional breakdown of the organisational structure – e.g. whether organisations operate through branches across more than one region. Thus we will obtain data on the income, staffing and geography of third sector organisations where this has been previously lacking.

We exemplify the value of the project, using the organisational database, to support analyses of:

a. trends in the distribution, formation and dissolution of different components of the organisational base (e.g. comparing the fortunes of social enterprises taking the legal form of a community interest company with the patterns for registered charities, thereby contributing to questions about the resilience of different organisational forms);
b. Spatial and sectoral distributions of different types of organisation – are these complementary or not? Do areas lacking in a strong charitable presence have greater representation of social enterprises, mutuals or cooperatives?
c. The scale of the wider nonprofit sector measured in terms of employment and turnover – something that has previously eluded UK scholarship.

The value and wider relevance of the paper lies in its focus on subsets of the voluntary sector that, in the UK at least, are often hidden from view; its ability to explore questions about the relationships between these subsets of the organisational base of the sector; and its demonstration of the analytical benefits of, linking together substantial volumes of administrative data gathered by regulators as a substantial and renewable research resource.

References

Enjolras, B, Salamon, L et al The third sector in Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Kruger, D. (2020) Levelling up our communities: proposals for a new social covenant. Report for government by Danny Kruger MP, available at https://www.dannykruger.org.uk/sites/www.dannykruger.org.uk/files/2020-09/Kruger%202.0%20Levelling%20Up%20Our%20Communities.pdf

Law Family Commission (2023) Unleashing the power of civil society: report of the Law Family Commission. London: Pro Bono Economics, available at https://civilsocietycommission.org/

Nickel, P and Eikenberry A (2016) Knowing and Governing: The Mapping of the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector as Statecraft Voluntas, 27, 392–408

Rees, J et al (2022) Covid and the voluntary and community sector in the UK. Bristol: Policy Press.

Salamon, L. M. (2010). Putting the civil society sector on the economic map of the world. Annals of Public and Comparative Economics, 81, 167–210.

Authors

• Alasdair C Rutherford, University of Stirling

• John Mohan, University of Birmingham

• Diarmuid McDonnell, Braw Data Ltd

• David Clifford, University of Southampton

• Charles Rahal, University of Oxford