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Charity Commission unveils new sector data web pages

Finance | Jonathan Last | 1 May 2012

The Charity Commission has added new summary pages to its website that reveal data about the voluntary sector as a whole.

The sector regulator said it has developed the 'sector overview' pages in order to make statistics more "transparent to the public”.

Figures from the pages reveal that the sector’s assets are worth around £166.7bn – a combination of the individual totals for own-use assets, long-term investments, short-term investments and cash, and other assets. Total spending was £54.13bn (again, broken up into sub-categories), and there are over 940,000 trustees and nearly 2.9 million volunteers.

The page gives a graphical overview of the sector and breaks organisations down in terms of their income size. Charities with an income of more than £500,000 are split up according to their income source.

The charity with the highest total income was the British Council, with £692.96m. Data also divulges that nearly half of the larger charities (with income of £500,000 plus), get nearly half of their income from payment for charitable activities, twice as much that the figure for voluntary income.

The new pages also give users the opportunity to see the top ten charities from a range of criteria, including income, charitable spending, number of volunteers or employees, and those with documents overdue (such as annual accounts).

Sam Younger, chief executive of the Charity Commission, said: “It is right and proper that the public are able to scrutinise how their money is being spent. The web pages allow the public to search the information we hold in more creative ways, seeing which charities are growing the fastest, and which have the most volunteers or most charitable spend. And where figures raise questions for the public, charities should be ready to answer them."

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