Forty-one per cent of charity leaders expect the situation to improve for their organisation in the next 12 months, compared to 25 per cent who expect it to worsen, according to data collected by NCVO.

And 49 per cent of all charity leaders expect to increase spending in the next 12 months, compared to 19 per cent which expect to decrease spending.

The quarterly Charity Forecast polls charity leaders who are members of NCVO and usually has around 850 respondents. Karl Wilding, director of public policy at NCVO, said it had now started to show a trend of increasing confidence in the charity sector.

This is the fourth consecutive time the poll has shown a net expectation in the sector that conditions will improve, after 18 consecutive quarters between August 2008 and March 2013 when organisations predicted their situation would worsen.

Wilding said the forecast was established in order to provide accurate information about the state of the sector in advance of the UK Civil Society Almanac, which his organisation produces along with academics from the Third Sector Research Centre.

He said that “the longer-term series of polls is now demonstrating some consistent enough trends” but that at the moment it was too early to tell whether the forecast really provided accurate data.

“I feel confident enough to ask if we are seeing a change in mood,” he said. “Are some organisations starting to prepare for an upturn?”

He said that the most pessimistic charities were a “squeezed middle” with between £100,000 and £1m in income.

"This makes intuitive sense to me," he said. "An organisation big enough to be running some significant services but not big enough to spread risk and income around its operations is more vulnerable, and may have less room to manoeuvre when making plans for the future.

"Organisations of this scale are likely to be particularly exposed to the decisions of a small number of commissioners."