Only three charities made the grade for Stonewall’s top-100 list of gay-friendly employers this year, and last year’s top-ranking charity Nacro has disappeared from the list altogether.

Last year five charities appeared in the top-100 index of employers for lesbian, gay and bisexual people – Nacro, Citizens Advice, St Mungo’s, Victim Support and Barnardo’s.  This year, St Mungo’s was the top-ranking charity at 24th-equal, while Citizens Advice came in 68th and Victim Support was number 72.  

Crime-reduction charity Nacro, last year’s highest-scoring charity at number 33, and Barnardo’s, have both slipped out of the list altogether. 

Nacro was the top-ranking charity in the annual list for five years up until 2010 - ever since it launched, in fact - and in 2008 was number one in the entire index of all employers.

Nacro could not respond by deadline to enquiries from civilsociety.co.uk about its omission from this year’s list.

James Lawrence, a spokesman for Stonewall, told civilsociety.co.uk that as a sector, charities performed worse this year than last, but he added that competition was fiercer this year.

“Particularly interesting” new additions to the list this year included MI5 and the Serious Organised Crime Agency, Lawrence said, “both employers that would find it more difficult than most to identify and support gay staff”.

More organisations entered the contest this year too – 376, up from 363 in 2012 – and the entry point for admission to the top-100 index was seven points higher.

Thus, charities will have to work harder to maintain a presence in the list, Lawrence said. “It’s harder to get a place in the top 100,” he said, “which is good to see, especially as you might expect the tough economic climate to make it harder for employers to focus on diversity.”