The True Cost of Delivering Public Services

This survey was carried out by NCVO between 1 August and 8 September 2023. The survey was conducted online using Microsoft Forms.

We invited organisations to take part via email and social media. Many voluntary sector infrastructure bodies also promoted the survey to their members via email and social media.

You can find more information on the breakdown of survey respondents below. For a more detailed breakdown, you can download the full survey data.

Survey respondents were moderately representative of the voluntary sector as a whole. We received a good spread of organisations across Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, as well as across English regions.

Wales, the north-west, the north-east, Yorkshire, the east Midlands, and the south-east were overrepresented, while Scotland was underrepresented.

The majority of organisations who responded to the survey were medium-sized (54%), with incomes between £100,000 and £1m per year.

Around one third of respondents (33%) were organisations with incomes over £1m per year. Just over one in ten (12%) were organisations with incomes below £100,000 per year

Survey respondents were not representative of the overall voluntary sector in terms of size. We expected this, as the majority of the voluntary sector consists of small and micro organisations with incomes below £100,000 per year. See our UK Civil Society Almanac for a full breakdown of organisations by size.

In 2020/21, micro and small organisations received less than 2% of the sector’s income from government. These organisations are more likely to be run partly or entirely by volunteers. They’re also less likely to have the capacity to bid for, deliver, and report on government grants and contracts. And they’re less likely to have capacity to respond to our survey.

A disproportionately high number of large, major, and super-major organisations with annual incomes over £1m responded to the survey. In 2020/21, these organisations received 86% of the sector’s income from government. These organisations are therefore much more likely to be delivering public services. They may also have more capacity to respond to our survey.

We asked respondents to self-report the types of services they deliver. Organisations could tick as many boxes as they felt were relevant. They also had the option to tick ‘other’ and self-declare the services they deliver.

We use a modified version of the International Classification of Non-profit Organisations (ICNPO) to describe the activities of voluntary organisations. You can find out more about this in the UK Civil Society Almanac.

Organisations are classified into 18 subsectors. Some of these categories are very broad. For example, social services include:

• youth services
• family services including domestic violence shelters
• services for disabled and elderly people and
• support groups.

Other categories are focused on one type of organisation. For example, parent-teacher associations.

This classification system is not perfect. The ICNPO classification groups organisations into a single category based on their primary activity. However many organisations provide multiple activities. For example, housing and advice.

In the full survey data download we’ve provided a table detailing the proportion of survey respondents delivering different types of ICNPO services compared to the overall voluntary sector. It should be noted this is not an exact like for like comparison.

However, this comparison does show that the types of public services charities tend to deliver are strongly represented in our survey data. Particularly those that fall into the ICNPO category of ‘social services’. We would expect this, given the survey’s focus on public services.

The survey was mostly quantitative. Some multiple-choice questions included an ‘other’ option where respondents could write in their answer. We identified key themes across these ‘other’ responses for each question. We then coded all ‘other’ responses to each of the questions using the themes for that question.

Respondents also had the option to tell us anything further about their experience of delivering public services in a free text box. The quotes throughout this report came from those open responses.

We received a total of 346 unique responses to the survey. There were a small number of duplicate responses. We contacted these organisations to verify which response they wanted us to use.

We were also able to identify a small number of respondents who weren’t delivering public services via grants and contracts based on the answers they gave. We removed these responses.

The remaining 331 responses were analysed using Power BI. This allowed us to create a dashboard and filter responses by different parameters.