Third Sector and Civil Society Organisations in the UK, 1869-2025

Rutherford, Alasdair and Mohan, John and McDonnell, Diarmuid and Rahal, Charles and Clifford, David and Couper Kenney, Fiona and Duggan, Alan and McNicol, Stacey (2025). Third Sector and Civil Society Organisations in the UK, 1869-2025. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-858000

The voluntary sector is widely acknowledged as containing very large numbers of organisations that make an enormous contribution to well-being and social cohesion in the UK. It encompasses charities, social enterprises, mutuals, cooperatives, and many less formal voluntary and community organisations. We know a great deal from survey data about patterns of individual giving to charities, and about patterns of volunteering. But there is a substantial gap in the availability of high-quality data about voluntary organisations. And it is argued that better-quality information and evidence would lead to the contribution of those organisations being properly recognised, leading in turn to higher levels of public and voluntary support for them.

This project responds to this need by creating the first national database on the population of organisations forming the third sector 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). A variety of relevant registers are maintained by different regulators and public bodies across the four nations of the UK. Each register holds partial and sometimes overlapping information about civil society organisations. This project combines them into a single, deduplicated dataset, linking records that refer to the same organisation.

The project will open up new avenues for research on, for example, the survival and growth of third sector organisations; the contribution of the third sector to public service delivery; the level of voluntary sector activity in different parts of the country. In this way, we will make the contribution of the sector much more visible to stakeholders.

In strategic terms this work provides an important demonstration of the uses of administrative data for research on organisations - a field in which most work to date has focussed on administrative data on individuals. The dataset can be linked to publicly available information on government and NHS spending, allowing users to identify which organisations receive public funding. It can be used to support further analysis of the size, scope, and distribution of third sector organisations across the UK This will be of value to funders (such as charitable foundations), central and local government, local and regional councils for voluntary service, which sustain these organisations locally, and commissioners of public services such as the NHS, which rely substantially on the voluntary sector to deliver services.

Data description (abstract)

This dataset brings together information on all organisations registered with at least one charitable or non-profit regulator in the United Kingdom. It was developed by combining and deduplicating records from ten separate registers, covering organisations across all four nations of the UK. The Third Sector and Civil Society (TSCS) in the UK are overseen by a range of regulatory bodies, including three national charity regulators and several additional registers for non-profit entities. Companies House, the UK’s official register of companies, also includes non-profit types such as companies limited by guarantee and community interest companies.

Because these registers operate independently and often overlap—many organisations appear in more than one—the available data is fragmented. This fragmentation makes it difficult to form a clear picture of civil society and its role within the UK. By integrating these diverse sources and linking records where evidence suggests they refer to the same organisation, we produce a unified “spine” of TSCS organisations. This consolidated list enables consistent mapping, analysis, and monitoring of the sector as a whole. The spine can also be linked to other datasets—such as government procurement records—to examine patterns in public spending, or to demographic data to explore the geographic and social distribution of civil society activity across the UK.

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