Mapping and Understanding the UK Civil Society Sector

Client: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)

This project, a continuation and extension of the ESRC-funded UK Third Sector Database, constructed the UK Data Spine — the first comprehensive register of the UK civil society sector. The Data Spine brings together records from ten regulatory bodies into a single deduplicated dataset of over 770,000 organisations, enabling analysis of the scale, composition, financial trajectories, and geographic distribution of civil society across all four UK nations.

Braw Data led the data engineering and analytical work: designing and building the pipelines that collect, clean, link, and deduplicate records from the Charity Commission for England and Wales, the Scottish Charity Regulator, the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland, the CIC Regulator, Companies House, the FCA Mutuals Register, and other regulatory sources. We developed classification systems for organisational type — disaggregating the broad "other nonprofit company" category into ten meaningful subtypes including property management companies, education institutions, sports clubs, and religious organisations — and produced longitudinal financial datasets tracking charity incomes adjusted for inflation across ICNPTSO sectors.

The project demonstrated that approximately 377,500 civil society organisations are currently active in the UK, with substantial geographic variation in density across local authorities. A third of active charities are micro-organisations with income below £10,000. Real income growth for many charity sectors has been modest or negative since 2008. The Data Spine also links to public procurement data, showing that UK Government is the largest source of procurement spend to civil society.

The Data Spine and its underlying code are published as open data and open source, and the methodology is being used to inform DCMS's approach to civil society data infrastructure.

Methods: Large-scale data linkage and deduplication, data pipeline engineering, organisational classification (SIC codes and NLP), longitudinal financial analysis, geographic analysis, open data publication

Output: UK Third Sector Database