The Charity Commission has issued a stark warning to a Derbyshire charity – the National Hereditary Breast Cancer Helpline – after information technology emerged that the organisation spent but 3 per cent (around £27,000) of its full expenditure on charitable activities in 2014-xv. Over £800,000 – went on "fundraising and other expenses".

The Commission said the organisation'due south trustees had "committed a alienation of trust". Merely how mutual is this kind of practice? Is your coin going where it should?

FactCheck investigates.

How much do charities spend on their charitable activities?

As of Dec 2016, there were 167,000 registered charities in England and Wales, with a collective almanac income of over £lxx billion.

Data from the U.k. Civil Society Almanac shows that in 2014-15, charities spent around £42 billion of their income.

Using that information, we've calculated that between lx and seventy per cent of charities' annual spending goes on "charitable activities" – i.e. providing the services or fulfilling the duties that the charity exists to provide.

Assistants (oftentimes chalked up as "governance") equally well as spending on fundraising are the next largest costs. And these are at least in part designed to generate future income for the system.

Clemency spending: size does thing

Just that figure only gives us part of the picture. When we intermission it downward by charity size, nosotros tin can run across that the very smallest and the very largest charities spend much less on their charitable objectives as a proportion of their full expenditure.


"Small and micro" charities – i.due east. those with an annual income of nether £100,000 – dedicated but sixty per cent of their spending to charitable activities in 2014-15.

At the other end of the spectrum, and then-called "super-major" organisations – i.e. those with an annual income of £100 million or more – spent a similar proportion on charitable activities, at just nether 64 per cent.

That said, the largest charities actually saw their incomes become upwardly in recent years, while the smallest players have got even smaller. And so information technology'due south harder to explain why super-major organisation take been spending relatively little on their charitable activities.

Medium-sized operations performed best, with nearly three quarters of their money going towards charitable activities.

But with all of these statistics, it's worth remembering that this is an average position. Whatsoever one clemency may well spend much more or less on charitable activities. The Charity Commission website allows y'all to observe out more about the spending of an individual organisation.

What about staff salaries?

The average dominate of the United kingdom's summit 100 charities is paid £255,000 a twelvemonth, according to analysis by Third Sector. Fourteen of those charities paid their highest earners more than than £300,000.

But a report by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) found that of all registered charities, 91 per cent have no paid staff at all and are run by volunteers. The remaining 9% provide jobs for 800,000 people. Fewer than 1% of charities employ a member of staff earning £60,000 or more.