1.1. Our beliefs and assumptions about the third sector

Now that you have completed the quiz and reviewed your feedback, you might sit there all smug because you got all the answers right. Maybe you don’t need this course after all? More likely though, you will be sitting there a little bit confused, wondering how you knew so little, or how you had some basic assumption so wrong. That’s ok, most people will be in the same boat. The income figures alone are eyewatering. So let’s dig a little deeper into the beliefs and assumptions about the third sector.

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People often make the assumption that the voluntary sector only consists of volunteers. They are affronted about the fact that Chief Executives of charities might earn £50,000 or more, and they refuse to give money to ‘charity muggers’ (those unfortunate souls that stand out come rain or shine on the streets collecting money from passerby’s) because those people shouldn’t be getting paid when they’re wanting other people’s money for their charity. 

The voluntary and community sector (in other words, the third sector) contributes significantly to the economy. 

The numbers of organisations and people in the sector are naturally fluctuating every year, and depend for instance on external forces such as the pandemic, and the financial crisis in 2007. This is obviously the case for any other sector too. However, the UK third sector has been growing steadily in the past decade. As of 2018/19, there were just over 163,000 voluntary organisations in the UK. Nearly 21,000 of these organisations were in Scotland (the current figure for Scotland is over 25,000). 

80% of voluntary organisations are relatively small, with an annual income of less than £100,000, and only a handful of staff. While dominating the sector, they make a tiny proportion of the money going around in the sector, with an income of only 4% and spending only 5% of the overall in the sector. These small organisations typically operate very locally. There are less than 800 organisations in the UK that are responsible for over 80% of the sector’s income and spending, bringing in more than £1 million, a few even bring in more than £100 million a year. These are national and international organisations. Overall, the sector contributed £20billion (0.9% of total GDP) to the economy in 2020. It had a total annual income of £56billion and it spent £46 billion on charitable objectives (NCVO Almanac 2021).

Most people would probably be surprised to find out how wide a reach the charity sector has, and how many services are actually provided by charities. If you are a student at a Scottish or UK University, you are actively engaging with a charity. If you are or have ever engaged with the Scouts, it’s a charity. If you go to church – charity. Have you frequented the Glasgow Science Centre? Ever watched a film in the Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT)? Ever used the sports, culture or arts facilities provided by Glasgow Life? Some are just so obscure that you would never come to think that they are charities. You can however check the bottom of UK organisation websites to see if they are a registered charity. 

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        Source: Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations

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Volunteering for and working in the charity sector is hard work. And when it comes to paid employment, it should be appropriately remunerated. Even if you work in a charity. Your employment is not charity and wishing to work in the charity sector does not mean that you should want to do so out of charitable reasons and should not expect to be paid. This is a flawed notion. It may partly stem from the assumption that the charity sector consists of only volunteers, or the opinion that it should consist only of volunteers. 

The third sector consists of paid staff, formal and informal volunteers. 

In the UK there are just over 29,1 million people in employment. Of those, over 950,000 people work in the voluntary sector (September 2020 figures), 80,000 of these are in the Scottish charity sector. The sector is now 20% larger than it was a decade earlier. Although it is a much smaller sector than the public or private sectors at just 3% of the UK’s workforce, the voluntary sector has seen by far the fastest growth (Martin, 2021).
In 2020/21, there were 16.3m formal volunteers in UK voluntary organisations. Pre-pandemic this figure was as high as 20.1m. Much of the volunteer base is older people, and these were obviously disproportionately affected during the pandemic, e.g. having to shield, so the drop in volunteer numbers makes sense. However, simultaneously, there was a substantial increase in informal volunteering – this is basically people volunteering their time informally to help others (not relatives or friends), by providing some service to them.

Let’s look at the picture a bit more broadly still. According to Salamon & Sokolowski (2018), contrary to common assumptions about the sector, the European third sector is an enormous economic force, far larger in scale than most major industries when it comes to its workforce. The most recent data on the 28 EU countries and Norway is from 2014, but it showed that the European third sector engaged 29.1 million full-time paid and volunteer workers. Therefore, the sector accounted for more than 13% of the European workforce, meaning that it had the third largest workforce of any industry in Europe.

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Source: Salamon & Sokolowski, 2018

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Now that we know the relevant figures about the sector, watch the video by activist and fundraiser Dan Pallotta, where he calls out the double standard that drives our broken relationship to charities. This should further reinforce some of the issues we have explored thus far.

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