Survey methodology
A survey of voluntary organisations working in criminal justice, including arts organisations and individual arts practitioners, was carried out between June and August 2023. This received 151 useable responses, of which, 146 were from organisations and five were from individual arts practitioners. This survey included both open and closed questions, allowing organisations to explain the responses they gave. The survey this year saw a significantly increased response rate on the previous year, up 51%, bringing it back to pre-pandemic levels.
Please note percentages in some of the graphs and tables included in the research may add up to more than 100%. This due to a combination of rounding and some questions where respondents could select more than one response.
Focus Groups and Interviews
NCVO conducted two focus groups with voluntary organisations working in the criminal justice system, of between four and five participants. One included organisations with an annual income of £500,000 or more, and the other organisations with an income of less than £500,000. In addition to income, participants were selected to ensure representation of:
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Organisations led by and focussed on racially minoritised people
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Specialist women’s organisations
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Family organisations
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Organisations delivering services outside of London and the South East
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Arts providers.
For the first time, our research also included three interviews with charitable organisations that fund voluntary organisations in the criminal justice sector. The qualitative discussions in both the interviews and focus groups explored the current state of criminal justice sector finances, including the impact of organisation’s ability to deliver services, support from external stakeholders, and future expectations of financial sustainability.
Anonymised quotes from these focus groups and interviews are included throughout the report and may be lightly edited for ease of reading.
Charity Commission Data Analysis
After introducing this analysis for the first time in our 2022 project, Clinks again commissioned analysis of the data charities submitted to the Charity Commission for the most recent financial year for which data is available.
The UK Charity Activity Tags (UK CAT) project has classified every UK registered charity based upon how organisations describe the activities they undertake. This includes a ‘crime and justice classification’, made up of five sub-categories: offender support and rehabilitation, prevention and safety, road safety, trafficking and modern slavery, and victim support. Using this classification as a proxy for voluntary organisations working in criminal justice, we have been able to analyse the size of criminal justice voluntary organisations, their income sources, and workforce in comparison to the wider voluntary sector.
When discussing findings coming from this data analysis, we discuss ‘Criminal Justice Charities’ to mean all the charities with the ‘crime and justice’ classification on the register, and ‘All Charities’ to refer to every organisation on the Charity Commission register.
Limitations
Survey
As with all research, there are limitations. The survey sample is self-selecting, therefore not necessarily representative of the sector, and only includes a small part of the sector. In addition, when compared to the sector as a whole, the organisations who responded tended towards larger organisations. Comparing the size of organisations in the NCVO UK Civil Society Almanac with our sample, 62% of the ‘law and advocacy’ Almanac sub-sector have an income of £100,000 or less, compared to 15% of survey respondents.
Charity Commission Data Analysis
There are some limitations to this analysis. First, the Charity Commission does not require registration for charities with an income below £5,000 a year, which means some criminal justice voluntary organisations have not been captured.
Second, more detailed types of data are only available for charities over a certain size. For example, staffing numbers are only available for organisations with an income of over £500,000. When this applies to the data we are considering, we have made this clear.
Third, when making comparisons between ‘Criminal Justice Charities’ and ‘All Charities’, we are looking at criminal justice organisations on the Charity Commission register against every charity on the register. This differs from NCVO’s Almanac classification of ‘general charities’ which has been used for comparisons in the research conducted in 2019 and earlier. Hence, in this analysis, the ‘All Charities’ group will also include organisations like universities and non-departmental public bodies.
Finally, Clinks considers the criminal justice voluntary sector to include social enterprises in addition to charities. However, because the data source used for this analysis is the Charity Commission register, those social enterprises which are not also registered as charities will not be included. This means the analysis will be offering a best approximation, rather than a complete picture of voluntary organisations working in criminal justice.