What does central government think it spends on the voluntary sector?

The Government does not commission the work which I used to carry out for what was the Home Office Voluntary and Community Unit, and later the Office of the Third Sector at the Cabinet Office, and, as far as I know, has no intention of doing so in future.  The last report covering the years 2006-07 and 2007-08 was produced but not published.  This is a disappointment, because it ends a series of figures which have been collected on more or less the same terms for nearly twenty-five years.  By contrast, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have continued to collect data on similar terms.  The value of their exercises to the voluntary sector, and the openness which they promote, are indisputable, in my opinion)

As David points out, the exercise which I used to carry out suffered from a number of weaknesses (though I am not certain what he means by “partial”).  The most obvious were its lack of status and authority at the centre of the UK Government machine.  Given the scale of the task, the work was also under-funded, so that one researcher was obliged to handle data on more than £4 billion expenditure across the entire UK.  As a testament to its validity, in 2007, I collated my various estimates and figures for statutory expenditure, and produced a figure which was comparable with the Almanac estimate for statutory income, for 2003-04 (£10 bn). 

David has carried out a valuable exercise in collating the figures on spending on the voluntary sector from departmental plans.  One of the things which it does is to expose the weakness of current Government practice.  David notes variation in the standard of information.  There are figures for grants for only nine departments and contractual spending for eleven, six provided one figure, grants or contracts, but not the other.  Two of the most well-known users of the voluntary sector appeared to offer no information (Department of Health and Department of Culture, Media and Sport).  Of the seventeen departments altogether; the position on their agencies and NDPB’s is not clear (agencies and NDPB’s together spend probably more than half the total of Government spending on the sector).  The seventeen are England, GB or UK departments, and do not include the Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland devolved governments. 

There does not appear to be any precise relationship between the departments’ published lists of payments to outside bodies and the figures in departmental plans collated by David, and there is no way of knowing how they have produced the figures in the plans..  Experience shows that many civil servants do not know what is and is not “voluntary” or “third” sector.  In 2009, I double-checked an exercise carried out by DEFRA, which had identified several hundred external providers believed to be voluntary or potentially so.  They had identified what they thought was over £70 million expenditure, but this was reduced to about £23 million after I checked their figures and removed profit-makers, statutories and NDPB’s. 

 I have also carried out a brief examination of some of the departments’ published lists of outside spending for 2009-10, in order to see whether I could reconcile those with the figures quoted in the departmental plans and collated by David.  I couldn’t. 

For England, we now have what is possibly the worst of both worlds: a claim that departments are being open, but which produces an odd collection of unverified information, and which cuts across what I used to do for the Government.  As noted above, that exercise suffered from weaknesses, but it did have a degree of unity and consistency, which I think we have lost.