London Advice Providers Funding

We were pleased to work with London Funders on a report analysing funding for London advice providers.

Published in November 2024, the report began to map advice funding in London, and shows the kinds of analysis that can be done with data published using the 360Giving Data Standard.

Combined with analysis about advice providers themselves, we’ve covered the size and scope of the sector, income sources, and lots more information about funders and funding—including the relationship between funder collaborations. This was also combined with London Funders’ qualitative research to better understand the picture.

London Funders sought to understand the funding provided to welfare advice organisations in London as part of a wider report on this sector to inform an advice funding strategy. As a starting point for this, 360Giving was commissioned to provide data on advice organisations and their past funding. Analysis was based on data available at the end of March 2024 and analysis was largely completed in April 2024.

Key data findings outlined in this analysis include:

• 334 organisations were identified as providing advice services in London – either as dedicated organisations or part of a wider menu of support. The vast majority were registered as charities and three were Community Interest Companies. This is likely to be an underestimate of all advice service delivery.
• 58% operate in a single borough or multiple boroughs, 25% London-wide and the remaining are multi-regional or national
• Organisations included Citizens’ Advice (27 organisations), Law Centres (25), community-based advice centres (67), organisations working with community-specific groups of identity or experience (184), Student Unions (21) and Major Charities providing a range of services with advice a smaller part (13).
• Excluding Major Charities and Student Unions, there were 300 advice organisations with a total turnover of £280m in 2022-23. The majority of these organisations (221 organisations/74%) would be classed as small organisations with a turnover of under £1m.
• Around 40% of income in the cohort is reported to have come from government sources. Excluding the Major charities and Student Unions, this is 39% of income in 2022-23, representing £42.7m in grants and £66.9m in contracts. This is likely to be an under-representation as not all charities are required to report on this information. This rate is higher for Citizens’ Advice organisations where over 61% of income is from Government sources.
• The largest funders of advice work in London are The National Lottery Community Fund, City Bridge Foundation, Trust for London and The Henry Smith Charity.
• The 20 largest funders of this work in the available data are responsible for at least 77% of the amount of known grant funding received by advice charities (excluding the Major Charity and Student Union Segments), and 63% of the number of grants received by the cohort.
• There are a number of charities receiving a high number of small or short-term grants. This may be impacting administration and efficiency. Even excluding the Major Charities, there are 25 organisations that received 20 or more grants between 2020 and 2023, and not many are large or national charities.  
• Short-term grants (one year or less) were not just prevalent in 2020-21 in response to the pandemic, but continued in subsequent years. Only 26% of published grants awarded in 2022-23 were recorded as being for over a year.
• There were challenges in identifying the organisations to be included in the research and we may be missing organisations who are not members of recognised bodies. It is difficult to disaggregate the delivery and funding for advice work, and this analysis looks at the organisations as a whole. While it is important to look at the sustainability of the organisations, this may be masking the needs in relation to advice work specifically. We are also unable to disaggregate by type of advice provided to align to potential changes in demand for different types of support or services.
• There are gaps/limitations in the data on grantmaking impacting our understanding of the overall picture including
  • Significant funders of this work who do not share their data, including most Local Authorities in London
  • Some funders were late in publishing the data for 2022-23 so it was not available for analysis, including central government departments, London Community Foundation and Comic Relief
  • Only a small proportion of funders include the duration of the grants in the structured grants data to support the interpretation of the amounts and patterns of funding.

The data does not provide easy answers, but we hope the analysis in this report and the research from London Funders stimulate discussions and consideration of the collective picture to support further research and planning. There is a need to improve the availability and quality of data to support future strategy and insights, particularly from Local Authorities.

Access the charity data used in the report.

Inspired by the report? Find out more about the support available to publish your grant data or explore the data yourself in our search engine for grants, GrantNav.