Big data, open data and the funding base of the
UK’s third sector
John Mohan
TSRC, University of Birmingham
[email protected]
www.tsrc.ac.uk
www.johnfmohan.com
Thanks to my collaborators on the project: David Kane and Maria Pikoula (NCVO)
and Charlie Rahal (Birmingham)
Why? Advantages of these sources
• Greater detail – better handle on financial flows,
especially for small organisations
• Assessing overlapping of funding
• Targetting of funding
• Substantive questions about
– identity of sector (how voluntary / dependent on public funding is
it?)
– Balance between public and voluntary provision
SOURCES
Grants: 360 Degree Giving
• See http://www.threesixtygiving.org/
• Persuading funders to make available on recipients of
awards
• Ad hoc, voluntary initiative – progress is slow
UK government Transparency Code
• Public disclosure of information on procurement by public
sector agencies: local authorities and NHS commissioning
groups
BIG? OPEN? DATA?
Big?
• Grants – BLF – 119 000 awards, 2004• 31 other funders, 170 000 awards
• Procurement – 26 Mn transactions
Open?
• Mandatory data not present – conformity with code
• Formats not easy to work with
Data?
• Quality – referencing and linkage to other sources
• Classification of applicants
Local authority procurement data
•
Key features of LA procurement (payments>£250/£500) dataset:
o Contains data from of 303 out of 326 potential districts – 4 LAs had no data, 19 not
machine readable.
o 10,919 input files, with a total of 39,249,943 transactions parsed.
o 2,580,744 had redacted information, 13,108,029 were missing at least one piece of
key information (supplier, date, amount).
o Final dataset has 23,561,170 payments, with 623,765 unique suppliers.
o Suppliers need to be linked to organisational databases (180 000 registered
charities; c. 100 000 other TSOs) – this is the main technical challenge
Grants data
•
32 funders (including 10 lottery funders)
•
291,000 grants worth £22.8 billion (265,000 and £16.7 billion of which are lottery
funds), 1995-2014
•
Mean grant size is £76,000 and the median £8,300.
•
Possibilities:
–
overlap between funders
–
Significance of funding to individual organisations
–
Funding “histories”
–
Distribution of awards
DATA SOURCES
Example: Big Lottery Fund’s grants data
•
•
•
•
119 000 awards, 2004Most of these are through open schemes
E.g. Awards for All – max £10 000
No particular restrictions or targetting and any
organisation can apply for it
• 83000 unique organisations
• 48000 are charities – link through charity ID or other
name matching
Developments of funder data
Overlap / complementarity between funders
• Meaningful? Need eligibility data
• To whom is this useful?
Relationship to public programmes
• Austerity means that large funders like Big and
Community foundations are much more significant players
• Will we see awards to public agencies
Normative questions
• What should the pattern be? Applicant-driven therefore
don’t expect any particular outcome?
Other uses of data
Insights into:
• Organisational dynamics
• Numbers of grassroots groups
• Application process – particularly if application
data can be obtained
• Relative shares of private vs nonprofit
government contracts
Public procurement: NHS Commissioning data
• Disclosure threshold £25 000 – fewer
transactions!
• 330 000 transactions from 208 CCGs covering
£75BN
• C. 10 000 distinct suppliers
• Monitoring of change over time
Public procurement: NHS Commissioning data
Work in progress but “top 500” CCG transactions
shows:
• registered charities: only 16 charities, receiving £300Mn
out of £75Bn total; mainly hospice care
• Community Interest Companies (CICs) new social
enterprise form to spin services out of the NHS: 26 of
these, £1.35Bn
• Commercial provision: 53 providers, £1.8Bn, which were
for-profit (but some claim social enterprise credentials
while others are investor-owned)
Public procurement: uses of data
• These figures could be an underestimate – contracts to
NHS providers may hide payments to subcontractors
• But data can provide crucial evidence in analyses of:
– Shifting balance of public and private provision
– Success of public sector spinoffs: “largest social enterprise sector
in the world” according to David Cameron…
– What should normative share of third sector provision be?