Yesterday the #furlough scheme was in the news, which both trade unions & @CBItweets calling for extension to the scheme once it ends at the end of April.

Here’s a short thread of how we *think* charities might be using the scheme

We’re just starting to get some data on how charities (& businesses) have been using the scheme.

The U.K. gov published the names of all companies, including charities, who used the furlough scheme in December: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/employers-who-have-claimed-through-the-coronavirus-job-retention-scheme

The excellent @kanedr has done some analysis.

It looks like approx 7000 charities & 1400 community interest groups used furlough in December.

Remember: the vol sector employs 900k people - twice as many as @Tesco. https://twitter.com/kanedr/status/1356218140754120708

Now, there are 166k voluntary organisations in England - see our @ncvo almanac: https://data.ncvo.org.uk/profile/ 

But, only c.6000k orgs have a turnover of £1m+. Only 30k have a turnover of more than £100,000.

There’s no easy way to see turnover vs staff numbers so...

Let’s *assume* that those with bigger turnover are more likely to have staff & have used the furlough scheme.

Taking the 30k figure (income of £100k+), thats potentially 28% of charities still using the Job Retention Scheme.

Caution: this is not fact. This is a hypothesis!

The main point here is that 7000 charities using the furlough scheme is a lot. Seriously, a lot.

This will be a combination of big charities with a network of retail shops, local arts venue closed, & one-person community cafes shut.

The diversity will be huge.

There is one problem. The almanac data is for England & furlough data, I think, is for the U.K.

There are approx 40k charities in Scotland, Wales & N.Ireland. So the % is probably lower.

We know from @3rdSectorRC that many orgs only have reserves that could support them for a matter of weeks.

In this research, 44% orgs had less than 2 months of reserves: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/tsrc/research/assessing-financial-vulnerability-and-risk-in-the-uks-charities-during-and-beyond-the-covid-19-crisis.aspx

There’s lots we don’t know & exploring this data is going be important.

One thing emerges: charities need furlough to survive as many are using it. We need the Chancellor is extend it and let us know ASAP.

We have others ask too: https://nmn.org.uk/information/2020/06/NMN-Charities-and-COVID-19-Briefing-1-Jun-2020.pdf

#NeverMoreNeeded