Home Legal Review procedures Metrics Third Sector and Civil Society Organisations in the UK, 1869-2025

Citation

Rutherford A, Mohan J, McDonnell D, Rahal C, Clifford D, Couper Kenney F, Duggan A & McNicol S (2025) Home Legal Review procedures Metrics Third Sector and Civil Society Organisations in the UK, 1869-2025.

Abstract
This dataset brings together information on all organisations registered with at least one charitable or non-profit regulator in the United Kingdom. It was developed by combining and deduplicating records from ten separate registers, covering organisations across all four nations of the UK. The Third Sector and Civil Society (TSCS) in the UK are overseen by a range of regulatory bodies, including three national charity regulators and several additional registers for non-profit entities. Companies House, the UK’s official register of companies, also includes non-profit types such as companies limited by guarantee and community interest companies. Because these registers operate independently and often overlap—many organisations appear in more than one—the available data is fragmented. This fragmentation makes it difficult to form a clear picture of civil society and its role within the UK. By integrating these diverse sources and linking records where evidence suggests they refer to the same organisation, we produce a unified “spine” of TSCS organisations. This consolidated list enables consistent mapping, analysis, and monitoring of the sector as a whole. The spine can also be linked to other datasets—such as government procurement records—to examine patterns in public spending, or to demographic data to explore the geographic and social distribution of civil society activity across the UK.