The impact of COVID-19 on the formation and dissolution of charitable organisations

Abstract

COVID-19 represents an existential threat to many charitable organisations, while simultaneously spurring new, large-scale forms of voluntary activity. Using comprehensive publicly available data from UK regulators, this chapter examines the impact the COVID-19 pandemic had on the registration of new charities and the deregistration of existing organisations. The pandemic is a once-in-a-century event and thus posited to alter the expected or ‘normal’ levels of registrations and deregistrations. Data for this study come from the publicly available charity registers of seven regulatory agencies. The charity registers were collected using a Python web-scraping script that has been running on the 28th of each month since August 2020. The analysis compares the numbers of foundations and dissolutions in 2020 to what we would expect based on the trends from previous years, and examines variation in these trends by key organisational and geographic factors. As well as the level of applications for foundation and dissolution by charities, this chapter considers implications for the capacity of the charity regulators to process these applications.