Surprising churn in the top UK foundations

This article is written by Caroline Fiennes, Giving Evidence 

How much churn is there amongst the largest UK grant-making foundations (by giving budget)? One might expect very little, because huge foundations don’t get created very often, and foundations don’t compete for resources. Giving Evidence looks at these data each year for our work on the Foundation Practice Rating, and we find that there is a surprisingly high amount of churn. These are the data for the last few years.

Clearly, Wellcome and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation are consistently top.

Sources and notes: These foundations were compiled for the Foundation Practice Rating. In each of FPR’s first three years (from 2020/21), we used the UK Association of Charitable Foundations’ most recent annual report about the largest ~300 UK grant-making foundations, called Giving Trends. It listed foundations with their giving budget, among other things. In 2020, it produced only an interim report, which is not included here. In 2024, production of Giving Trends ceased and UK Grantmaking launched as an alternative source. FPR uses that latter now.

Why is that churn there? We haven’t investigated so can’t say. Maybe it’s related to investment income – because success there might enable larger giving budgets. Maybe it’s related to other income, e.g., BBC Children in Need and Comic Relief, which were both in the top 5 in 2019, raise their grant budgets from the public, which one might expect to rise and fall. CH Foundation grew very significantly between financial year 2022 and 2024: increasing expenditure nearly sevenfold.