What do public records show about funding linked to Barking?
A financial audit of 828 organisations associated with Barking and Dagenham (B&D), joining Charity Commission accounts to published GrantNav awards. It examines £92.2m of observed award value, almost all of it entering the population from funders outside it, alongside concentrated reported income and little observed circulation within.
Discipline
Financial Audit
Scale
URBAN - LOCAL
Year
2026
The register
Award records identify funders, recipients, values and dates. Some funders also publish beneficiary locations.
The register supplies reported income, expenditure, total funds and filing histories for the registered charities in scope.
One square per organisation
Each square represents one anonymised register row in the 828-organisation population.Structural core (805): organisations found through Charity Commission records to be registered in or operating in B&D.Activity-associated (3): organisations not formally located in B&D, but linked by explicit GrantNav evidence that their beneficiaries are in B&D.Contextual (20): organisations connected through the wider local partnership environment, but without enough direct evidence to enter the main analysis. Contextual associations remain visible for context but are excluded from locally embedded rankings.
Sources: Charity Commission register and accounts, GrantNav / 360Giving
What the registers can see
Evidence combinations — every organisation counted once
Charity Commission financial records cover 775 of the 828 organisations, including 725 across multiple years, while GrantNav matches cover 258.This difference reflects how the sources are produced: charities on the Commission register have statutory reporting requirements, whereas GrantNav coverage depends on funders publishing compatible award data and is less comprehensive.The combination bar separates the 254 organisations found in both sources, 521 with financial records only, 4 with grant records only and 49 with neither.A missing GrantNav match means only that no published award was observed, not that no funding exists. These records are not a complete account of funding, but they still reveal useful patterns in who funds whom and how money flows through the network.
Sources: Charity Commission register and accounts, GrantNav / 360Giving
Follow the money
Three directed flow classes
Full observed history
| Directed flow class | Full observed history | Principal 2021–2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Non-seed upstream → seed | £91.2m · 852 edges | £29.2m · 398 edges |
| Seed → seed | £263k · 17 edges | £120k · 4 edges |
| Seed → non-seed first hop | £775k · 177 edges | £316k · 52 edges |
Seed membership is network scope, not evidenced geography · Only seed → seed value is observed circulation within the seed
Across the full observed history, £91.2m of £92.2m in observed award value is non-seed upstream → seed. Observed circulation within the seed — seed → seed — is £263k, and £775k flows seed → non-seed first hop.
Sources: GrantNav / 360Giving
Who sends it
| Upstream funder — full observed GrantNav history | Value | Awards | Seed recipients |
|---|---|---|---|
| The National Lottery Community Fund | £35.2m | 530 | 181 |
| City Bridge Foundation | £7.9m | 87 | 36 |
| Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport | £5.8m | 125 | 69 |
| The National Lottery Heritage Fund | £4.5m | 39 | 26 |
| Greater London Authority | £3.7m | 64 | 34 |
| Department of Health and Social Care | £2.8m | 18 | 4 |
| Henry Smith Foundation | £2.6m | 32 | 14 |
| BBC Children in Need | £2.5m | 60 | 24 |
| Sport England | £2.4m | 91 | 41 |
| Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales | £1.6m | 53 | 27 |
| Other upstream funders (88) | £22.2m | 749 | — |
| Total | £91.2m | 1,848 | — |
The table names up to ten upstream funders that meet the publication threshold. All remaining funders are included in the Other row, so the values reconcile to the non-seed upstream → seed total.
Sources: GrantNav / 360Giving
Where local evidence exists
Full observed history
161 direct awards · 57 charities · 18 funders · Portfolio totals are not B&D-local spend
Across the full observed funding histories connected to the 808 seed organisations, 161 awards worth £9.03m explicitly identify beneficiaries in B&D. These awards reached 57 seed charities: 54 already connected to B&D through Charity Commission records and 3 included through the beneficiary evidence itself. The remaining observed grant records may involve B&D-associated organisations, but their published data do not explicitly establish where the benefit was delivered.
Sources: GrantNav / 360Giving
Concentration and persistence
Reported income concentration
Principal 2021–2024
Income concentration — Lorenz curve
2024 curve drawn
Top 10% share 85.4–87.6% · 636–674 reporting organisations / year
The Gini coefficient summarises how unevenly reported income is distributed, calculated as twice the area between the Lorenz curve and the line of equality; values nearer 1 indicate greater concentration.Among organisations with usable reported-income data, income is heavily skewed towards a small share. The 2024 curve shows this departure from equality, while similar annual Gini values indicate that the pattern persisted across 2021–2024. Reported income reflects organisational scale and throughput—not impact, reserves or resources available for local delivery. Some unevenness is compatible with charities operating at different scales and in different roles, including receiving funds to distribute onward, but this analysis does not establish why the observed concentration occurs.
Sources: Charity Commission register and accounts
Award persistence
Principal 2021–2024
Recipient-visibility cohorts
| Recipient-visibility cohort | [A] | [B] |
|---|---|---|
| Continuous· 4 years | 56.3% | 25.2% |
| Persistent· 3 years | 26.3% | 32.2% |
| Intermittent· 2 years | 8.0% | 30.9% |
| Episodic· 1 year | 9.4% | 11.7% |
Award-year axis 2021–2024 · Visibility is not need, impact or funder preference
Across all observed awards [A], value is strongly concentrated among recipients with repeated visibility: those observed in three or four years account for 82.6% of the total.Direct B&D-beneficiary value [B] is more evenly distributed across the four cohorts, with 57.4% going to recipients observed in three or four years and 42.6% to those observed in one or two.This contrast may reflect recipient mix, award timing or published-data coverage; the analysis does not distinguish between them. Recipients in [B] may rely more often on intermittent or project-based awards, or differ in organisational maturity and role from the wider recipient population in [A]. Separating those possibilities is recipient-level work, set out in section 06.
Sources: GrantNav / 360Giving
The intermediary
The intermediary in the retained network
Full observed history
Effective count = 1 / Herfindahl index — the number of equal-sized entities that would give the observed concentration
Four named upstream funders have supplied the intermediary, with an effective funder count of 2.1. The intermediary has distributed awards to 194 recipients grouped by network scope: 17 seed organisations, 84 identified non-seed recipients, 92 unresolved non-seed recipients and one contextual recipient.
Forward-compatible in total 346 — same-year is a subset, not a separate class
Forward-compatible in total 122 — same-year is a subset, not a separate class
Compatibility never traces a specific incoming grant into a specific outgoing award
These bars provide a temporal stress test of the routes implied by the intermediary network. Each possible path pairs an upstream funder with a downstream recipient through the intermediary and compares their observed award years. A path is same-year when upstream and downstream activity overlap in the same year, forward-compatible when upstream support precedes later downstream activity, and not forward-compatible when the observed downstream activity predates that funder’s support.This distinction matters because the network combines relationships recorded across multiple years and should not be read as though every visible funder–recipient route operated simultaneously as a single system. Of 776 full-history paths, 346 have a same-year or forward-compatible chronology, compared with 122 of 168 paths in 2021–2024. The recent network is therefore more closely aligned in time, while the full-history view includes more relationships drawn from different periods and may suggest additional sources of funding that have not been captured here.Compatibility does not trace particular funds, prove regranting, measure retained income or assess the intermediary’s efficiency. It indicates only whether the dates in the published records support the chronology of the possible routes shown, helping to avoid overstating what the network can establish.
Sources: GrantNav / 360Giving
Financial review signals
Screening signals
Principal 2021–2024
Review signals, not diagnoses · “Mixed or no material signal” is a substantive result, not an unclassified remainder
All 808 organisations were screened using available 2021–2024 evidence. A financial signal is triggered where recent reported income moves sufficiently downwards or upwards, or where expenditure is sufficiently high or low relative to income, to cross the model’s review threshold. GrantNav adds a separate signal where matched published funding is concentrated among a small number of funders.Two financial warning signals produce a priority review; a financial warning combined with concentrated observed funding produces a combined review; and one financial warning produces a financial watch. Positive movement in both financial dimensions produces positive momentum. Organisations lacking suitable recent records are separated from those with usable but mixed, neutral or below-threshold evidence.These categories guide further investigation; they do not diagnose failure, resilience, need or impact.
Sources: Charity Commission register and accounts, GrantNav / 360Giving
Operating balance
Principal 2021–2024
Annual flow and four-year net
The operating-balance proxy subtracts reported expenditure from reported income and aggregates the result across the 703 organisations with usable evidence during 2021–2024. It therefore describes the combined annual flow recorded across the analysed population, rather than the financial position of a typical charity. Annual results move between positive and negative values and combine to a four-year net of +£22.7 million.
Cumulative proxy — sensitivity scenarios
Positive across the displayed scenarios · Extreme positive and negative balances strongly shape the total
The lower panel tests how much the four-year net changes when the largest organisation-level balances are removed. Excluding the two largest absolute contributors raises the total from +£22.7 million to +£46.2 million, implying that those two cases contribute −£23.5 million overall — 103.7% of the published net. Extending the exclusion to the largest 1% lowers the figure again to +£28.3 million, showing that the next six cases contribute +£17.9 million, or 78.9% of the net. The headline result is therefore positive, but highly sensitive to roughly 1% of reporting organisations whose large positive and negative balances offset one another.
Sources: Charity Commission register and accounts
Proxy vs change in total funds
Principal 2021–2024
This tests the proxy against an independent balance-sheet measure: change in total funds over the principal period. Only 50 organisations had complete, aligned records, so the validation is selective.
n=50 anonymised organisations · sign agreement 94.0% · Subsample=50; Spearman=0.860; Pearson=0.885; sign agreement=93.9%. · Axes asinh-scaled
The two measures move in the same direction for 94% of the subsample, while the Pearson and Spearman correlations show strong agreement in both value and ranking. Most points also lie close to the dashed one-to-one line, supporting the operating-balance proxy as an approximate indicator of changes in total funds. Here asinh-scaled axes are used to compress large positive and negative values while preserving zero and direction.
Sources: Charity Commission register and accounts
Findings, limits and next directions
What the analysis shows
The first finding is about visibility. Of the 828 organisations in the borough-connected universe, 775 have observed financial histories but only 258 are matched to published GrantNav awards. The picture is therefore much stronger on registered organisational finances than on the totality of grant funding.
Across the full observed funding network, £91.2 million of £92.2 million in award value is recorded entering the 808-organisation seed population from 98 non-seed upstream funders, reaching 236 observed seed recipients. Published seed-to-seed awards total approximately £263,000 and originate from the sole seed organisation observed distributing GrantNav awards; a further £775,000 is recorded from that organisation to non-seed first-hop recipients. This makes the retained network overwhelmingly inbound in value, but it does not by itself demonstrate organisational dependence on external funding or exclude other forms of redistribution that are absent from the published records.
Beneficiary-location information is available for only part of the observed award portfolio. Within that subset, 161 awards worth £9.03 million and reaching 57 seed charities explicitly identify beneficiaries in B&D. For the remaining published awards, the beneficiary-location field does not provide equivalent confirmation. This is principally a boundary of data completeness: the wider portfolio remains relevant to organisations connected to the borough, but the records do not consistently specify where the funded benefit was intended to occur.
The records also describe a field marked by sustained unevenness. Throughout 2021–2024, the highest-income tenth of reporting organisations account for approximately 85–88% of annual reported income. Observed award value is similarly weighted towards repeated visibility: recipients appearing in three or four principal-window years account for 82.6% of all recorded award value, although their share falls to 57.4% among awards with explicit B&D beneficiary evidence. These measures show concentration in organisational scale and published award visibility. They do not explain why it occurs.
The financial models add a further set of signals to this structural picture. Applying the established screening model identifies organisations whose recent income, expenditure or observed funding patterns provide grounds for closer review, alongside organisations showing positive movement and others for which the available evidence is mixed or incomplete. These signals are not conclusions about organisational performance, but they establish a defined set of cases that could support a subsequent programme of more detailed financial analysis. In aggregate, reported income exceeds expenditure across the observed period, although the result is sensitive to a small number of dominant cases. The operating-balance proxy also corresponds strongly with changes in reported total funds within the selective validation subsample, supporting its use as a review indicator.
Where this analysis stops
This first release has been kept deliberately structural. It establishes the population, the coverage of the retained sources, the principal directions of published award flows, the scale of explicit beneficiary-location evidence, and the broad distributional and financial patterns visible at population level. What it does not yet do is descend to the individual recipient — that programme is set out below. Any such extension would remain bounded by the completeness of published award records, and could not on its own establish unreported funding, trace particular funds through the network, or determine where benefits and outcomes were ultimately realised.
What this points towards
The immediate next stage should move from population-level structure to deeper analysis of the 236 observed seed recipients. That programme could measure the distribution and concentration of inbound award value, establish recipient funding bands, compare one-off and repeatedly visible recipients, assess funder diversity and portfolio dependence, and identify overlap between major funders. Linking those measures to reported income, expenditure, total funds, organisational age and financial trajectories would show how published awards sit within recipients’ wider operating positions. Award purpose, duration and beneficiary-location evidence could add further context, and the intermediary relationships could be examined in greater temporal detail — within the compatibility limits set out in section 04.
The same governed pipeline could then be reproduced across London’s boroughs. That comparison would test whether B&D’s inbound-dominant published network, limited observed internal circulation, high reported-income concentration and uneven award visibility are distinctive local features or recurring metropolitan patterns. Applying common population rules, observation windows and publication safeguards across boroughs would also reveal how much apparent difference is structural and how much reflects the uneven visibility of funders and beneficiaries in public data.
Taken together, these next stages would turn the present baseline into a broader research programme: first explaining how observed funding is distributed within the borough-connected population, then testing how that structure compares across London, and ultimately connecting financial flows more carefully to organisational purpose, place and public benefit.
Sources and licences
Contains data from GrantNav a 360Giving application released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license (CC-BY-SA)
Source: Charity Commission for England and Wales Register of Charities. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
What this work demonstrates
The audit joins two public registers — Charity Commission accounts and published GrantNav awards — into a single 808-organisation population, then traces how £92.2m of observed award value enters it. The method separates what the sources record from what they cannot: an organisation absent from a register is reported as unobserved, not as unfunded.
Where this approach could be applied
The same construction could support funders and local authorities examining comparable organisational ecosystems — establishing which organisations exist in an area, which relationships are visible in public records, and where the evidence runs out before a funding decision is taken.
Continue the investigation
This project demonstrates more than one area of work.