A recent report produced by Claudia Wood for Demos and New Philanthropy Capital [NPC] highlights some of the issues that have faced charities in the last year and highlights that non-covid related Medical Research charities, such as RAFT have been particularly hit hard.
The amount of money donated to medical research between January and June 2020 was £174m less than expected, as such charities would normally take 12% of all charitable donations in a six month period, when in 2020 they only took 7%.
This is in part due to the fact that such causes often use high profile events to generate donations (such as the London Marathon), but also because individual donors have shifted their giving habits to NHS/Covid-19 related charities. Estimates suggest charities investing in medical research will lose up to 38% of their income this year and over 25% next year, leading to an overall loss of up to £7.8bn of investment in medical research by 2027. This reduction in funding will certainly have a long-term impact on the development of cures and treatments for a range of diseases – unless this lost funding is recovered.”
The report goes on to include in its recommendations for the government to provide new and ongoing funding for medical research. The losses in non-Covid-19 health research funding have meant that dozens of clinical trials are being scrapped, health researchers are being driven from the sector. The pandemic has shone a light on how medical R&D is funded in the UK and that it is clearly inappropriate that such a fundamental part of the UK’s social wellbeing is reliant on public donations.
See the full report at: Covid-19-impact-on-the-charitable-sector.pdf (demos.co.uk)