Most people assume a domestic abuse charity runs on donations, goodwill and people who care. Some of that is true. But for most domestic abuse services, the main source of income isn’t bake sales or well-meaning donors. It’s public money, awarded through a process that can look less like charity and more like any other business competing for work.
Most of the money is public, and it comes with strings
When the Domestic Abuse Commissioner mapped services across England and Wales in 2022, 80% of organisations said statutory funding was their main source of income. Much of it arrives as a commissioned grant or contract: 75% of accommodation-based services and 63% of community-based services were funded this way.
In practice, that often means competing for it. A council or other commissioner decides what it wants delivered, and organisations bid against each other to win the work. The same kind of process a council might use to buy any other service can decide who supports women escaping abuse in an area. Research by specialist services has been blunt about this, concluding that competitive tendering is not an effective way to commission domestic abuse support.
The amounts are often smaller, and the timescales shorter, than people imagine. Half of the funding amounts local commissioners gave to services were under £50,000. The most common length for a service’s main funding was one to three years, and funding is often allocated for just one or two years at a time. More than a quarter of organisations relied on a main funding source lasting less than a year. Services describe that funding as patchy and piecemeal, and say it makes planning ahead very hard.
Short contracts shape the work
Short-term funding doesn’t just cause uncertainty for managers. It shapes what a service can offer the woman in front of it. When a service doesn’t know whether it will exist in eighteen months, it struggles to recruit and keep experienced staff, plan longer support, or build anything that lasts. One refuge described living with “the threat of possible tendering from one year to the next.”
Accountability for public money matters. But oversight is uneven. A 2024 review found that funding devolved to local commissioners often isn’t matched by robust reporting or monitoring requirements. So services can face the insecurity of short-term, competitive funding without the system clearly tracking whether women are getting what they need.
Scale wins. That’s the design of the system.
Winning funding in this system isn’t only about being good at supporting survivors. It’s also about being good at winning bids. That favours organisations with the staff, time and money to write strong bids, absorb delays and survive if a contract ends early, and they tend to be the largest ones.
Smaller organisations are at a disadvantage when they compete against larger ones. Specialist services describe being forced to compete against large, generic organisations with their own marketing and bid-writing teams. In one case, a service could not bid to keep running a refuge it had run for more than 30 years, because the tender was structured as a single contract it could not bid for alone.
The organisations hit hardest are those set up “by and for” the communities they serve, often run by and for Black and minoritised women. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner found these services are disproportionately underfunded and six times more likely than other specialist domestic abuse services to receive no statutory funding at all. A 2021 survey of refuges in England found that only 5 of 18 specialist by and for refuges were commissioned, and that these services had been disproportionately affected by cuts and competitive tendering. A 2020 briefing by specialist organisations reported that 50% of Black and minoritised specialist refuges had been forced to close or been taken over by a larger provider in the previous decade because of a lack of funding, and that competitive tendering favours larger organisations.
That is one visible cost of a system that rewards scale over specialism.
What donations are actually for, and where that gets blurry
It’s easy to assume that once an organisation wins public funding, donations become unnecessary. The reality is different.
Contract funding often doesn’t cover what a service actually costs to run. In the 2021 survey of refuges in England, only 19.8% of commissioned refuges said their contract funding covered all their support staff costs. Of those that answered, 78.1% used grants and other fundraising to cover the shortfall. Many refuges have no commissioned funding at all and depend entirely on these less secure sources. Services also report that funding and contract levels have stayed the same even as caseloads and costs have risen.
So donations often fill a gap that public funding leaves. That’s a legitimate use of donated money. But it raises a question most donors never think to ask: is my money paying for something extra, or is it quietly topping up a contract that was never funded properly in the first place? From the outside, a donor usually can’t tell the difference.
Donations should be spent transparently on what they were asked for, and donors deserve to know when their money is filling a hole left by public funding.
So who is a charity actually accountable to?
Here’s the uncomfortable version of the question. The public assumes a charity answers to the people it serves and to the people who give to it. But when an organisation’s survival depends on its main funder renewing the money, it also has to keep that funder satisfied. Most of the time, these pull in the same direction. When they don’t, the organisation still has to keep the lights on.
None of this means the people working in these charities don’t care. Most of them clearly do. But the system they work in rewards winning bids, surviving short contracts and bidding again. The next time a large domestic abuse charity is described in the press as a trusted institution, it’s worth remembering what keeps it running underneath that description.
Go deeper
- Dictionary: refuge, safe accommodation, IDVA, intersectionality, misogynoir, no recourse to public funds
- Read: When Help Becomes a Business: Supported Housing After Domestic Abuse, Imagine If Tesco Could Apply to Take Your Child Away. It Sounds Absurd. One Charity Already Can., Perpetrator Intervention Programmes: He’s Not Fixed. He’s Being Watched., I Can’t Afford a Solicitor: What Are My Options for Leaving an Abusive Relationship?
- Guides: Our original practical guide (Get Money. Get Out. Get Rid.) covers your money, exit and legal options in England and Wales, so you know what you’re entitled to whoever is providing your support. You can find it, and our other guides, on our Get Help page.
