Most people assume a domestic abuse charity runs on donations, goodwill, and people who care. Some of that is true. But the money that actually keeps most large domestic abuse services running doesn’t come from bake sales or well-meaning donors. It comes from winning government contracts, in a process that looks less like charity and more like any other competitive business tender.
It’s a procurement process, not a donation
Councils and Police and Crime Commissioners don’t hand money to organisations because they’re doing good work. They publish a tender specification, a document setting out exactly what they want delivered, for what price, to what standard, and charities bid against each other to win it. Bids are scored against criteria like quality, cost, and something called “social value.” Usually, one provider wins the entire contract for a whole region, sometimes worth millions of pounds, for three to five years at a time.
This is procurement. The same mechanism a council would use to award a contract for road maintenance or IT services is used to decide who gets to run domestic abuse support for an entire county. There is now an entire cottage industry of consultants who exist purely to help charities write winning tender bids, because writing a competitive bid is its own specialist skill, separate entirely from actually supporting survivors.
KPIs, break clauses, and performance reviews
Once a charity wins a contract, it isn’t free to just get on with the work. Contracts come with Key Performance Indicators. Outcome reporting requirements. Regular performance reviews. Break clauses that let the commissioner end the contract early if targets aren’t hit. Annual or multi-year reviews where continued funding depends on demonstrating the right numbers.
That’s not a criticism of accountability in principle, public money should have oversight. But it means a domestic abuse charity’s actual day to day priorities are shaped as much by what a contract measures as by what a survivor in front of them actually needs. If the KPI is number of clients seen, the incentive is volume. If the KPI is a specific outcome measure, the incentive is whatever gets that number up, not necessarily what that specific woman needs most.
Scale wins. That’s the whole design of the system.
Winning these tenders isn’t primarily about being the best at supporting survivors. It’s about being the best at winning tenders, which rewards a specific kind of organisation: one with the staff, time, and resources to write a strong bid, absorb a slow payment cycle, meet reporting requirements, and survive if a contract is delayed or cut short. That tends to be the largest, most established charities, the ones that already look most like an official public institution rather than a grassroots response to a real problem.
Smaller and more specialist organisations, including ones built specifically around communities that generalist services don’t serve well, consistently lose out in this system, not because their work is worse, but because they can’t compete on bid-writing capacity and financial resilience the same way. Imkaan, the umbrella body for Black and minoritised women’s organisations in this sector, found that half of Black and minoritised women’s specialist refuges in the UK have closed or been absorbed by larger providers over the past decade, as a result of this funding structure. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s own 2022 mapping of services found this pattern is particularly acute for organisations led “by and for” minoritised communities. That’s one visible casualty of a system built to reward scale over specialism. It’s very likely not the only one.
What donations are actually for, and where that gets blurry
It’s easy to assume that once an organisation is winning government contracts, public donations become unnecessary, or worse, a kind of double-dipping. The reality is more specific than that, and also less reassuring than it sounds.
Contract funding almost never covers everything a service actually needs to run. Tenders typically pay for a narrowly defined slice of work, a set number of hours, a specific caseload, particular outcomes. They rarely cover the gaps between one contract ending and the next beginning, support for people who fall just outside the contract’s exact criteria, campaigning and policy work, or building up any kind of reserve so the organisation can survive a delay, a funding cut, or losing the next tender to a competitor. Donations are often what fills that gap.
That’s a legitimate use of donated money. What’s far less visible to the average donor is whether that’s actually what’s happening. When a contract is underbid, when an organisation wins a tender at a price too low to properly deliver what it promised, donations can end up quietly absorbing the shortfall instead of funding anything additional at all. From the outside, a donor has no way to tell the difference between their money extending a service beyond what the state pays for, and their money simply patching a hole created by a contract the organisation shouldn’t have accepted in the first place.
Donations should be spent transparently on what they were actually asked for, not used to quietly plug holes left by underbid contracts, and donors deserve to know the difference.
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 whoever donates to it out of goodwill. In practice, its survival depends on satisfying a commissioner’s scoring criteria and winning the next contract renewal. Those two things overlap a lot of the time. They are not the same thing, and when they pull in different directions, the organisation still has to keep the lights on, which means the contract usually wins.
None of this means the people working inside these charities don’t care, most of them clearly do. But the system they operate inside runs on the same logic as any other government contractor: win the bid, hit the numbers, survive the review, bid again. The next time a large domestic abuse charity gets described in the press as a trusted institution, it’s worth remembering what actually keeps it running underneath that description.
References:
- Imkaan (open letter to party leaders; corroborated by Women’s Aid campaign page citing Imkaan 2018) — “half of BME/Black and minoritised refuges closed or funding slashed over the past decade” (corrected from the article’s original “single year” claim)
- Domestic Abuse Commissioner, A Patchwork of Provision: How to meet the needs of victims and survivors across England and Wales (November 2022)
- IDVA Statutory Guidance, issued under section 16 of the Victims and Prisoners Act 2024 (published May 2025)
