Fragile funding landscape
Our latest report, ‘Fragile funding landscape: the extent of local authority commissioning in the domestic abuse refuge sector in England 2020’, reveals the huge number of refuge services running without any statutory funding, including a significant proportion of specialist services ‘by and for’ Black and minoritised women.
Findings from the report are discussed further in our Safe blog here.
© Women’s Aid, 2021
This report finds that:
- More than 1 in 5 refuge services in England received no local authority commissioned funding in 2019/20 (60 out of 269 refuge services)
- 18.5% of all refuge bedspaces running in November 2020 were not funded through local authority commissioning (788 out of 4251 bedspaces)
- There were 18 refuge services run by specialist ‘by and for’ Black and minoritised women’s organisations running at November 2020. A much higher percentage, 57.5% (146 out of 254), of spaces in these services were provided by non-commissioned refuge services, compared to the overall 18.5%.
- Women’s Aid survey data shows that only 19.8% of commissioned services (20 out of 101) received enough funding to cover all of their support staff costs.
- The current commissioned refuge sector is currently supported by a significant number of non-commissioned spaces. Without these, the shortfall in spaces would increase from 24.5% to 42.5%.