Profits at some of Britain's best-known charity shops have fallen sharply, over a decade in which the country has quadrupled what it spends on secondhand clothes.
Oxfam's retail profit fell 23% to £4.9m in the last financial year, from £6.4m the year before, according to unpublished accounts seen by the Financial Times, in reporting followed up by the Guardian.
The British Heart Foundation, which has the biggest high street presence of any charity in the country, has announced plans to close 150 stores after its shops made a £3.3m loss in the last financial year. Cancer Research UK and Scope have also closed shops, or are closing them.
The British Heart Foundation's retail arm, which employs almost 3,700 staff, was reviewed in June after shop profits fell from £18.8m in 2024 to £3.6m in the year to 31 March 2025. The charity cited "an exceptionally challenging trading environment", and is aiming to close 90 stores by the end of March 2027 and a further 60 by the following March.
None of this has happened in a shrinking market. UK spending on secondhand clothing has risen to £8.8bn a year, four times the figure of a decade ago, according to GlobalData.
The growth has come alongside platforms such as Vinted and Depop, which connect sellers directly with buyers. Charity shops remain responsible for collecting, sorting, pricing and storing clothes, and for high street and warehouse rents.
What is being donated has changed too. Tansy Hoskins, the author of Charity Shop World, told the Guardian this month that the sector was dealing with "avalanches" of poor-quality clothes. "Quality is the big change marker - it's gone through the floor. You're just fighting against the waste," she said.
Robin Osterley, chief executive of the Charity Retail Association, said: "Fast fashion has had an impact on donations quality, there's no question about that." He pointed instead to the November 2024 budget, where national insurance increases and a lower threshold had a "really significant" effect on shops' costs.
"It has been challenging ... and it is going to be painful for the sector," Lorna Fallon, the head of Oxfam's retail operation, told the FT. Oxfam's latest filings show that for every £100 spent in its shops, £6 now goes towards its work on alleviating global poverty, against £22 as recently as 2022. Its focus on books and music means it has no plans to reduce its number of shops.
The Charity Retail Association does not regard the platforms as a problem at all. "We don't see Vinted or any of the other online platforms as an issue at all," Osterley said, and gave two reasons. The first is that they normalise buying secondhand: "A rising tide floats all ships." The second is that "there are a lot of people who buy things from charity shops to sell on the online platforms. Our members get a significant income from them."
Both reasons are true, and taken together they describe a closed system. The tide is rising because more people are buying secondhand. A significant number of them are buying secondhand in charity shops. They then sell the same garments on the platforms, where the money is counted again.
This newspaper has followed the water. A coat donated once is sold twice: priced by a volunteer at one end and by its eventual owner at the other, and recorded in the £8.8bn on both occasions. The market is four times larger than it was, and some of it is the same coat.
Our analysts are satisfied that the tide does float all ships. It does so by being poured from one ship into the next, which is why the fleet keeps growing and why the vessels at the top of the pour are closing 150 stores.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has established the sector's position precisely. Charity retail is the only industry in Britain whose competitors are also its customers, whose stock is also its waste, and whose growth is recorded somewhere else.