Who funds British politics?

The rules in 60 seconds

Who is allowed to donate

• Individuals on a UK electoral register

  Including qualifying overseas electors. The donor must be registered at the time of the donation.

• UK-registered companies

  Incorporated in the UK or another EU member state and carrying on business in the UK.

• Registered trade unions

  Trade unions registered under UK law.

• Limited liability partnerships

  Registered in the UK and carrying on business in the UK.

• Unincorporated associations

  Carrying on business or activities mainly in the UK, with their main office here. They must register once their political contributions pass a threshold.

• Certain other UK bodies

  Including friendly societies and building societies registered in the UK.

What has to be reported

1. 1The party checks permissibilityA party has 30 days to decide whether a donation comes from a permissible source. If it cannot be verified, it must be returned — those records appear on the register marked as returned, and are excluded from every total on this page.
2. 2Donations above the threshold are itemisedDonations above the reporting threshold to a central party, or a lower threshold to a local accounting unit, are reported individually with the donor named. Smaller donations that add up past the threshold from one source are also reported.
3. 3Quarterly reporting to the CommissionParties report each quarter, and more frequently during a general election campaign. Reports are published on the Commission’s searchable register.
4. 4Publication on the public registerThe register is public, searchable and downloadable. Everything on this page comes from it.

Electoral Commission, political party donations and loans in Great Britain ↗ · Electoral Commission, who you can accept donations and loans from ↗

Who funds each party?

Composition since 2001, by the Commission’s donor taxonomy. Public funds are shown as their own category rather than folded into private giving.

Donations over time

In 2025, 23.4% of everything parties reported was public funding rather than private donation.

Reading the peaks. Money arrives when there is an election to fight. Reading the troughs as parties losing support, or the peaks as a surge in influence-buying, would mistake the electoral cycle for a trend.

Last verified 2026-08-16. Data: Electoral Commission political finance database — donations to political parties.

How concentrated is each party’s funding?

The share of a party’s private donations that came from its ten largest donors. A high share is not evidence of anything improper — it describes a funding model, and the models differ in kind as well as degree.

Since 2001, Sinn Féin received 87.27% of its private donations from its ten largest donors; Conservative and Unionist Party received 14.78%.

Last verified 2026-08-16. Data: Electoral Commission political finance database — donations to political parties.

Public funding of parties

British parties also receive taxpayer money, and most people have never heard of it. Short money supports opposition parties’ work in the Commons; Cranborne money does the same in the Lords; policy development grants help parties develop policy. None of it is a donation, and none of it is available to parties without parliamentary representation.

Public funds received, 2001 onwards

• Labour Party£115.9m
• Conservative and Unionist Party£63.1m
• Liberal Democrats£38.1m
• Scottish National Party (SNP)£16.2m
• Plaid Cymru - The Party of Wales£5.1m
• Democratic Unionist Party - D.U.P.£4.5m
• Sinn Féin£3.1m
• Green Party£3.0m

Bars share one scale. Public funds are identified from the Commission’s own donor status and donation-type fields; some Short money records are filed under a general status, so both fields are checked.

Last verified 2026-08-16. Data: Electoral Commission political finance database — donations to political parties.

Britain’s largest political donors

What the Electoral Commission published, and nothing else. There are no donor profiles here: a profile requires a person to check and approve it, and none has been approved. Match state is shown so you can weigh each row — confirmed means a Companies House number matched, high-confidence means an exact name and donor type matched.

Last verified 2026-08-16. Data: Electoral Commission political finance database — donations to political parties.

Where the money goes

Reported campaign spending at each general election, from the Commission’s spending returns.

The limit. There is no single national spending limit that applies to every party. The limit is £54,010 for each seat a party contests, calculated separately for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — so a party standing everywhere has a much higher limit than one standing in a single nation. A party contesting all 650 seats would have a limit of £35.1m. It was raised in November 2023 from £19.5m for a party contesting every seat.

Electoral Commission, the spending limit ↗ (guidance last updated 11 June 2024) · 107,746 spending records ingested. Supplier addresses in the export are dropped and never published.

Last verified 2026-08-16. Data: Electoral Commission campaign spending returns.

Lobbying — what is visible and what is not

The statutory register captures a narrow slice of lobbying: paid intermediaries contacting the two most senior levels of a department. For an industry that mostly lobbies for itself, at levels below permanent secretary, it records very little. That is a feature of how the 2014 Act was drawn, not a failure of the registrar.

Register of Consultant Lobbyists ↗ · Registrar’s guidance ↗ · Statutory basis: Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014

Can foreign money enter British politics?

The permissibility rules are about registration and trading, not nationality. That is the whole answer, and it is more precise than either “foreign money is banned” or “the rules are wide open”.

• Overseas electors may donate

  A British citizen living abroad who is registered as an overseas elector is a permissible donor, on the same basis as any other registered elector. Registration, not residence, is the test.

• UK-registered companies may donate

  A company incorporated in the UK and carrying on business here may donate, regardless of who owns it. The permissibility test is about the company’s registration and trading, not the nationality of its shareholders.

• What beneficial ownership does and does not reveal

  Companies House holds persons-with-significant-control records, so ultimate control is often visible. But control can sit with a foreign parent, a trust, or a chain terminating outside the UK register, and a company’s profits may originate anywhere. The register shows who controls the company, not where the money came from.

• Unincorporated associations

  These appear on the register as the donor in their own right. They must register once their political contributions pass a threshold, but the people who funded the association are not themselves reported. This is the largest structural gap in the disclosure regime.

The structural blind spots

• Donations below the reporting thresholds are never itemised, so money arriving in many small amounts is invisible at donor level.
• Loans are reported separately from donations and under different rules. Summing them would double-count a party’s obligations, and this page never does.
• Unincorporated associations obscure the original source of the money they pass on.
• The register records what parties report. The Commission itself notes that reported and accepted values differ, and that late reporting is common.

What Parliament is currently considering

Last verified 2026-08-16. Data: Parliament Bills API, bills.parliament.uk.

What if money mattered less? What the research actually finds

This page’s own evidence statement — “a donation is a financial relationship, not by itself evidence of access, influence, or wrongdoing” — has to be written that carefully because proving influence case-by-case is genuinely hard. That does not mean the question “would restricting money in politics change anything?” is unanswerable — it has been studied directly, with a real policy change and a comparison group, at least once.

• Spending caps changed who runs and who wins

  Studying Brazilian municipal elections, stricter spending limits increased political competition by drawing in a larger and on-average less wealthy pool of candidates, and reduced the incumbency advantage — sitting mayors became less likely to win re-election. A real, measured effect from an actual policy change, not a modelled scenario.

  Avis, Ferraz, Finan & Varjão, "Money and Politics: The Effects of Campaign Spending Limits on Political Competition and Incumbency Advantage", NBER Working Paper 23508 (2017)

• Contributions look more like participation than vote-buying — at least in the US

  Analysing US campaign finance data, the authors found little evidence that contributions buy legislators’ votes once other factors are controlled for, that individuals (not organised interests) are the largest source of donations, and that giving behaves like a normal good tied to income — a "consumption" pattern more than a "purchase" of influence. This is US evidence, on a different funding system from the UK’s.

  Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo & Snyder, "Why Is There So Little Money in U.S. Politics?", Journal of Economic Perspectives 17(1): 105–130 (2003)

These two findings are not a contradiction to resolve — they measure different things in different systems. Spending CAPS (a limit on what can be spent) changed who could compete and win in Brazil; this is separate from whether DONATIONS (money going in) buy specific votes, which is the weaker relationship the US evidence finds. The honest answer to "would reducing money’s role improve UK politics" is: it depends which lever is pulled, caps and donation limits are not the same intervention, and no equivalent UK quasi-experiment exists to test either directly. What the literature supports is narrower than either "money corrupts politics" or "money doesn’t matter" — and narrower than this page’s evidence statement alone can convey.

Follow the money through British politics

Each step in the chain from a donation to a policy outcome, and what evidence each one would need. This is the generic model: it uses no real donor, because a real-donor version requires an approved profile and none has been approved.

The chain has five links and the public record reliably establishes two of them. That asymmetry is the most important thing on this page: the money is documented, the spending is documented, and everything after that usually is not. A page that filled the gap with implication would be making the argument the evidence cannot.

Which sectors do company donors come from?

Company donors are enriched only where the Electoral Commission recorded a company number and the entity is matched confirmed. That number is looked up directly against the Companies House public data API; no company is ever matched by name, because two companies can share one. Individuals are never given company linkage. Sectors are derived from the company’s own filed SIC codes through the published mapping below — nothing is hand-assigned.

2,306 of 3,311 confirmed company donors were looked up — those whose lifetime donations reach £5,000. Smaller company donors are excluded from sector totals, so those totals understate rather than overstate.

Last verified 2026-08-16. Data: Companies House public data API.

Access, contracts, honours and appointments

These are the sections where a wrong match would name the wrong person alongside a contract, an honour or a meeting. Each row needs individual human approval before it appears. The methods and limits are published here; the rows are not, because none has been approved.

Sources and methodology

Sources

• Electoral Commission political finance database — donations to political parties ↗

  The Electoral Commission · retrieved 2026-08-16 · Open Government Licence v3.0 · 81,375 records

• Electoral Commission political finance database — loans ↗

  The Electoral Commission · retrieved 2026-08-16 · Open Government Licence v3.0

Confirmed and high-confidence matches only, public funds excluded. Unmatched name variants are counted separately. Datasets generated 2026-08-16 from the Electoral Commission's published register.