The latest figures for party donations are out from the Electoral Commission and already we’ve seen reports which simply take the numbers at face value.

Of course, that’s an understandable thing for the media to do: regulator publishes numbers, you report them.

However, the numbers are misleading for two reasons:

• They are (only) for donations to parties. As I’ve previously pointed out, donations made direct to candidates during the election campaign period are excluded from these figures.
• The figures only include donations which are large enough to have to be reported to the Electoral Commission. Small donations are excluded from the figures.

Hence whilst the official figures show that the Liberal Democrats have received just two donations 6-12 April, that says less about how much money the party has received and more about how much is excluded from the figures.

Overall, do the exclusions make a difference to the picture of lots of Conservative donations, some Labour and not many Lib Dem? Simple answer is we don’t know because, for example, the pattern of local donations direct to candidates has never been analysed.

What proportion of candidate campaign spend comes from their own party organisations and what from donations direct to their campaigns? Not only does no-one know, no research or publication gets even close to giving a hint as to what the figures might roughly perhaps be like.

However, it’s plausible given the nature of the parties both that the Liberal Democrats received more donations direct to candidates and – particularly in the wake of the TV debate – more small donations that do not hit the reporting threshold. But how different? Again, no-one knows.

So whilst the published figures provide a large degree of transparency over who the large donors are, the information they provide about how parties are doing overall financially is much more limited.