The Electoral Commission website is a data-mine of information for those interested in all aspects of party political funding.
For those who’d rather not get their hands dirty doing the mining themselves, below you’ll find 10 interesting (in my opinion) facts I discovered there.
But for those of you interested in excavating further, I’ve uploaded Google spreadsheets of the three main parties’ donations received between 2001 and 2011 (incl.):
- Liberal Democrat donations, 2001-11;
- Labour party donations, 2001-11;
- Conservative party donations, 2001-11.
And here are those 10 interesting facts I promised you…
1) In total, the Lib Dems raised £33,742,984 in donations from 2001-11. This compares with £173,742,956 for the Labour Party, and £182,418,146 for the Conservatives.
2) The Lib Dems received £19,906,609 (59% of total donations) from 373 gifts in excess of £10,000.
3) In comparison, the Conservatives received £149,834,472 (82%) from 2,632 gifts in excess of £10,000; and the Labour party £156,991,215 (90%) from 1,330 gifts in excess of £10,000.
4) £27,877,979 (83%) of the Lib Dem total was received from 4,325 individuals and 701 corporates by the Lib Dems.
5) In comparison, the Labour Party received £56,556,081 (32% of total donations) from 1,750 individuals and 1,041 corporates; while the Conservatives received £166,052,423 (91%) from 6,798 individuals and 2,938 corporates.
6) The Labour party received £110,087,436 (63% of total donations) from the trade unions between 2001-11. The Conservative party received £53,003,532 (29%) from corporates.
7) Michael Brown’s five donations (totalling £2.45m) via 5th Avenue Partners between February and May 2005 accounted for 7% of the party’s total donations in this period.
8 ) The single biggest gift, other than Michael Brown’s, was £418,700, donated by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd in November 2006.
9) The biggest individual donor is Lord (David) Alliance, who’s given c.£695k, with Lord (Paul) Strasburger (c.£645k) not far behind.
10) The Lib Dems received a total of £15,859,758 from public funds. This compares with £14,048,629 for Labour (which was in government for most of this period), and £44,263,521 for the Tories.
NB: all figures are based on declarable donations counted by the Electoral Commission, the definition of which has changed has changed over the years, and which does not include all donations given to parties.
Note: point 8 originally and mistakenly referred to the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. This was corrected to the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd on 25/2/2012.
* Stephen was Editor (and Co-Editor) of Liberal Democrat Voice from 2007 to 2015, and writes at The Collected Stephen Tall.
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15 Comments
The more interesting information (to me) is tracking which companies are donating to parties, and the effect those donations have on the support for legislation.
The example that’s been doing the rounds recently is the cumulative £540,000 from Alpha Healthcare and Lib Dem support for the Health Bill currently going through parliament. There are countless other examples from all political parties. The biggest threat facing our democracy (even more than the fact it’s barely a democracy under FPTP) is the influence of corporate money on policy. We should be *very* careful before we open the doors any wider to the kind of corruption we see in the USA.
Interesting to compare these statistics with other numbers. Dividing the numbers in item 1 by the numbers of MPs of the three parties in parliament today, and then dividing by 10 for the ten years of donations, the cost of getting an MP into parliament comes out as
59k per year for a Liberal Democrat MP
60k per year for a Conservative MP
68k per year for a Labour MP
Consequently, we are the cheapest! To form a government of 326 MPs, it seems that we need to raise 326 x 59k = 19 million per year. Is my math correct?
Do these take account of my point in the previous thread that now only donations above £1.5k are published whereas a few years ago
Yummy, scrummy, lovely stats. Stephen, can we have a graph too next time?
I will say, you don’t seem to have an opportunity for us to tweet this into the wide world web and promote just how great the Lib Dems are.
@ Hywel – see the NB at the foot of the post. The figures are based on declarable donations as classified by and published by the Electoral Commission. As you say, that definition has changed over time, though I don’t think it’ll distort very much what’s published here.
I would appreciate knowing more about where the public funds in item 10 come from and why they appear to have such a lopsided distribution. Does this include MP’s expenses?
This is all fascinating stuff – must have taken you ages to go through all this stuff. Thank you for doing it so I don’t have to:-).
Shows that we really are dependent on individual donations unlike the Labour Party particularly which continues to be heavily funded by the Unions, who then have a huge say in choosing the leader and other Conference decisions.
What we have achieved over the last 10 years has been quite extraordinary given that we’re doing it on a fifth or sixth of the funds of the others. It just shows the challenge ahead, though.
Tony: I would imagine that a great deal of the public funding mentioned is the much discussed “Short money” given to parties in opposition to compensate for their lack of direct access to the civil service as a resource for policy making, etc. I believe it is given in proportion to the number of MPs, hence the Tories would have had quite a bit, Labour less so because they were in govt for much of the period described, and us less so because we have fewer MPs.
@Steven Tall
I’m curious as to how you came up with £33 million? if I do a simple sum of col C I get £49 Million, initially I thought you may have been talking about cash donations, but again I get a different figure if I try that (29 million).
@Stephen
I mean of course Col O – sorry
@ Stephen Tall
Sorry, I’ve worked it out now. It is interesting stuff, but it does throw up some questions of how serious the LDP are about reforming donations, e.g.:
The Rowntree foundation donated 5.6 mil over that period (approx 560k per year), if a Company cap were set at 50k that would cause a massive dent in your funding (a 5 mil shortfall over the same period). Also, The Ministry of Sound Ltd donated 317k over 3 years, that would be halved with a cap.
You also seem to be reliant on internal donations, if your membership declines badly will that not also cause problems? (again as an e.g. 752 councilors donated over 1 mil in total). What happens if they are voted out?
On a lighter note, it’s nice to see that the LDP hatred of Tesco and Rupert didn’t deter you from accepting donations from them in the past 😉
Chris_sh: The Rowntree money can of course be read as indicating, “Crikey! It shows how committed the Lib Dems are to party funding reform that they’re still pushing a policy which would hit their own finances” 🙂
@Mark Pack
Or of course, why Lib Dems seem to have been pushing the hardest for state funding 😉
‘Richard Dean’ not sure if your mathS is correct or not, but by my mathS that makes us the best value for money, not the cheapest.. it’s important how you tell it..
and there must be a Telegraph story in item 10, if only they would tell it.
@peter “and there must be a Telegraph story in item 10, if only they would tell it.”
Exactly: just the kind of stat that would be front page news if it were LDs or Labour receiving the 44 million figure.
How we get exposure for this and many other positive stats past the Tory gatekeepers in the press is crucial. The media team should be vigorously questioned on these matters at next month’s Conference.