Civil Liberties Action / Democracy and Money
Political finance explorer
Compare parties, explore donors and check the evidence.
Loading donation records and reported receipts…
The news evidence could not be loaded. The figures below currently contain only January–June official records and exclude the £72 million. Reload to try again, or open the 2026 news tab for the status.
EC disclosed · Jan–Jun: —
Reported receipts · awaiting EC match: —
Why the reported £72 million is included
September reports and Reform’s statement say Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne each gave £36 million, paid upfront. These are labelled reported received · awaiting EC match; acceptance dates remain unverified. They are separate from official January–June disclosures.
The selected records
Where the money went
Largest recipient totals within your filters. All amounts are shown beside the bars.
EC disclosed Reported received
Inspect the matching records ↓How concentrated is it?
Select one party and one period to inspect its largest disclosed funders.
Return to the source
Donation records
| Accepted / report timing | Donor as reported | Recipient | Value | Evidence / type | Record |
|---|
Follow a question / Check the calculation
Investigate political funding
Explore dependence, changes in funding and the form a donation takes. These views use official disclosures and documented identity links. Every calculation can be traced to its records.
Loading analysis evidence…
Concentration through time
Each period has its own denominator. January–June 2026 is not a full year. Reporting thresholds changed in 2024. Incomplete identity matching can understate dependence on actual people or organisations.
The largest disclosed funders
Disclosed value in this period
Cash-labelled entries do not, by themselves, prove a fresh cash receipt. This view separates bequests, non-cash benefits, trust classifications and an evidenced loan-conversion case.
Publication history
Identity / History / Evidence
Follow the recorded donor
Start with a reviewed profile or search the original donor IDs. A similar name, a shared director or a corporate connection does not automatically make two donors the same entity.
Loading identity evidence…
Reported in 2026 / Evidence reviewed 10 October
Large donations in the news
Selected reports published between 1 January and 9 October 2026 about party donations of £100,000 or more, including stated aggregates. A story published in 2026 can concern money donated in 2025. This review is not exhaustive and is not a ranking of parties.
Loading and reconciling the news review…
| News date / donation timing | Reported donor / recipient | Reported amount | Reconciliation status | Evidence |
|---|
Reported gifts and how they are counted
Ben Delo → Reform UK
£36 million
Announced in September. Reform says the money was paid upfront. Awaiting a match in the EC snapshot.
Christopher Harborne → Reform UK
£36 million
A separate September donation. Reform says it too was paid upfront. Awaiting a match in the EC snapshot.
Keep reported amounts and official totals distinct. The 2026 Donations view includes reviewed reported receipts alongside official entries, with a separate breakdown for each source. Historical comparison charts and donor-concentration calculations continue to use official records only. Reports that match existing records are linked to those records; they are not added again.
An EC match confirms that the cited entry is in our dated snapshot. It does not independently establish legal compliance or improper influence. A reported gift can be genuine before it appears in a quarterly disclosure.
Like-for-like within each period
Compare disclosed funding
Choose up to six party registrations. This view uses official disclosed totals only, independently of the Donations tab’s filters. Later reported receipts, including the £72 million to Reform, appear in the 2026 Donations view. January–June 2026 remains a separate half-year; amounts are not annualised or adjusted for inflation.
| Party | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | Jan–Jun 2026 |
|---|
A zero means no matching disclosed amount in this snapshot. It does not mean the party had no income. Reporting thresholds changed in January 2024; see Method & sources.
A different accounting boundary
Annual party accounts
Central-party records as filed with the Electoral Commission. The organisations consolidated in each account differ. These totals must not be treated as the whole party network, or used as a denominator for party-wide disclosed donations.
| Party / year end | EC income | EC expenditure | Income less expenditure | Source and review |
|---|
Six 2025 income statements were checked against original PDF images. “Statement checked” does not mean CLA audited the accounts. A surplus or deficit alone does not establish financial health. Later restatements are not automatically reflected in earlier exports.
Checks / Decisions / Conflicts
What do parties publish?
Compare the public documents we have reviewed with replies to CLA’s request. These are dated observations about published information, not a rating of legal compliance or the quality of checks in practice.
Loading the policy and response record…
Our questions, selection rule and how to read the statuses
Found a newer policy or an error? Send a policy or correction. Download the full dated evidence record.
Coverage / Accountability / Updates
What the evidence covers
Official coverage ends on 30 June 2026; selected news coverage ends on 9 October. Detailed review loading…
Transparent about what we know
The method is part
of the evidence.
Our aim is to make political finance easier to inspect, using the same rules for every party. This explorer describes official records and separately labelled news reports. A donation, a concentrated funding base or a data discrepancy does not establish improper influence.
A fixed, dated snapshot
12,775 donation records accepted in 2023, 2024, 2025 or January–June 2026. The snapshot was downloaded on 9 October 2026. It covers every party returned by the political-party query, with GB and NI registrations kept separate.
The 1,090 central-account records comprise 360 for 2023, 364 for 2024 and 366 for 2025. An absent filing or donation is not automatically a zero. Candidates, other regulated groups and the general loan register are outside the main dataset. The Tisun case is a separately labelled, targeted loan-register reconciliation.
Disclosures are not all income
The default excludes records classified as Public Funds. It includes disclosed non-cash benefits, trusts, sponsorship and bequests. Interparty transfers remain recorded receipts, so totals are not unique external money entering politics.
Donor concentration is available for official disclosure periods and uses a party’s full disclosed non-public total for that period. It is not calculated for the combined 2026 view because later news coverage is incomplete. Other record filters do not change that denominator. No non-public records gives an unavailable share, rather than 0%.
An ID is not a person
Original EC IDs are the default in the Donations tab. The optional candidate-matching view joins selected normalized full names or unambiguously formatted company numbers. It is a sensitivity scenario, not a verified donor ranking or statistical bound.
There are 162 multi-ID candidate groups across the periods. Reform’s 2025 Harborne pair (£9m and £3m) is corroborated. The new Investigate and Donor histories views use a separate, bounded registry of reviewed record links, including six company identities checked against Companies House. The original candidate scenario remains provisional and is not silently upgraded by this review. Matching can both miss aliases and confuse people with equal names. We do not infer common ownership from surnames or branding.
Keep the boundaries visible
Reporting thresholds for central parties increased from £7,500 to £11,180 from January 2024. Separate lower thresholds and aggregation rules apply. Amounts below reporting thresholds are not fully represented here.
Annual accounts have different consolidation boundaries. Labour’s 2025 PDF and EC summary differ by £411,000 in both income and expenditure because of the presentation of an asset-sale gain; the deficit is unchanged. Open a checked account to inspect its bridge.
05 / NEWS REPORTS
Follow the evidence without counting it twice
The news review selects reports published from 1 January to 9 October 2026 about donations of at least £100,000, including stated aggregates. All parties are eligible under the same threshold. The selected coverage is not a complete press survey or a measure of each party’s newsworthiness. News publication dates and donation timing are separate fields.
We check the named recipient, amount, period and donor against the fixed EC snapshot. A fully matched report links to the existing EC references. A partial match separates the already-counted amount from the unmatched reported balance. We preserve company donors as companies and distinguish bequests, aggregates, pledges and reported receipts. We do not infer an exact legal acceptance date from an announcement.
The two September £36 million Reform donations are labelled as reported received: Reform’s 14 September statement says both arrived in one tranche. That is evidence of the party’s account, not independent verification of a transfer. Restore Britain’s £500,000 announcement includes a £250,000 company donation already in our snapshot and a further £250,000 reported given in August; the later donor entity remains unverified.
A further EC API search for acceptance dates from 1 July to 9 October returned no records at 23:46 UTC on 9 October. This is a point-in-time search result, not proof that money was not received or a filing does not exist. The search URL, retrieval time and hash are preserved in the news dataset. Source links and receipt evidence are available for every report. The default 2026 Donations view adds only reviewed, unmatched 2026 amounts reported as received: the two £36 million Reform gifts and the £250,000 August Restore gift. The other £250,000 Restore entry is already in official records and is not added again. Pledges are excluded. Accepted dates remain blank until verified; news dates are separate. The combined subtotal has incomplete coverage and must not be read as a complete year-to-date ranking. Official subtotals, historical comparisons and concentration figures exclude news-only amounts.
Update · 10 October 2026, version 2.0: A further 50 logged searches added four fully matched reports, bringing the catalogue to 22 items. No additional money enters the totals. Version 1.2 made 2026 the opening view. 2026 is now the default Donations view, with separate official and reported amounts in its chart, records and CSV. Version 1.1 added 18 selected news items: 15 fully matched, one partly matched and two reported received awaiting a match. Official donation and account records remain the 9 October snapshot. Review date uses UK local time; news coverage stops on 9 October. No automatic refresh.
Published limitations / official dataset 1.0
Differences still under investigation
The snapshot CSV totals reconciled with the API at collection (with less than two pence of export rounding in 2023 and 2024). Two historical release comparisons have been investigated further; parts remain unresolved:
| Period, including public funds | Current snapshot | Original release | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | £65,250,583.27 | £64,838,824 | +£411,759.27 |
| April–June 2026 | £17,077,124.27 | £17,085,354 | −£8,229.73 |
For Q2, £5,000 is explained by query scope: a Conservative gift accepted on 1 April is assigned to a Q1 return and excluded by the release’s reporting-quarter filter. A £13,230 Labour shortfall remains unresolved; other differences are within whole-pound release rounding. For 2025, 36 records with later publication dates total £649,186.51, more than the net difference. Removing them leaves a £237,427.24 offset still unexplained. Publication dates are not a complete amendment history. Q1 2026’s current £24,507,274.33 matches the later revised comparator.
The £613,000 Tisun case is now corroborated in aggregate: 33 loan conversions and 33 cash-labelled donation entries match by participant, date and amount frequencies. Reform’s accounts also reconcile £270,000 repaid against the £883,000 opening loan. The conversion is financial support without fresh cash at that date. Repeated amounts prevent unique record pairings, so none are asserted. Download the reconciliation, references and remaining questions ↓.
Inspect the primary sources
- Electoral Commission registers ↗
- 2025 donation release ↗
- Q2 2026 donation release ↗
- Commission guidance on identity and disclosure limits ↗
- Source URLs, retrieval times and SHA-256 hashes ↓
Each donation has its EC reference; each account links to the original PDF. Live source records may have changed since our snapshot.
Reproduce, challenge, correct
All calculations use integer pence. Downloads contain the selected records, filters, snapshot date and source links. Grouping uses EC IDs or the labelled candidate scenario; top 1/5/10 shares sum the largest groups and divide by the disclosed non-public total.
Derived public data excludes donor addresses and postcodes. We preserve original source versions and will record corrections with the affected figure, reason and date.
Suggest a correction or send evidence ↗
Explorer version 2.2 · Questions, briefings and party-policy tracker added 14 October 2026; finance data unchanged · News review: 10 October 2026 · Official snapshot: 9 October 2026 · No automatic refresh. This descriptive explorer has not received independent forensic or editorial audit.
Go behind the figures
Inspect the method, read the findings or challenge a record.
Publisher disclosure, 10 October 2026: CLA’s founder is a Labour Party member. CLA has received no money or material support from anyone other than its founder. Read the declaration and its limits. External review is on hold.