Leaky Pipes: What’s wrong with donations data
As part of our WhoFundsThem work we want to make better information available about money in politics.
Last year we released a report Beyond Transparency – looking at the UK Parliament’s register of financial interests, and wider arguments about how we fund politics.
Today we’re releasing a follow-up report: Leaky Pipes (read online or download as a PDF). This covers what we’ve learned (and what we think could be better) about the systems for reporting election donations. You can also re-watch the launch event on YouTube.
This report started because we were a bit confused about the different ways data could be declared and reported. And to be honest, we’re still a bit confused – but we have more diagrams to explain why.
What we explore in this report are the multiple routes for declarations, different thresholds for disclosure, and uneven public access. This makes cross-checking difficult and leaves gaps where information can vanish depending on how a donation flows (direct to candidate vs via party), how large it is, and whether the candidate wins.
The result is that candidates and agents face complex reporting requirements, electoral administrators hold paper-heavy returns that are hard to inspect, and the public (and sometimes regulators) struggle to build a consistent picture of who is funding whom.
From this, we’ve made recommendations on making reporting easier to do correctly, faster to publish, and simpler to scrutinise:
- Move to a “report once” process that informs multiple systems
- Harmonise public disclosure at £1,000
- Create a comprehensive public database above that threshold
- Create a safe private database below the threshold for research and evaluation purposes
Building on this, we suggest three practical avenues for follow-up work that would strengthen the case for reform and help design better systems:
- User research and prototyping to map how a “report once” service would work for candidates, agents, administrators, Parliament, and the Electoral Commission.
- Sampling local authority returns to demonstrate the scale and type of inconsistencies between routes.
- Exploring a data-sharing agreement for controlled research access to the Electoral Commission’s small-donor/return data.
The report can be read online or downloaded as a PDF.