In brief:
- MPs received £6.7mn in donations and hospitality during the 2017 to 2019 Parliament.
- Around £1.7mn of these relate to the 2019 Conservative Party leader election. These donations have already been widely scrutinised. So, in this article, we focus on the remaining £5mn of donations/hospitality.
- On average, male MPs received £8,900 in donations and hospitality. Female MPs received £5,400. That means male MPs received more support for office costs, more tickets to sports events and more funding for overseas travel.
- On average, Liberal Democrat MPs received three times more in donations and hospitality than MPs from any other party.
- Boris Johnson received £200,000 in donations and hospitality – more than any other MP in the 2017-2019 Parliament. That rises to £890,000 if donations to support his campaign to be Conservative leader are included.
Last week we published an analysis of the £8.4mn that MPs earned in addition to their parliamentary salaries in the 2017 to 2019 Parliament. In this article, we turn our focus to the £6.7 million in donations and hospitality those MPs received during the same period.
MPs must declare any donations and hospitality they receive with a value of more than £500. Donations are used to fund office staffing costs, party leadership campaigns and political campaigns more generally. Hospitality includes tickets to events in the UK, and travel/accommodation costs incurred when travelling to overseas events.
Of the total £6.7mn in donations/hospitality, around £1.7mn related to cash donations received by candidates in the 2019 Conservative Party leader election. As widely noted in the press, Boris Johnson significantly outraised his competitors (Figure 1). Sajid Javid raised the second largest amount, following a late surge 40 days into the campaign (Figure 2). By comparison, the two candidates in the 2019 Liberal Democrat leader election raised a total of just £9,000.
The data cited in the remainder of this article EXCLUDES donations related to leadership campaigns. They have already been widely scrutinised. And – as they apply only to certain MPs from two parties – it would not be appropriate to include them when analysing differences between parties and gender, for example.
We’ve divided the remaining £5mn of donations and hospitality into 5 categories (Figure 3). They are:
- Funding of international travel (e.g. to attend an overseas conference)
- Domestic hospitality (e.g. tickets to sports matches)
- Office costs (e.g. donation to pay for researchers or office space)
- Other known (Donations which do not fall into the 3 main categories above, and are too small to analyse as distinct categories. They include, for example, donations to fund events and domestic travel)
- Unknown (no description provided by the MP)
For all 5 categories, male MPs on average received more than female MPs (Figure 4). In practice, that means men received more support for office costs, more tickets to sports events and more funding for overseas travel. This echoes the findings of our piece on additional income, which noted a gender pay gap.
MPs from ethnic minorities received roughly the same amount in donations/hospitality as other MPs of the same gender. On average, male MPs from ethnic minorities received £9,000 compared to £8,900 for other men. Female MPs from ethnic minorities received an average of £6,700 compared to £5,250 for other women. We have not controlled for factors other than gender (e.g. party or experience). And, as explained above, this excludes sums raised in party leadership campaigns.
On average, Liberal Democrat MPs received far more in donations and hospitality than MPs from other parties (Figure 5). But, individually, LibDems are rarely amongst the largest recipients of donations/hospitality (Figure 6).
Boris Johnson received £200,000 in donations and hospitality – more than any other MP. If you include donations received to support his campaign to be Conservative leader, this amount rises to £890,000. As noted in last week’s article, he also earned more income than any other MP from additional work outside of Parliament.
In our next article we will look at the companies and individuals making donations, providing hospitality and making payments to MPs.
Notes on data
- All the data used to calculate the numbers and charts cited in this article is available in the spreadsheet below. We will make our source code fully available once we have published our full series of articles on donations, hospitality and payments received by MPs.
- Some donations are received periodically over time – for example, a donor might fund the monthly salary of a researcher for an MP. We calculate the monthly value of such donations, and include them up to 31 October 2019. This is consistent with how we calculated second job salaries in our previous article. For lump-sum donations, we include those received prior to 30 September 2019. There is often a lag between receipt of donation and the MP registering the donation. But, based on typical registration practices, our sample should include most donations actually received prior to 30 September. Hence we chose this as our cut-off point to enable consistent comparison of MPs.
- We only include donations and hospitality received after 7th June 2017 – i.e. the start of the last Parliament.
- To identify BAME MPs, we used the list prepared by www.BritishFuture.org
- This data has been prepared on a best-endeavours basis. As the original dataset is highly unstructured it is possible that, in places, our code has incorrectly identified donation amounts.
- When using this data or the charts above, cite www.datalobo.com.
- The raw, unstructured data can be downloaded from www.membersinterests.org.uk