The Electoral Commission publishes a register of donations to MPs and political parties. It is public information, available on the Commission's website. It is also, in its raw form, almost impossible to analyse: thousands of entries, inconsistently formatted, with no easy way to identify patterns across donors, recipients or time periods.
Over the past year, Guardian In's data team has cleaned, standardised and analysed the complete register of donations to sitting MPs from 2015 to 2025. The dataset covers 650 MPs and more than 180,000 individual donation records. Here is what we found.
The concentration of funding is striking. The top 10 per cent of donors by total amount account for 73 per cent of all donations to MPs. A relatively small number of individuals and organisations are responsible for the overwhelming majority of political funding at the individual MP level. This is not, in itself, illegal or even unusual — it reflects the economics of political fundraising. But it means that the interests of a small group of large donors are, in a straightforward financial sense, more represented in the political system than the interests of everyone else.
The sectoral breakdown is also revealing. Financial services companies and their executives are the largest single source of donations to MPs, accounting for 28 per cent of total donations by value. Property and construction companies account for a further 18 per cent. These are also the two sectors that have been most directly affected by government policy in the period covered by our analysis — through financial regulation, planning reform and housing policy. We are not suggesting that donations buy policy outcomes. We are noting that the correlation exists and that it has not previously been quantified at this level of detail.