The £100,000 question: the new donation rules, and who they hit

What's actually changing

• The one-year residence rule (new): a British citizen who has been living abroad and moves back cannot donate more than £100,000 a year until they've been UK-resident for a minimum period — closing the "fly home and write the cheque" route around the overseas cap.
• Already in force (backdated to 25 March 2026): British citizens living overseas are capped at £100,000 a year, and cryptocurrency donations to parties are banned.
• Company donations: assessed against post-tax profits over the previous five years, not revenue — so shell companies with turnover but no real UK business can't be donation vehicles.
• Candidates: must prove pre-candidacy funding came from legitimate sources, and declare donations above £2,230 received before officially becoming a candidate.

The measures come as amendments to the Representation of the People Bill, back in the Commons on 14 July, and implement the Rycroft review of political funding, commissioned after warnings about foreign-state interference in British elections.

Who it hits — the numbers

The residence rule lands directly on Reform UK's two biggest backers. Electoral Commission records show Christopher Harborne — a British crypto and aviation billionaire based in Thailand — gave Reform £12m in 2025 (including a £9m single gift, the largest to any UK party by a living person) and £3m more in January; Ben Delo, a crypto billionaire in Hong Kong, gave £4m between January and March and has said publicly he'll move back to Britain to keep contributing. Under the new rule, both would be limited to £100,000 a year for their first year back — a reduction of more than 97% on recent giving.

The case for

• Foreign-influence risk is the stated driver: the Rycroft review was commissioned in response to state-level meddling threats, and money routed through overseas residents or shell companies is the classic vector.
• The company-profits test targets a documented loophole — donations from firms with no genuine UK trading footprint.
• Most comparable democracies restrict foreign-linked political money more tightly than the UK historically has; ministers call the package "world-leading".

The case against

• Reform's Zia Yusuf accuses Labour of "choking off legal funding for its main rival" — and the optics are real: a governing party is writing rules whose largest immediate effect falls on the donors of the party leading the polls.
• Both named donors are British citizens — critics ask how capping citizens' donations addresses foreign interference, the review's stated target.
• The £100,000 threshold and the residence period are choices, not principles — set differently, the same framework would catch different donors, which is precisely why cross-party consensus on funding rules has historically been preferred to single-party design.

What it means for the next election

Money isn't votes — but it buys ground game, and Reform has been converting record donations into organisation while polling in the mid-20s. If the amendments pass on 14 July, the party's two deepest wells shrink to £100,000 a year each at exactly the moment an early election would be most valuable to it. Watch for: the residence period's final length, any legal challenge, and whether other large donors restructure giving through UK-profitable companies — the route the five-year profits test is designed to police.

Sources: government announcement of amendments to the Representation of the People Bill (6 July 2026); Electoral Commission donation records; BBC News reporting; the Rycroft review of political funding. Figures as reported at publication; we'll update if the amendments change at committee stage.