The Cost Of A General Election

When voters go to the polls on 8 June, millions of pounds will have been spent on getting them there

How much do we pay for an election?

This one is expected to cost the taxpayer at least £143m. The 2010 election (the last for which an official figure is available) cost more than £113m to administer, about £28.7m of which went on distributing mail (each official candidate is entitled to one free postage of a leaflet per residential address). Other big-cost items are the hiring and manning of 50,000 polling stations; the provision of postal votes and polling cards; and the counting of more than 46 million votes.

And how much do the parties spend?

Not much by American standards. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump between them spent £1.75bn on their campaigns. In Britain, by contrast, campaigns are relatively short and spending is strictly limited by laws dating back to the 1880s, to ensure that the rich can’t “buy” the election. That limit is determined by the number of seats a party contests: in this election, if a party were to contest all 650 constituencies (which none of them do), the limit would be £19.5m. In addition, each candidate is given a fixed spending limit during the campaign period: this year, it’s £8,700 – plus 6p per voter in urban seats, or 9p per voter in rural ones. In the 2015 election, the total spend of all the parties fell just shy of £60m, some £37m of which was spent by the parties’ central offices, and the rest by local candidates. The Tories spent £15.6m, Labour £12.1m, the Lib Dems £3.5m, UKIP £2.9m, and the SNP £1.5m.

Where does most of the money come from?