Rich people, foundations and companies in the UK donated a record £1.83bn to charities last year, as high profile philanthropy schemes such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge have encouraged more wealthy individuals to give away a portion of their fortunes.
Research by Coutts, the private bank used by the royal family, and researchers at the University of Kent found that 310 UK people and organisations made donations of £1m or more last year. The number of £1m-plus donations increased from 189 in in 2007, when Coutts produced the first edition of the Million Pound Donors report.
The biggest single donation last year was made by Lord Sainsbury, the Labour peer and great grandson of the supermarket chain’s founder John James Sainsbury, who donated £40.5m to his charity the Gatsby Charitable Foundation.
Sainsbury founded Gatsby, which is named after one of his favourite books, with £5 of his Sainsbury supermarket shares in 1967. Since then, he has given the foundation more than £1bn, which has been dispersed to charities focusing on education, science, public policy and the arts.
The Gatsby foundation donated £82m for the construction of the University of Cambridge plant science Sainsbury laboratory and £45m to Cambridge University botanic garden in 2005. Sainsbury was elected chancellor of the university, where he read history and psychology, in 2011.
The former science minister was the biggest single donor to the campaign to keep Britain in the European Union, donating £4.2m to the remain side, and he donated £2.1m to Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
His family are the 217th richest in the UK with a £560m fortune, according to the Sunday Times rich list. In 2013, Sainsbury and his wife joined the Giving Pledge, the Gates and Buffett-led promise for the world’s richest people to give at least half of their wealth to charity. “The approach of my wife, Suzie, and I to philanthropy is very simple. We do not believe that spending any more money on ourselves or our family would add anything to our happiness. However, using it to support social progress we have found deeply fulfilling,” Sainsbury wrote in his pledge commitment letter.
The Coutts report said publicity surrounding the giving pledge had encouraged other wealthy people and companies to increase charitable giving.
More than 170 of the world’s richest people, including Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg and George Lucas, have signed up. Gates said the pledge was “about building on a wonderful tradition of philanthropy that will ultimately help the world become a much better place”.
Earlier this year, Gates donated $4.6bn (£3.5bn) to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the biggest gift so far this year. The Gateses have donated $35bn since 1994.
Of the £1.83bn donated in the UK last year, £1bn came from foundations, £511m from companies and £313m from individuals. The amount donated directly by individuals decreased by more than £100m compared with 2015 and was half of that donated in 2007. The number of people donating £1m or more was 43, down from 48 last year but up from the 42 in 2007.
Among the individual donors were golfer Rory McIlroy, designer Sir Terence Conran, Gordon Roddick, the husband of late Body Shop founder Anita, and Liccy Dahl, the wife of the late author Roald.
McIlory donated all of his €666,000 prize for winning the Irish Open to his Rory Foundation, which aims to support children’s charities and “help kids live better lives”. “I know I’d like to be remembered as for my talents as a golfer, but I also intend to leave my mark through the Rory Foundation,” McIlroy said.
