Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

How ordinary people are priced out of Parliament by the most expensive job interview on earth

Could you afford to go into politics? Chances are that the answer is no, unless you’ve got a spare £10,000 knocking around. In a survey that is being published later this week, I’ve found that candidates in general elections are having to stump up tens of thousands of pounds of their own money just to stand. This is not the money spent on campaigning, which is funded by the parties and donors to individual campaigns. It’s the personal expenditure that comes with having to take up to two years off work to campaign, moving to the constituency if you are not local, travelling around the constituency, attending events and so on.

My survey, the most extensive of its kind, looked at the personal financial cost of standing for 532 candidates who stood in the 2015 election.

The average cost across all seats, whether marginal, safe or a total no-hope for the candidate in question, was £11,118, but the cost naturally rose for anyone standing in a marginal. Conservative candidates who won their seat spent a staggering £121,467. This was so high because a number of candidates left very highly-paid jobs and bought properties in the seat. But at least they then got the job, whereas their candidates who failed to win still lost an average of £18,701.

The Tories may be considered the party of the rich, but Labour, which prides itself on being the party of the people, still saw its candidates in marginal seats spending an average of £19,022 to win, and the considerably higher sum of £35,843 to lose. Their successful safe seat colleagues still lost £13,617 on average. And while the Liberal Democrats like to think they’ve worked out a better way of doing things than the two big parties in British politics, that doesn’t extend to the demands they place on their candidates, who lost on average £26,608.

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