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Money & Influence

The £1m Charity With No Staff Behind Hope Not Hate

5 min read
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The Desk

Hope Not Hate’s charitable trust raised £984,868 last year. It has no employees. Its single largest outgoing was a grant of £787,858 to the campaigning company Hope Not Hate Limited — the organisation that runs the investigations, briefs the police and tells Westminster what to worry about.

A million pounds. No staff. One giant cheque to the company that decides who counts as an extremist in this country. The people lecturing us about “hate” have built a machine that exists to be funded — and the filings prove it.

The shell and the company

Hope Not Hate Charitable Trust — now renamed HOPE Unlimited Charitable Trust — described its own role after a 2021 strategic review as “primarily a fundraising and grant giving trust”. Its accounts for the year ended 31 December 2024 confirm it: zero employees, no staff costs, no programmes delivered directly.

The people are at Hope Not Hate Limited, the private company limited by guarantee incorporated in 2012. Its accounts show 17 average employees and a grant of £787,858 from the trust “to carry out their assignments”.

That is roughly 80 per cent of the trust’s income flowing to the company in a single year. The trust raises; the company campaigns; the trustees “oversee”. Call it what it is: a tax-efficient conduit that lets donors fund a political campaigning outfit through a charity’s door.

The donor list

The trust’s accounts name the grants behind the £984,868. The largest single named source is not a foundation with a public face — it is a corporate vehicle:

DonorAmount
NPT Transatlantic Ltd£208,000
Paul Hamlyn Foundation£63,000
This Day Foundation£60,000
AB Charitable Trust£50,667
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation£40,000
Barrow Cadbury Trust£13,000
Toms Trust (Rathbone)£10,000

The £208,000 from a company that does not trade

NPT Transatlantic Limited is registered at Companies House as a “non-trading company”. Its own filing states there is no registrable person of significant control — no beneficial owner on the public record.

It is, in fact, the UK arm of the National Philanthropic Trust, the American donor-advised fund provider. Donor-advised funds work like this: an individual or family gives money to the fund, receives the tax relief, and directs grants to charities later. NPT Transatlantic’s own marketing is candid about the point:

“A gift to NPT Transatlantic allows you to have the option to remain anonymous in your giving if desired.”

So £208,000 — more than a fifth of the trust’s annual income — arrived from a structure whose entire purpose is to keep the donor’s name off the record. The money is real, the charity is real, the campaigning is real. Who paid for it is, by design, not.

The next time a Hope Not Hate staffer calls you a racist on television, remember this: their biggest single cheque comes from a company that exists so that its donors never have to be named. That is the transparency they preach.

A regulator that noticed

The Charity Commission spent years complaining that the public could not tell the charity from the company. It opened a case in July 2025 after “repeated complaints across several years”, and closed it in January 2026 only after the trustees changed the charity’s name, added three independent trustees and scrubbed the website.

The Commission’s own statement was unimpressed: it was “critical of how long it took the charity to take these steps”, and noted “limited action had been taken at the point of opening its most recent case in July 2025”. The trustees also pledged to hire a paid administrator and a grants manager with no existing role at Hope Not Hate Limited — a quiet admission of how entangled the two entities had become.

What the money buys

The trust’s report says the £787,858 grant funds the policy and engagement team, the research team, community organising and education. During the August 2024 riots, the report notes, the team “directly advised No10, the Home Secretary and the Secretary of State”. The research team briefed police and identified Andrew McIntyre, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to seven years.

That work is real, and it has produced real convictions. None of this is a suggestion that the campaigning is improper.

But the money structure is worth stating plainly: a tax-efficient charity with no staff, channelling four-fifths of its income into a private company, funded in its largest single tranche by a vehicle built to hide its donors — while the regulator spent years extracting a name change.

That is the machine. Follow the money. And never let them tell you the people pointing at it are the problem.

Sources