There is a family foundation in Britain with charitable objects about the arts, education and youth, a £918 million investment portfolio, and a grant-making strategy that reads like a movement’s war chest. Its own website says its vision is “a world in which everyone is free to move, and no one is forced to move”. Its own published grant data shows £43.5 million poured into migration campaigning and advocacy since 2015. Its own funding criteria name “dismantling the hostile environment” and “mainstreaming progressive narratives” as things it pays for. And it refuses — explicitly — to fund basic service delivery like CV writing and English classes.
That foundation is the Paul Hamlyn Foundation (PHF). And here is the thing about this story: we did not have to dig through leaked documents to find any of it. It is all on the public record — the Charity Commission register, the foundation’s own annual reports, its own open 360Giving data. The migration machine publishes its own receipts.
The numbers, from its own filings
- £918 million portfolio (the foundation’s own description of 2022/23, up from £780m three years earlier); long-term investments of £929.27m at 31 March 2025 on the charity register
- £50.69 million income in FY2024/25 (£72.02m the year before)
- £43,574,896 across 443 grants to migration causes, 2015–2025, per PHF’s own 360Giving dataset — more than £5m a year in the recent cycle
- Grants are 3–5 years, and the criteria explicitly prioritise “structural change” and “shifts in power”
Who gets the money? The foundation’s own data names the grantees: Civic Power Fund £1,186,150 lifetime; IPPR £762,554; Migrants Organise £984,700; Refugee Action £1,339,500; Detention Action £565,000; JCWI £515,000; Here for Good £365,000; Black Lives Matter UK £180,000 in 2025; Stop Funding Hate’s Reliable Media operation £200,000 in 2025; London Renters Union £180,000 in 2025. Safe Passage International, Right to Remain, the European Network on Statelessness, Asylos — the full infrastructure of the asylum-advocacy movement, all on one grant list.
The refusal that tells you everything
PHF does not fund English classes. It does not fund CV-writing workshops. It says so itself: its Migration Fund philosophy explicitly refuses “basic service delivery” — the kind of practical help a refugee might actually need — and instead funds campaigning, lawyering, “movement building” and narrative work. The strategy is not to help people adjust to Britain. The strategy is to change Britain’s laws, its enforcement machinery and its public conversation. That is not charity as most people understand the word. It is political infrastructure with a charity number.
One endowment, two machines
Here is where the map gets interesting. PHF sits on both sides of the Left’s funding web. Its own data shows £585,000 over four grants to Hope Not Hate’s charitable trust — the “anti-hate” industry — while its migration grants fund the very movement HNH’s narrative apparatus exists alongside. One £918m endowment, feeding both the counter-extremism machine and the migration machine. When you hear the “compassionate narrative” about asylum, remember that part of it is being written by an endowment whose stated aim is to dismantle the policies you voted for.
There are also structural questions the foundation has not answered. Its trustee board includes Martha Beaton Mackenzie — the executive director of Civic Power Fund, which has received £1,186,150 from PHF across nine grants. A grantee’s chief executive sits on the funder’s board. Another trustee, Marcus Davey CBE, was nominated for a Labour peerage in July 2026 — while the foundation funds explicitly political campaigning grantees including Black Lives Matter UK and the London Renters Union. And the £63k PHF grant to Hope Not Hate’s charity in FY2024, confirmed in HNH’s own accounts, does not appear in PHF’s published grants dataset at all — a publication gap we are still chasing.
The defence
PHF would say — fairly — that it is one of the most transparent grantmakers in Britain: it publishes its grants openly on 360Giving, which is exactly how its strategy is visible to anyone who cares to look. It would say philanthropy has always funded causes, and that funding campaigns for social change is legitimate. And it would say the migration figures represent work it is proud of. All of that may be true. None of it changes what the record shows: a £918m foundation, registered for the arts and education, spending tens of millions on dismantling the country’s border enforcement and shaping its migration narrative.
We are not the ones who drew that conclusion. The foundation drew it, in its own grant criteria, on its own website, in its own filings. Follow the money — it explains the narrative.
Sources
- Paul Hamlyn Foundation Charity Commission register entry, charity number 1102927 (income £50,690,127 FY2024/25; investments £929.27m) — accessed 2026-08-17
- PHF 360Giving grants dataset (migration spend £43,574,896 across 443 grants 2015–2025; grantees incl. Civic Power Fund £1,186,150, IPPR £762,554, HNH £585,000) — verified 2026-08-16, dataset at https://www.360giving.org (see wiki entities/paul-hamlyn-foundation.md)
- PHF website, Migration Fund philosophy (“a world in which everyone is free to move, and no one is forced to move”; refusal of basic service delivery; “dismantling the hostile environment”; “mainstreaming progressive narratives”) — accessed 2026-08-16
- HNH Charitable Trust accounts, FY2024 (PHF restricted grant £63,000), note 3 — Charity Commission register (verified 2026-08-15)
- @shadowcanman X audit, 15 August 2026 — https://x.com/shadowcanman/status/2088749221549576538 (lead; figures cross-checked against primary records; his “£35m+ by 2024” cut-off understates PHF’s own 360Giving total)
- GOV.UK, Political Peerages list July 2026 (Marcus Davey CBE nomination)