Voluntary donations to pay off national debt reach highest in a decade

The Treasury office

Public donations to pay off the national debt have hit their highest level in at least a decade amid growing concern about the UK’s soaring debt mountain.

Members of the public handed almost £700,000 over to the Government through six individual bequests and donations last year, according to Debt Management Office (DMO) figures obtained via a Freedom of Information request.

The amount for the 2023-24 financial year was the highest in at least a decade, with the biggest single payment to help pay off Britain’s £2.65 trillion debt pile coming from a £500,000 bequest, according to the DMO, which did not provide names of individual donors.

The money received represents a big jump compared with the previous year, when six other donations and bequests totalled just £47,000.

Britain’s debt pile soared following pandemic lockdowns that saw Rishi Sunak subsidise the wages and energy bills of millions of workers and households whilst then chancellor.

Public debt has climbed from 85.2pc in 2020 to 97.1pc today and is only on course to start falling in the second half of this decade, according to official forecasts.

While these donations will make very little difference to overall public borrowing and debt, the number of payments, as well as amounts received, have fluctuated over the past decade.

Donations and bequests ramped up in 2020 during the first lockdown when there were 17 individual payments totalling £575,000.

The Government accepts as little as a penny in contributions to reduce the national debt, which one person did donate in 2016-17 when Philip Hammond took over as chancellor from George Osborne. That year, another individual made a donation of 3p.

The DMO states that “cash donations and cash proceeds from bequests and other gifts are used to purchase, and periodically cancel, gilts from the wider market, thus reducing the amount of outstanding debt accordingly.”

These figures are separate from donations and bequests sent to the Treasury, which received 77 payments between January 2014 to February 2024, totalling almost £1.6m.

These payments are put “towards public expenditure”, though the Treasury says “gifts cannot be ring-fenced for a specific purpose or assigned to a specific area of public spending”.

Despite the current state of the public finances, the Treasury does little to advertise the opportunity to donate.

Nigel Huddlestone, the financial secretary to the Treasury, recently highlighted how Britons could hand their spare cash to boost the public purse in a post on social media site X, providing a link to the Treasury’s website.

He suggested he would “happily write a thank you letter” to one millionaire who suggested he wanted to pay more tax.

Previous reports indicate the biggest single contribution to pay off the national debt on record is a £2m bequest made in 2000, just before the dot-com bubble burst.

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