Financial Report 2025

Financial Report: AGM 2025

LME’s income and expenditure are healthy. Once again, and for the third year running, our membership and donation income was higher than expected. We ended the year in a strong position with a surplus of £41,000 due to another remarkable year of fundraising and continued membership performance. However, if we are to continue to have two staff members, we will have to increase the number of our members and/or maintain a good level of donation income.

An unexpected expenditure in 2024 was the June Parliamentary Reception celebrating the cohort of LME MPs. Neil Kinnock and Stella Creasy hosted a packed Reception with members from both Houses, and our guest speakers included Nick Thomas-Symonds, the German Ambassador, Mariella Frostrup and the General Secretary of the Musicians Union, Naomi Pohl. The event cost £4,300, of which £3,500 was covered by one generous donation from Sovreign Strategies.

Our presence at the Party Conference was more expensive than previously as we decided to hold our fringe within the security area. We worked in partnership with the Party of European Socialists, the Horticultural Trade Association, the Brussels-based organisation Encompass, and the Labour Party Irish Society, thus making this year’s Conference very cost-effective. 

For 2025, we have ambitious targets, both to increase the number of our members so that we can fund our core activities through our membership income and to increase donations we receive. We also hope to fund other activities such as a greater presence at Labour’s Regional Conferences.

David Poyser, LME National Treasurer

 

Notes on the Above

  1. Some of the donations were earmarked for specific items of spending, which we feel we would not have been able to fund without the generosity of donors
  2. In 2023, the LME Commissioned an opinion poll from Deltapoll, which achieved some press publicity. It was (largely) paid for by a donor in 2023, and we paid Deltapoll on Jan 24. This appears under “Elections and Misc” in 2024.
  3. We receive an invoice from Labour HQ for our affiliation to various constituencies and pay it on receipt. There is disparity over the two years; in Jan 2024, we paid £4,300 as our annual fee to affiliate to constituencies (for 2023) and further £1740 in December 2024.
  4. The £5,536 spent on Meetings in 2024 was a combination of funding for the House of Commons Meeting (funded by a generous donor) and travel/hotel expenses associated with a fundraising meeting in Brussels

We would like to take this opportunity to once again thank our Membership Secretary, Martin Phillips, for auditing these accounts.