A donor name is not a person

A donation row names a donor and a recipient as the Electoral Commission published them. The name is text. It is not a person page. People on this index come from published roles and identifiers already attached. We do not mint a Person from a donor name, even when the spelling matches a councillor or an MP.

The Electoral page is where those rows are searched. Donations, loans, and lobbying returns are three holdings. Do not add the counts into one figure unless you mean to, and if you do, say which you added. The Commons register of interests is not in those tables. It sits on the member, on Parliament.

Some rows print a company number. The number is the identifier. The name beside it is still a name. How to search UK political donations is why you follow the number and stop at the name. Opening the company record needs an account. Reading the number on the public row does not.

A search with no rows means nothing matched the words in the rows we hold. It does not mean the Commission never recorded the gift. Check the recipient spelling. Try the number if you have it. Then cite the row you opened, not the search that failed.

The same letters can appear in a minute, on a donation, and on a filing. That is three strings. Only a shared published number attaches two of them. A surname is not a number. Do not brief a person as the donor because the surname matched. Brief the row, with the donor string in quotes, as the Commission printed it.

Search on this desk stays public, including a query. It is not a finding about the donor or the recipient. The publisher is the Commission. Institrace is how you found the line.

If you publish a table, publish the columns you actually have. Donor string, recipient string, amount, date, and company number when it is on the row. Do not add a column called person. You do not have a person. Do not add a column called council merely because the recipient's words resemble one. Search again if you think it is a council, and keep the result as a result. A regulated donee and a local authority can share a place name without sharing a file. The donation remains a Commission row. The authority's minutes remain the authority's minutes. Readers can hold both ideas. They cannot hold a merged cell that pretends the two files were one.

Loans are not donations that have not been counted yet. Lobbying returns are not a third way of writing a gift. If your story is about a gift, stay in the donation rows. If the story is about a loan, open the loan rows and say loan. Mixing the words makes a regulated return sound like cash. The columns are there to stop that. Use them in the sentence: amount, date, donor string, recipient string, and number if present.

A regulated donee can share words with a council. The council page will not grow a donation total because of that similarity. Search the recipient. Read the rows. Stop. If you also need the council's minutes, open the council as a separate citation. Two publishers, two notes. The Electoral desk will still be there when you come back. It does not expire because you opened a council. Write the date you searched as well as the date on the row. The holding grows. A row you saw in September may sit beside new rows later. Your citation is the row, not the whole result set. If you counted rows, say the day of the count.