The Green party may be within reach of overtaking Labour as the UK's largest political party by membership, according to accounts published by the Electoral Commission on Thursday, which show Labour's membership fell by more than a fifth during 2025 to its lowest level in a decade.
Labour's audited figures put its membership at 264,754 at the end of December 2025, down from 333,235 a year earlier — a fall of 68,481, or 20.6%, equivalent to one member leaving roughly every eight minutes. The party's income from donations dropped from £39.4m in the general election year of 2024 to £6.5m, a decline of almost 84%. Membership fee income fell by nearly 17% and affiliate income by around 4%.
A Green party spokesperson said its own membership had "quadrupled" in the year since Zack Polanski was elected leader in September 2025, when the party's total stood at roughly 66,000. The Greens announced they had passed 200,000 members on 1 March 2026 and 215,000 the following week, after Hannah Spencer's by-election victory in Gorton and Denton. The party's website now urges recruits to join "the biggest we have ever been and getting close to overtaking Labour".
The comparison is not a like-for-like one. Labour's figure is an audited year-end total filed with the regulator, while the Green totals are self-reported and continuously updated. Parties are under no legal obligation to publish membership statistics, there is no uniformly agreed definition of a member, and no independent body monitors the numbers.
Labour has lost roughly half its members since its 2019 peak of 532,046.
The accounts were published as part of a release covering 30 parties and accounting units with income or expenditure above £250,000 in the 2025 calendar year. Jackie Killeen, the Electoral Commission's director of electoral administration and regulation, said: "We are committed to maintaining transparency in political funding." Early analysis of the wider release points to a surge in donations to Reform UK and a decline for the Conservatives.
The figures land three weeks into Andy Burnham's premiership. Burnham was elected Labour leader on 16 July and became prime minister on 20 July following Sir Keir Starmer's resignation, after a year in which the party lost control of 35 councils and nearly 1,500 councillors at the 2026 local elections. Labour's accounts flag a challenging financial environment, with pressure on operations and delivery and a stated focus on growing and diversifying income streams.
Elsewhere on Thursday, Reform UK's home affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, set out an illegal working crackdown at a press conference in London. The package includes a so-called "Deliveroo Law" imposing fines of 10% of global revenues on companies employing illegal workers, with chief executives personally and criminally liable, and national licensing for vape shops capped at 1,000 premises nationwide. Yusuf said the cap would "instantly reduce" the number of vape shops by 70%, and that "any unlicensed shop will be immediately closed and its assets seized".
Reform would also establish a central prosecution fund for local authorities pursuing employers of illegal workers, create multi-agency enforcement teams with powers to serve immediate deportation notices, and require anyone using a vehicle for commercial delivery to hold a full British driving licence. Yusuf cited National Crime Agency estimates that £1bn is laundered annually through such businesses.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, remain under pressure over Kemi Badenoch's defence of the appointment of Joshua Bonehill-Paine, a former far-right activist convicted of inciting racial hatred in 2015, as an unpaid adviser to the party's culture and integration commission. He withdrew on Wednesday as the party's candidate for Crewkerne South. The Liberal Democrat MP for Yeovil, Adam Dance, said the withdrawal "should never have got to this point".