The UK’s richest people gave almost £8bn to charity in 2023, latest figures show.

High Value Giving, published today by the Charities Aid Foundation, says the country’s wealthiest 1 per cent donated a total of £7.96bn to charitable causes, equivalent to 0.4 per cent of their combined investable assets.

CAF said that separate research for its UK Giving report showed that the wider UK public gave an estimated £13.9bn to good causes in 2023, equivalent to 1.6 per cent of their income.

The report says that if high-net-worth individuals gave 1 per cent of their investable assets, it would create an additional £12bn for UK charities.

It estimates there are almost 537,000 HNW individuals in the UK, defined as those who have at least £1m in investable assets, excluding the value of their main property and pension funds.

It says these people have combined investable assets worth £2tn, with about one in 10 of those individuals having between £5m and £30m in such assets.

The report reveals that causes supported by the UK’s wealthiest people are significantly different to those supported by the rest of the public.

The most popular cause for wealthy donors is education, supported by six in 10 HNW individuals. But only 4 per cent of the rest of the population donate to education causes.

And while 26 per cent of HNW individuals donate to arts and culture, just 3 per cent of the rest of the population do the same.

The report says that, given the estimated £5.5tn that is expected to transfer from the post-World War II generation to younger generations in the UK over the next 24 years, the next generation is predicted to be the most significant charitable donors in history.

This means charities must “keep up with the changing landscape of charitable giving”, the report says.

“Given the intergenerational transfer of wealth, it is important for charity fundraisers to understand trends in high-net-worth giving, how donors are choosing to give, such as through donor advised funds, and the causes that they care about,” it says.

CAF says the government should draw up a national strategy for philanthropy and charitable giving.

Edward Garrett, head of private clients at CAF, said: “There is considerable untapped potential for philanthropy to contribute towards tackling local, national and global challenges. Donors, particularly among the next generation, are increasingly considering their giving as part of the spectrum of capital they can invest within the broader impact economy.

“The government can take steps to harness this and renew Britain’s culture of giving to strengthen civil society for the future, with high-net-worth individuals and professional advisers playing a leading role.”

CAF commissioned the wealth intelligence company Altrata to produce estimates of the size of the UK’s wealthy population and philanthropic giving by those people.

Altrata based its work on publicly-available information of about 3,000 wealthy people in the UK before projecting those findings to the wider UK HNW population.