Patriotic Millionaires Survey: Who’s Actually Answering?

The group criticises Henley & Partners’ “misleading” data… but their own methodology raises serious questions

Introduction

A survey published today claims that three-quarters of UK millionaires would happily pay more tax.

The research, conducted by Survation on behalf of Patriotic Millionaires UK, has generated headlines in the Guardian and will doubtless be cited in policy debates for months to come.

But there’s a problem.

A significant one…

Who verified that the respondents were actually millionaires?

The answer, as far as can be determined from Survation’s published methodology, is ‘nobody’.

The Claims

The headline findings are striking. According to the survey of 501 “UK millionaires with assets over £1m, excluding their home”:

88% are proud to live in the UK

• 75% would be willing to pay more tax;
• 64% support higher taxes on the wealthy to reduce the burden on everyone else; and
• Only 9% are most worried about millionaires leaving Britain

These are remarkable numbers. It’s rare for 75% of any population to agree on anything tax-related, let alone a proposal to increase their own tax burden.

How the Survey Works

Survation is a reputable polling firm and a member of the British Polling Council. Their standard methodology involves recruiting panellists who sign up for small cash incentives, typically around £5 to join, with further micro-payments for completing surveys.

For most polling  (voting intentions, consumer preferences, political attitudes) this approach is perfectly reasonable.

People are generally who they say they are, and there’s no obvious incentive to lie about being a Conservative or Labour voter.

Wealth is somewhat different.

When you’re recruiting “millionaires” via an online panel, you’re relying entirely on self-reported asset declarations.

Someone ticks a box saying they have £1m+ in assets excluding their home. That’s it. No verification. No cross-referencing with financial records. No screening questions to catch inconsistencies.

The Credibility Gap

Consider how this panel actually works.

Panellists sign up for small cash incentives, typically a fiver, and receive further small payments for completing surveys.

For most polling purposes, this is fine.

But ask yourself this.  How many genuinely wealthy people, those with £1m+ in investable assets, let alone £10m+,  would sign up to complete online surveys for pocket change?

The incentive structure is backwards.

The people most likely to join paid survey panels are those for whom the payments are meaningful.

That rather rules out the genuinely wealthy, who would value their time at .

There’s another problem. In previous surveys using this methodology, a significant proportion of respondents claimed assets of just £1-2m.

That’s essentially anyone with a house in the South-East and a pension, and notably below the threshold of any proposed wealth tax on assets over £10m.

If you’re voting for a tax that won’t affect you, that’s not turkeys voting for Christmas. It’s the turkeys voting for the geese.

The sample composition matters.

If a substantial chunk of your “millionaires” are actually upper-middle-class homeowners rather than the genuinely wealthy, your headline findings about what “millionaires” think become rather less meaningful.

Academic Evidence

This isn’t just scepticism. There’s empirical research on this exact problem.

A 2020 study published in the Review of Income and Wealth examined methodologies for surveying high-net-worth individuals.

The researchers found that when self-reported wealth claims were cross-referenced against actual financial data, 30% of respondents claiming to be millionaires were not in the top wealth bracket.

Nearly a third were simply wrong… for the more cynically minded, lying.

If that error rate applied to the Patriotic Millionaires survey, around 150 of the 501 respondents might not be millionaires at all. At that point, what exactly is the survey measuring?

Further, the Survation survey incentivises those to ‘miscalculate’ their net-worth or simply lie about it.

The Henley & Partners Irony

Here’s where it gets interesting.

The Guardian article notes that Patriotic Millionaires UK has criticised reports from Henley & Partners, a global migration firm, as “misleading.”

If you remember, Henley claimed an “exodus” of 16,500 millionaires from the UK last year, a figure which became ubiquitous in the media, which Patriotic Millionaires points out represents just 0.5% of the UK’s 3 million millionaires.

Fair enough. That’s a reasonable critique of the “exodus” framing.

There have also been criticisms of H&P’s methodology as well.

But Patriotic Millionaires then presents their own survey as evidence of what millionaires actually think, without acknowledging that their methodology cannot verify whether respondents are millionaires at all.

H&P is working from migration data and wealth management client movements, however imperfect.

Patriotic Millionaires is working from self-reported declarations by people paid small sums to complete online surveys.

Criticising one dataset as misleading while promoting another with significant methodological weaknesses is, at minimum, inconsistent.

What Proper HNW Research Looks Like

Surveying wealthy individuals properly is hard. It’s also expensive. Serious high-net-worth research typically involves:

Client lists from financial institutions: banks and wealth managers verifying assets

• Extended screening questionnaires: multiple questions to catch inconsistencies
• Tax record cross-referencing: where consent is obtained
• Quota controls by wealth band: ensuring you’re not just polling the lower end

Significantly larger samples of 2,000+ is usually standard for robust findings

The Charles Schwab High Net Worth Investor Survey, for example, draws from verified client relationships. Academic studies use panel data with known financial histories.

These approaches cost more and take longer, but they produce findings you can actually rely on.

So, all we know is that the Partiotic Millionaires are happy to pay more tax…

…but seemingly not to pay more for proper research.

The Reporting Problem

None of this nuance made it into the Guardian’s coverage.

The article reports the findings straight, noting only that “the sample size reflects the smaller section of society that millionaires take up in the UK”… as if sample size were the main methodological concern.

It isn’t. The concern is whether these are millionaires at all.

When a lobby group commissions research that conveniently supports its policy positions, journalists should be asking hard questions about methodology.

“We surveyed millionaires” sounds authoritative.

“We surveyed people who told us they were millionaires in exchange for small payments” is rather less compelling.

Conclusion

The survey tells us what people who claim to be millionaires on a paid online panel think about tax policy.

It does not tell us what verified high net worth individuals think.

It cannot, because no verification took place.

That’s a significant distinction…one that matters when the findings are used to argue for policy changes affecting people who may not have been surveyed at all.

Of course, Patriotic Millionaires UK is entitled to campaign for higher taxes on the wealthy.

But citing self-reported, unverified survey data as evidence of millionaire opinion, while simultaneously criticising other organisations for “misleading” statistics , is a glass house from which stones should not be thrown.