New register of interests spreadsheet – with much richer data
Tl;dr: Parliament has released new data, which we’ve made available in a simple format.
As part of the new release of the register of financial interests (which we blogged about yesterday) – Parliament has released CSVs of the new edition of the register. This isn’t just a better way of getting the data from each page individually, but contains much richer information than we’ve had previously.
Earlier this year, Parliament improved its data collection for MPs’ interests – meaning it collects much more structured data for different kinds of interests than the free text data that was released previously.
This is really good news – the work put in improving the data collection is so hard to do from the outside. Lots of effort has been made to clean up data in the past, but it was just fundamentally too broken. This is a big improvement on that – and means we can focus our efforts on where we can add the most value.
We know that Parliament is looking at creating data tools to sit on top of this – but in the meantime we’ve quickly made a single Excel file – and an analysis site to explore the data. We’ve also added our IDs from TheyWorkForYou and information on the MPs party. The great thing about Parliament making more data available is how that data can then be expanded by other datasets – for instance, the data now contains Companies House IDs, which could be joined to a range of datasets.
Please email if there are tweaks that would make the spreadsheet more useful to you!
Some example queries that are possible with this (give the site a minute to load):
Whenever Parliament ups its game, we need to think about what we’re going to do to build on top of that. As part of our WhoFundsThem project, we’re working to create simple summaries of declarations of interests. In general, the register is full of data but lacking in context. What do these organisations who have donated do? What’s the top-line figure on outside income? Is this affecting how MPs behave in parliament?
These are the questions we want to answer through WhoFundsThem. If you also want to know the answer, you can donate to support our work.