The first register of All Party Parliamentary Groups since the general election has just been published, and 519 of the 553 groups have vanished, leaving just 34. 

What is an APPG?

All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) are self-selecting groups of MPs and Lords with an interest in a particular policy area. Most groups are supported by a secretariat, which is usually a charity, membership body or consultancy organisation.

The logic behind APPGs is to create legitimate avenues for experts and interested parties from outside Parliament to discuss policy with MPs and Lords – but unfortunately they can also be vehicles for corruption. 

Our WhoFundsThem project is going to be taking a closer look at APPGs, to see which MPs are members (this information is currently not published) and a closer look at the organisations providing secretariat support. We have also updated our public APPGs spreadsheet with the new register. 

So why have so many groups disappeared?

A change in rules last year meant that we saw a huge drop-off from the 800+ groups registered in March to around 450 in April, and then a steady increase to 553 by the end of May. The 28th August edition has just 34 registered groups.

Since the general election, we think are there are three factors that might be influencing the dramatic decline in registered groups:

1. New officer rule – there’s a new rule that MPs are now only allowed to be an officer of a maximum of six groups.
2. The reduced size of the opposition – the ‘all party’ nature of APPGs means that they must have at least one member of the official opposition as an officer. Before Parliament was dissolved for the election in May, the then Labour opposition had 206 MPs. Now, the Conservative opposition has 121 MPs. Conservative Lords are allowed to be officers of APPGs, but the APPG Chair must be an MP.
3. Summer recess admin delay – in order to meet the deadline for this register, groups had to hold their new AGM to elect officers before summer recess began on 30 July. This gave them just a couple of weeks after the election, which was a hectic time, especially for the majority of MPs who were new to Parliament, and busy setting up their offices.

What next?

Given that we’ve just had one register, we can’t be sure which of these factors is having the biggest effect, but a second edition of the register should help us to understand the scale of the admin delay problem. 

We expect a large number of groups will have used the summer to get established and recruit officers and members – but they will need to hold an AGM fairly soon after Parliament returns next week in order to make the new register, which should be published in about six weeks’ time.

We’ll be looking in detail at the work of these groups, and the people behind them, in our project WhoFundsThem. Please consider donating to help us do more of this work. 

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash