Yesterday we had a launch event for our new features on TheyWorkForYou and report on money in politics.

We didn’t get time for all the questions,  so we’ve answered a few now.

You can also a look at the report, the new features on TheyWorkForYou, and donations are appreciated if you like this direction for our work.

Information questions

Is access to all your data available via CSV or APIs?

All the data we make available is currently listed on the registers page of TheyWorkForYou. This includes reworkings of the published registry into spreadsheets and json. We’re not yet publishing our extra information as a spreadsheet, but will be in the coming weeks (working on some additional spreadsheets we’ll release at the same time).

Are there public lists other than the MP list of members’ financial interest available from the Parliament website please?

So Parliament publishes a few different registers: MPs, Lords, APPGs, MPs staff, journalists. 

Of these, the MPs has been the one most recently looked at and is in the best condition to access data-wise. 

As we understand it, PDS are currently looking at the staff register list (and we have some recommendations around that in the report). 

On APPGs, some things need to be released in the register, but also APPGs are supposed to provide these on request – we’re having some trouble with that. Ongoing work!

Do you track donations to constituency parties as these may be a way to donate to Members indirectly?

In principle, the register of interests has passthrough rules for donations to local or national parties, that mean the original donor should be declared in the register. The ones to be more concerned about are unincorporated fund-raising clubs or other intermediate organisation that are *not* parties as these are not covered by the rules. We think they should be. 

We did some digging to see if we could detect problems in party donations by comparison electoral commission data to the registry – but the data and time period are either covering different things,  or the EC data comes *from* the registry in the first place. 

Systematic reform

Will the new ban on MPs doing consultancy/providing advice on Parliament make a difference and clean up politics?

For background on this change, when the new reforms take effect they will not substantially ban second jobs – but further restrict MPs giving advice on public policy or how Parliament works as part of paid employment. 

This is a good change, but the concern is that this was not actually what the exchange was for, just one of the more plausible reasons to have them on the payroll – and that other semi-plausible ways to extend credit to MPs remain.

We’ve made two recommendations to double down in this area:

• The first is that currently the parliamentary commissioner can ask for the MP’s contract (or similar) to ensure it aligns with this rule. We see no reason this shouldn’t just be required to be made public.
• The second is creating more disclosure around the nature of the organisation rather than the role. For instance,  if MPs need to declare “does this org lobby parliament/government” or “is this organisation a government contractor” – ‘yes’ to either question really shifts the evaluation of corruption risk regardless of what is on paper is the specific role. 

Direct corruption has given way to a “you scratch my back” culture – the reciprocal “favour” coming years later & benefit associates. How can this be monitored?

We talk a bit about this in the original literature review, where the UK as a high trust society makes these kinds of deferred rewards more possible. MPs and officials don’t need to be explicitly told about job prospects (and the kind of actions that would make them less eligible for those job prospects), but understand the system as it has been modelled to then. There are few brown paper bags (but not none) – in general there is more of a series of ambiguous events where money changes hands for individually semi-defendable reasons.

That doesn’t mean we can’t make progress. We have longer (and actually enforced) periods where people who have worked in senior jobs can’t accept jobs in relevant industries. ACOBA currently makes recommendations on whether appointments break the government’s rules, but doesn’t have strong powers. They have themselves recommended some improvements that don’t require new laws. We could build some more scrutiny here – linking to relevant ACOBA reports from the register. 

Institutions

Should an appropriately funded arms length organisation be created to pursue this scrutiny job more systematically and thoroughly?

Yes, transparency in this area has always been trying to head off calls to create strict rules enforced by real regulators – because once a scandal concedes there should be rules other than what Parliament itself sets, that’s a big shift in how our democracy works. 

The question is “is putting restrictions on elected representatives democratic?” and I think the answer to that can clearly be yes. There are arguments made that given the electorate elect with second jobs, the electorate is fine with this. But in reality, we can, and do, ask the electorate if they have opinions about ethical standards for MPs, and they come back with nuanced opinions about what those standards should be, and support for processes outside elections (like enforced codes of conduct with independent regulators) that ensure the standards are met.

MPs work for the public, other organisations can also work for the public to make the overall system work. 

If funded, would mySociety run its own citizens assembly on the reforms needed?

Would definitely be happy to be part of a consortium supporting one – although we’d leave running it to others. In general, we think anchoring our work in deliberative approaches would help make us more effective, and help participants in seeing results from their work that isn’t “does the government accept this or not”. 

In this project we’ve tried to stick close to principles we can identify in existing polling and research, but building a better picture of public expectations (and especially considered trade-offs) would help align our work to a civic agenda. Joining civic power to deliberative democracy provides power in one direction, and legitimacy in the other — a powerful force to engage with conflicts within Parliament to shift official rules and responses.

Going further

Can you also include the Mayors of combined authorities in any later editions of WhoFundsThem?

One of our questions at the moment is how to best approach devolution in England. Longer blog post about one of our funding attempts here.

One of the areas we think we can add value is just bringing together all the local authority registers of interest, but there are lots of these. Doing this in waves by combined authority would be a good approach – and as always interested in anyone who has an interest in local government scrutiny to help find funding for this (it’s one of those “very possible, just tedious” projects). 

Does Tortoise’s recent piece of work, the Peer Review, relate at all to your work?

So I’ve been interested in the wave of work looking at Lords conflicts of interests (Tortoise’s series and some recent work from the Guardian).

We don’t currently have the Lords register on TheyWorkForYou, we’re loosely waiting to see if it’s going to be migrated to the same format as the Commons because then it’d be really easy to copy our existing process. We can do it without that, but we don’t have unlimited funds (in fact, we have quite limited funds) so trying to work out what are the easiest approaches, or where we should try and build funding for a strong move.

In general, we want to have a good think about the House of Lords. We’ve got a document of potential ideas, but we need a different approach to how we approach elected chambers. A key feature (and reason for stalled reform) is its several kinds of chambers fused into one. It’s a technocratic revising chamber, it provides a deescalation venue for bad ideas in a less partisan setting, it’s an underpowered talking shop, jobs are hard won by expertise, and given as political gifts. Depending who you’re looking at, it’s either incredibly functional or incredibly not. 

And really neither house can be understood without the other. Effective manoeuvring in the Lords depends on understanding where there are openings in the Commons. Similarly, poor scrutiny in the Commons makes more sense as part of this dance between the two chambers. 

Much more than the Commons, conflicts of interests are just part of the fundamental design (and that’s bad). How we scrutinise it from the outside needs to be different to how we look at MPs, because there are questions about “judging it by its own (odd) standards” versus “the point of scrutiny here is to show it shouldn’t exist”.

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That’s it for event questions – but please take a look at the report, the new features on TheyWorkForYou, and donations appreciated if you like this direction for our work.