Our first round of information requests was a mixed bag: here’s what we learned and what we’re trying next. 

In mid-September we sent an information request to the 34 All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) that had been the first register of APPGs since the election.

As we’ve written about before, APPGs can be a source of really important cross-party working, but they can also be a route to unchecked access to Parliament. 

The Committee on Standards argued that “APPGs are a valuable part of how Parliament does its work; but there remains a significant risk of improper access and influence by commercial entities or by hostile foreign actors, through APPGs” – and as such recommended new rules. These new rules mean that APPGs either have to publish additional information on their websites, or they have to provide it on request. 

We saw this small group as a good opportunity to test our information request template that we want to send to all APPGs as part of our WhoFundsThem project.  

We want to discourage the use of APPGs as an unmonitored backdoor to Parliament, and encourage their core purpose: informed discussion on areas of shared interests.  Our goal in asking these questions of all APPGs is to ensure the baseline transparency made possible by the rules happens in reality.

Here’s what we learned when we sent our information request template to 34 APPGs:

1. Low responsiveness. Almost half of the APPGs didn’t get back to us at all – not even to acknowledge our email. We emailed 34 APPGs and had 18 responses back. We recognise that lots of APPGs are administered by charities, or by MP staff as part of their other work, so capacity is stretched. Nonetheless, the rules exist for a reason – APPGs provide outside influences access to Parliamentarians that should be monitored.
2. Difficulties in record keeping between elections. In many small APPGs, administrative services are provided by a member of staff from the chair’s office. These members of staff change jobs regularly – in and outside of election time. We had a number of responses to say ‘I have the files until this date, but before then, it was someone else who isn’t around anymore’.
3. Spreadsheets aren’t for everyone. Of the 18 groups who responded to us, only 6 filled in our spreadsheet template. Reasons for this went from technical issues to complaints about the volume of information it asked for. There was also advice issued that nothing required APPGs to fill out our spreadsheet as long as they were compliant with the rules (our view is that many are not). 
4. There is uncertainty about the new rules Parliament’s new rules say that APPGs must either respond to individual information requests, or make all of the information available on their website. We had several responses stating that the information we were asking for was available on the group website – unfortunately in almost all cases, it wasn’t. Some APPGs did improve this as a result of being asked however.

13 of the 34 APPGs we contacted don’t have websites at all. Of those 13 without websites, 7 didn’t reply to our email. No website and no email response means we really are left in the dark as to how these groups operate.

Thanks to the APPGs who did respond to our requests, and chat with us about their perspectives on how the rules operate. We’ve published the spreadsheets we did receive in a Google Drive folder, although something we want to be cautious of here is making the compliant APPGs the most visible. 

The current APPG rules are in a halfway house where technically a large amount of information is required to be released – but in practice very little of this is happening. What we don’t want is that rules brought in to reduce “bad” APPG behaviour are in effect only followed by “good” APPGs. We need to get more responses, and start highlighting when the information isn’t being published. 

What’s next?

This initial wave was a pilot to work out the next best steps. Unfortunately what we’ve learned is there are substantial obstacles to getting the full scope of information. 

Given there are issues around awareness of the rules, we’re going to reduce the initial effort of compliance. To get an initial bit of useful information from every APPG, we are going to narrow the scope of the exercise to just the parliamentary and non-parliamentary memberships of the group. At the moment, Parliament only publishes the four officers of each APPG, however in order to be ratified the group must have at least twenty members.

To get this information, we will review the websites that exist to determine if the membership list is already public, and if not, make a request for the information. 

If we do not receive a response, we will escalate by contacting the chairs of the APPG to highlight that the group is not being compliant with transparency rules, and will be publicly listed as such on TheyWorkForYou. 

From this point, we will re-evaluate approaches to getting the full scope of information that should be provided. 

Let’s make politics work better

Through TheyWorkForYou and our wider democracy work we take a practical approach to improving politics in the UK, looking for opportunities to make things better through putting the work in, and where we don’t need to ask permission to succeed. 

In this case: parliament has made rules to make APPGs better, but is being too hands off about actually making sure the rules are followed. This is something we’re going to work to improve from the outside. If you want to support us in this work, please consider donating. 

This analysis is part of our WhoFundsThem project – read more about how we’re working to make MPs financial disclosures better. 

There’s a lot in the news right now about the Register of MPs’ financial interests, where MPs are supposed to declare all extra income and donations they receive.

For years TheyWorkForYou has republished the register and made it easier to see changes over time. But there’s a lot more that can be done to improve this information and get a better understanding of the influence of money in politics.

Our WhoFundsThem project is going to do the digging into this information — creating summaries and publishing what we find in a clear and accessible way on MPs’ individual profiles on TheyWorkForYou. 

The three key questions for us are:

• Is everything being declared?
• Is what’s being declared clearly understandable?
• And, is what’s being declared acceptable to the public?

To answer this we’ve made a set of 32 questions we want to answer for each MP: we’ll be pulling on the Register, Companies House, MPs’ websites and parliamentary debates.

Our team of volunteers will be working together to answer these over the next few months — giving us new information to share with the public on TheyWorkForYou. 

If you think this work is important and politics should be more transparent, then we would love your help — can you donate today?

DONATE FOR A TRANSPARENT DEMOCRACY

Thank you for your support!

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Image: Thomas Kelley

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

Tldr: The first financial interests register of this Parliament has been published. We’ve updated MP profiles on TheyWorkForYou, made the data available as a spreadsheet, and with our WhoFundsThem project we’re working to create easy-to-understand summaries.

Update: Even more spreadsheets – see new blog post.

When MPs do additional work for other employers or receive donations or gifts, they have to declare it in the register of members’ financial interests. On TheyWorkForYou, we republish this register and highlight changes over time. We also publish the data as an Excel spreadsheet. 

At the moment, we’re gearing up to start our new project WhoFundsThem – where we’ll work with volunteers to create new analysis and summaries of MPs’ financial interests. 

With that in mind, we’ve been poring through the new register. As with previous releases, the quantity and quality of entries varies drastically, and crucial context behind the entries is missing. One of the things we want to make happen with this project is improving both the rules on publication, and a higher standard of disclosure from MPs themselves. 

The recent improvements to data collection mean the data we do have is now much more structured and useful. For example, Category 3 (Gifts, benefits and hospitality) and 4 (Visits outside the UK) now have clearer division between itemised expenses and total costs. However, the big problem is still inconsistency between MPs on what is being declared – both where the rules say disclosure is optional (unpaid directorships), and categories where we suspect information is missing that the rules say should be disclosed. 

As the first register after the election, we were expecting almost all MPs to have declared donations received during the election. The Guide to Rules is clear that under Category 2,  each MP must declare all support “for candidacy at an election for parliamentary or non-parliamentary office, which has a value of more than £1,500”.  For some MPs, the list of these donations goes into five pages, but for others this section is empty. It’s *possible* that these MPs had no money behind their election campaigns (or every donor was beneath the £1500 threshold) – it just doesn’t seem very likely. We’ll be keeping track of this over future releases. 

In general, the register is full of data but lacking in context. What do these organisations who have donated actually 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.

There’s going to be a UK general election on 4 July. We’ve written a 10-point guide to explain how the election works.

Here’s how our tools can help you cut through the noise and find out what’s happening in your constituency:

Assess your previous MP’s activities 

Parliament was dissolved on Thursday 30 May. After this point there are technically no MPs. 

Instead, your former MPs just become candidates (if they’ve chosen to stand again – many haven’t). 

That doesn’t stop you from looking up your previous MP’s voting record and register of interests on TheyWorkForYou, and comparing it with the way other parties’ MPs voted. 

In case you missed it, we recently changed the way we calculate voting summaries to prioritise actions, not words – making our summaries even more accurate and even more useful. 

Consider your new candidates in your new constituency

We’ve made some changes so that when you enter your postcode into TheyWorkForYou, you’ll be taken to a new General Election page that will give you an up-to-date list of candidates standing in your constituency. 

This page links to a much more detailed breakdown from WhoCanIVoteFor, made by our friends at Democracy Club. On WhoCanIVoteFor, you can find information about your candidates’ previous attempts to run for office, any statements or election materials they’ve made, and links to their social media pages. Once you’ve looked up your postcode, bookmark that link; it’s ideal for answering people on your neighbourhood Facebook or Next Door groups who will inevitably be asking who’s standing in your area.

On TheyWorkForYou and WhoCanIVoteFor you’ll find a handy map comparing your new constituency (pink) with your old one (grey). Here’s what that looks like for me, in Leeds:

What impact will the new boundaries have on this election? 

We can’t know for sure until after the election, but don’t forget you can also check out the Local Intelligence Hub for loads more info about both your old and new constituency. Just put in your postcode and you’ll find public opinion polls, candidate information, nearby campaigning groups and more. The hub is made in partnership with the Climate Coalition, so you’ll find a wealth of climate and nature data too. 

This information is absolutely invaluable for when canvassers come knocking at your door and ask what your priorities are. You can hit them with stats about things like what support there is for sustainable energy or net zero in your constituency; or share your opinions on how your previous MP voted on an issue that matters to you. Maybe even give them the link – www.localintelligencehub.com – so they can explore for themselves.

Build your own clever things using our free APIs

Want to dig into the data yourself? Maybe even build your own tools using the new boundaries? For those with a little coding knowledge, we’ve made the building blocks available in a number of formats. 

Mapit, our our geographical postcode lookup website has the old and new constituencies, many other geographies, and the register of members interest for the previous Parliament is available as one big spreadsheet. 

Help us do more of this work

Whoever is elected, they need to understand the importance of transparency and accountability — and we’ll be making sure that happens. Please consider donating.

Header image by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Work for the 2025 Council Climate Action Scorecards has already begun. To help make sure the next round have an even bigger impact than the last, I’ve been attending Advisory Group roundtables, hosted by Climate Emergency UK, alongside policy experts, council leaders and climate officers. Together, we’ve been going through the methodology with a fine-tooth comb. 

What are the Scorecards?

The Council Climate Action Scorecards project evaluates the climate actions of all UK local councils, serving as both a benchmark and a motivational tool. The project highlights councils’ efforts in seven sections:

• buildings and heating
• transport 
• planning and land use 
• governance and finance
• biodiversity
• collaboration and engagement
• food and  waste

By offering a clear, comparable picture of each council’s performance, the Scorecards help hold councils accountable, increase transparency, and encourage continuous improvement. They are designed and delivered by CE UK, with technical and policy support from mySociety. 

How much change is too much change?

Why are we changing the methodology? You might be thinking, if it works, why fix it? The updates are driven by a desire for the project to respond to the evolving policy landscape and feedback from stakeholders.  That said, we’re trying to strike the right balance between introducing necessary changes to keep the Scorecards accurate and relevant, but not so many that we lose the ability to compare to the previous Scorecards. 

The wisdom of the advisory group has been essential in striking this balance, as we were able to hear directly from elected councillors and council employees about their priorities and pain points.

So what’s changed? 

The reasons that questions have been tweaked, reweighted or removed are many and varied – and actually offer quite an interesting perspective on how the sector is changing. To see the detailed breakdown, check out the new methodology page on the Scorecards website. Here are the headlines:

• There’ve been 13 changes to question criteria — but no one section has had more than three criteria changed. This was often to add an additional tier allowing for higher marks: for example, Question 4.3b, about reduction in emissions since 2019, will now have an additional point available for councils whose reductions have exceeded 40%.
• There are five questions which have new weighting, based on sector feedback. For example, Question 2.9, on whether a council has a workplace parking levy, has been downgraded to ‘medium’. 
• There are three brand new questions to reflect areas of emerging policy interest, such as a new question on engagement with trade unions or other employee representative bodies.
• Three existing questions have been changed  in response to sector feedback, for example Question 4.2 now focuses on a council’s corporate risk register rather than a standalone climate change risk register.
• One question (7.1a) has been removed to reflect a change in government policy on single use plastics, making it a legal requirement of all local authorities to reduce their single use plastic usage.

What impact will this have on scores?

An initial trial scoring  with a sample of councils using 2023 data showed slight decreases in scores, but only by an average of 2%. This trial scoring was done using a ‘worst case scenario’ assumption of councils scoring none of the new points available. This was discussed by the Advisory Group, and it was agreed that this level of change was small enough to remain confident that the Scorecards could be meaningfully compared.

Reflections on the roundtables 

In total I attended four meetings of the Advisory Group.

In each meeting we broke out into small groups to go through each question line by line, then discussed each groups’ feedback. The CE UK team then went away to draw conclusions, which were brought back to the next meeting and agreed. 

In the initial discussions there was some disagreement, as you might expect from a group of people coming from different perspectives and wanting different things from the Scorecards; however, the tone and conduct was always upbeat and working towards a solution. 

We ended the final meeting with agreement across the board on all changes. Overall, the changes that have come out of the methodology review process reflect a commendable ambition for collaborative and continuous improvement — and to make real change at the local level.

Photo by Winston Tjia on Unsplash

WhoFundsThem is our new project looking to uncover the influence of money in politics. You can donate or volunteer to support this project.

Last month, we asked “What happened to all the APPGs?” because between March and April over a third of All Party Parliamentary Groups were deregistered, from 722 down to just 445. This story was covered in the Byline Times and the Parliament Matters podcast.

On Monday, we got a partial answer to our question. 

The May register shows an increase of 90 groups – up to 535.

We’ve crunched the numbers, and found that 86 of the 277 groups that were removed in April have been re-registered for the May edition. We can’t know for sure why this happened, but we know that Parliamentary authorities did an audit of compliance ahead of the April register, which might have contributed to lots of groups being removed. It’s possible that these groups have since passed the necessary requirements to be re-registered in time for the May edition.

Taking into account the last three registers, we found:

• 2 groups were deregistered in May (Thrombosis and UK Shared Prosperity Fund)
• 6 new groups were registered in May (Channel 4, Midlands Engine, Neurodiversity in Defence & National Security, Rare, Genetic and Undiagnosed Conditions, Slovenia and Tajikistan)
• 14 new groups were registered in April
• 86 groups were removed in April, but re-registered in May
• 205 groups were removed in April, but haven’t re-registered
• 429 groups were present in March, April and May

Dive into the data yourself

We’ve updated our public spreadsheet with the new register and an ‘All groups’ tab that shows which groups fall into the six categories above.

What next?

We’ve launched our WhoFundsThem project which is requesting information from all APPGs (yes, our job just got a bit bigger!).

We need your help – please consider volunteering, or donating £10 to help make this work happen. 

Photo by Zetong Li on Unsplash

We’ve kickstarted the WhoFundsThem project, and now we have a (tight!) timeline of work

WhoFundsThem is our new project looking to uncover the influence of money in politics. You can donate or volunteer to support this project.  

On Friday, we sent our first batch of requests for information to 25 All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) as part of our WhoFundsThem work. 

This is a test batch to see how well the template we’ve made works as a method for getting information back from APPGs. The new rules require them to make quite a lot of different kinds of information available, and there are 445 APPGs — so we want to ask in a way that makes sense for them, and for us.

We’re asking for this information because we think it’s important to have it openly available for the public benefit. There are loads of possible uses for it: for example, we’d like to improve the APPG membership information we include on the Local Intelligence Hub, but once the information is public, it will be available for all sorts of other projects and individuals to use. 

To select the lucky 25 APPGs who would make up our test batch, we took Parliament’s A-Z list of all of the APPGs, numbered them, and then randomly generated 25 numbers. The selected APPGs were:

1. Africa
2. Denmark
3. Japan
4. Poland
5. South Africa
6. Tibet
7. Artificial Intelligence
8. Arts and Heritage
9. Biodiversity in the UK Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies
10. Children of Alcoholics
11. Deafness
12. Disability
13. Ethnic Minority Business Owners
14. First Do No Harm
15. Future of Work
16. Human-Relevant Science
17. Internet, Communications and Technology
18. Life Sciences
19. Microplastics
20. Packaging Manufacturing Industry
21. Responsible Vaping
22. SME (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) House Builders
23. Sport
24. Taxation
25. United Nations Global Goals for Sustainable Development

On Friday,  we emailed these groups a copy of the template, and informed them that as per the rules they’ve got 28 days to get back to us, making a deadline of Friday 7 June 2024. After this deadline we’ll review the feedback and responses, make any adjustments necessary, and then email the template to all of the remaining 420 APPGs. This should give us responses from every APPG by the middle of July.

Don’t forget, this is just one of the two parts of the WhoFundsThem project. While we’re waiting for APPG responses, we’ll spend the month of May recruiting volunteers, and then in June we’ll begin answering questions for the other stream of the project which looks at the Register of Members’ Financial Interests (RMFI). By mid-July, we’re hoping to have turned those answers into individual summaries for each MP. Then the right of reply process begins: MPs will have a month to respond to our summary of their financial interests.

All being well, as we send off these summaries to MPs, we’ll be able to switch back to looking at APPGs, as the returns from the second batch should be back ready for us to clean and analyse. By the end of August, we should have both clean APPG data and RFMI summaries with MP feedback. We’ll then spend some time auditing this data ready for publication in the autumn.

Well, that’s the plan at least!

If you’re interested in being one of the volunteers who will work on this exciting new project, you have until 28 May to fill in our short application form! On Tuesday evening (14th), we’re hosting a Q&A event to explain more about the project and answer any questions about volunteering. We know not everyone can give up their time, though, so if you want to support projects like these in another way, please consider financially supporting us.

Want to find out more about APPGs? I wrote a blog post last month explaining what APPGs are, how the rules changed, and the impact that change had. 

As ever, if you’re interested in the work we do, make sure you’re signed up to our newsletter. Thanks!

Tl;dr: We’ve added lots of local council data to the Local Intelligence Hub.

In February, we launched the Local Intelligence Hub, and today we’ve released a huge new update. 

We designed the Local Intelligence Hub — in collaboration with The Climate Coalition and supported by Green Alliance — to provide all the data you need, either about one constituency or across the whole country, on issues around climate. It helps you gain a deep understanding of public opinion, demographics, political considerations, and much, much more. In short, it’s an extremely powerful tool, free to use, and invaluable for anyone pushing for better climate action.  

At launch, we divided the data by UK Parliamentary constituency — but with this huge new update, you can now also explore data at the local council level.

As ever, there are several different ways to view this data:

• by individual authority, so you can deep dive into your local area
• as a table, so you can compare councils by metrics that matter to you
• plotted onto a map, so you can see where to find hot- and cold-spots of action

And it can all be downloaded as a spreadsheet for use on your own desktop.

What kind of data are we talking about?

We’re pulling together data from multiple different sources. What does it all have in common? We reckon that it provides new insights for climate campaigners, researchers, journalists and organisations  — especially when it’s combined in new ways, as Local Intelligence Hub allows you to do quickly and simply. 

Sources include national polling data, information from our services CAPE and Scorecards, and other Climate Coalition member organisations, like the National Trust and the RSPB. 

And we’re always looking for more data, so do get in touch if you know of a useful source we haven’t yet included! 

What can I do with it?

You will know best how this rich data could inform your work, but here are a few ideas to get you started.

1. Build a profile of your local council

Dip into the local council page and see what data awaits you! Here’s an example of the top-level stats you can find for Leeds City Council:

• The area has a strong mandate for climate action. MRP polling suggests we’d see 88% of Leeds City residents support onshore wind compared to 83.5% national average, and just 10% oppose net zero compared to 12% national average. 
• Leeds City Council is doing better than most councils, but could be doing more. It scored 53% on the Climate Action Scorecards, gaining its highest scores in Planning and Land Use, but with the biggest room for improvement on Transport. 
• Emissions are huge, but so is the population. Leeds City Council serves 798,786 residents compared to the average of 307,712. According to BEIS data, Leeds City Council has influence over 2,822 kilotons of CO2 emissions, which is more than twice the national average of 1,168.3.
• There’s an active climate movement. In Leeds city there were more Great Big Green Week events than average in both 2022 and 2023.

2. Design a national campaign strategy 

If you’re a campaigning organisation looking to work out where and how to allocate resources, the table-builder and CSV download could form an essential part of your planning process. Here we’ve generated the single-tier councils with Net Zero target dates that fall within the coming decade, and sorted by their Action Scorecards overall score, alongside useful data about public opinion and emissions.

3. Visualise your goals

Local Intelligence Hub helps you zero in on the areas of the country that meet specific criteria. For example, where are the district councils who have declared a climate emergency but haven’t published a climate action plan? Here’s a map that shows you — just one of hundreds of maps that you can generate with a few clicks, and no expertise required:

What to do with all this lovely local data?

Thanks to this update, it’s now easier than ever to push for local climate action. With these rich new insights, you now have a number of talking points with which to engage your local councillors or council climate officers — and a wealth of facts and figures to back them up.

What next?

We need you to use the Hub and tell us what works, and what doesn’t! Give us your feedback  — and if you’d like to know whenever we add something new,  sign up to updates and we’ll let you know when there’s new data to play with.

Photo by Daniil Korbut on Unsplash

Over Easter, some groups went missing in Parliament.

No, not lost tourists: of the 722 All Party Parliamentary Groups registered in March, only 444 are left – a 39% decrease in the space of a month. What caused this, which groups have been removed, and what happens next?

Tl;dr: we’ve published the changes as a spreadsheet.

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. Browsing the list might help you find out that you have more in common with MPs than you think; subject-based APPGs include Craft, Jazz, and Parkrun, and country APPGs range from Albania to Zimbabwe. 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 – but unfortunately they can also be vehicles for corruption. As  Transparency International argue: “While APPGs can help inform debate, time and time again we see examples of MPs and Peers exercising poor judgement by accepting all-expenses-paid trips from regimes with highly questionable records on corruption and human rights.”

Why were so many groups removed?

New rules came into place on 31st March 2024 that required:

• Increased financial reporting 
• A ban on funding from foreign governments
• Increased reporting on secretariat support 
• A minimum of 20 members 
• Exactly four officers, two of whom must be MPs

How did the Register change?

Parliament maintains the Register of all APPGs that gets updated approximately every six weeks. The last edition before the rule change, published on 6th March 2024, showed 722 groups in total – 130 country groups and 592 subject groups. The 8th April edition shows 444 in total – 74 country groups and 370 subject groups. In total, 39% (278) groups were removed, with the countries list shrinking by 43% and the subjects list by 38%.

Why does this matter?

We don’t know exactly why each group was removed from the register. In some cases they simply may not meet the new 20 member threshold, but in others, deregistering might be an attempt to evade scrutiny.

Deregistered “unofficial” groups can operate in very similar ways to registered APPGs (and there is some evidence they are already doing so) but will not have to abide by the same rules. This means that the only way to track the activities and spending of these groups, and the outside interests that fund them, is through individual Members’ Registers of Financial Interests. Parliament’s rules are clear that MPs are supposed to declare all benefits received through group membership (whether or not a group is an official APPG) but in practice this can be inconsistent.

Which groups were removed?

We’ve published the full list of groups from the last two registers, the changes, and the list of removed groups as a spreadsheet.

What next?

TheyWorkForYou has a long history of making MPs financial interests data easier to access and understand. We make it easier to see changes in MPs’ declarations over time and are now publishing this information as a big spreadsheet. 

We have a lot more work in the pipeline around both APPG data and Register of Members Financial Interests data (stay tuned for details in our newsletter).

If you think what we’ve done so far is valuable, and want to help us go further: please donate. 

Photo by Zetong Li on Unsplash