At the beginning of the year, we set ourselves an ambitious goal: to help a group of small organisations working with marginalised communities to run Freedom of Information–based campaigns using WhatDoTheyKnow Pro’s batch-request and project features. We recruited groups working in areas as varied as domestic abuse, arts funding, youth health, SEND provision, parental leave, fuel poverty, and migrant justice. 

As the year draws to a close, we’re reflecting on the project and the lessons we’ve learned from it. It’s been a total privilege working closely with these organisations, because it gave us a front-row view of the real challenges of frontline campaigning and community support. 

What became clear early on was that the hardest part of a batch-request project isn’t actually pressing “send”.  Campaigners know their issues intimately, but FOI requires a specific kind of precision: pinning down exactly what data will answer their question, what format it should be in, and which public bodies actually hold it. Moving from “we want to understand this issue” to “we need these five questions answered from these 150 authorities” is a surprisingly big leap. 

Luckily, WhatDoTheyKnow’s knowledgeable  volunteers were able to help our groups go from vague policy areas to precise questions, and to understand what information was already out there. One of our groups didn’t end up submitting a big batch request, as in the course of their preparatory research they found an already-published dataset from an industry body they didn’t know existed. This is still a win — proactive publication by authorities makes everyone’s life easier.

In the cases where we had good questions and had identified the right authorities, we then still had to tackle the practical reality: for small teams already stretched thin, a large FOI project which asks a lot of questions requires capacity to deal with the answers. These can come in a diversity of forms: follow-ups, clarifications, refusals, delays, internal reviews. Our Projects tool helps to make dealing with the range of responses easier, but the scale of the challenge can still require serious commitment of time and resources. Zarino shared his experience of this on our blog back in October.

Just this week we had a moment that illustrates this: one of the groups we were supporting sent a batch FOI request to 133 universities on 5 July. As I write this in December, they are still receiving responses. The most recent one, a refusal, arrived five months after the original request! 

We’ve got two strands of thought here. On one hand, it’s good to be realistic. Although these moments are frustrating, they also teach us to be prepared for slow, unpredictable timelines, and that persistence is part of the craft. On the other hand, we feel strongly that citizens shouldn’t have to be quite so persistent, that pace shouldn’t be quite so slow, nor unpredictable. That’s why we’re advocating for upstream policy improvements, such as in our recent evidence to the Scottish Parliament, and in our upcoming FOI Fest conference.

Although it’s not always been straightforward, this year reinforced why FOI is worth the effort. A particularly strong example came from SCALP and Netpol’s From Scotland to Gaza report, which, with our help, used batch FOI requests to uncover policing practices around protests. Their methodical approach combined data from public bodies with testimonies to make a compelling case that has shaped media coverage and public debate. It’s a reminder that FOI doesn’t just extract information, it empowers communities to speak with confidence.

All of this left us with a clearer sense of what we can do in future to help make big FOI projects work. A few lessons stood out:

• Start smaller: a 10-authority pilot builds confidence and tests the strength of the question.
• Co-design the requests: working together on wording and structure reduces uncertainty: the organisations have expertise of their area, while our volunteers have second-to-none understanding of how to write a clear request.
• Prepare organisations for the long tail: follow-ups, delays, and refusals are, unfortunately, to be expected, not signs of failure of the project. 
• Volunteers can help with the volume of work: Climate Emergency UK have set the standard for how to train, empower and mobilise the cohorts they need to churn through large quantities of data.
• See FOI as a strategic, not administrative tool: it’s most useful when tied directly to campaign goals.

We fundamentally believe that every organisation can benefit from FOI; they just need the right scaffolding and resources. If you know what you’re in for, the whole process becomes far less intimidating.

What next? We’re refining our approach, watching what happens with our initial batch of projects, and constantly updating our guides and help pages to support our users in their big and small FOI projects. Every request is a small act of collective muscle-building. We’re excited to keep learning and keep improving the support that makes those acts possible.

Photo by Danist Soh on Unsplash

The UK has two Freedom of Information laws – one that covers Scottish public authorities and one that covers public authorities in the rest of the UK. While similar to the UK law in many respects, we think there are a number of practical ways the Scottish system improves on the wider system of FOI in the UK. 

While being better than the UK law is a good start, our sights should be set a lot higher than that: Freedom of Information needs to keep pace with how the world has changed, the changing ways public services are delivered, and huge shifts in how information can be stored and shared. 

Currently there is a Private Member’s Bill going through the Scottish Parliament with a combination of practical fix-ups to problems that have emerged, and bigger picture changes to encourage better proactive publication of information.

Last month, the Scottish Parliament’s Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee invited views on the Freedom of Information Reform (Scotland) Bill, which aims to modernise and strengthen the existing law. Our submission welcomed the Bill as a timely and proportionate improvement to an already effective system.

In addition to our written evidence, we were delighted to be invited to give oral evidence to the committee. You can watch Alex’s evidence session here.

Overall we’re really supportive of this effort to update the FOI system in Scotland, and as Alex said to the committee, we’re especially pleased to see proposals for a new proactive publication duty. 

This change would help public bodies make information available as a matter of course, reducing the need for requests and ensuring that information, once released, is accessible to everyone. In our research on fragmented public data, we’ve shown how better coordination and consistent publication practices can unlock huge public value. The Bill’s provisions around proactive publication are a welcome step towards achieving this.

This feels like a key moment for transparency enthusiasts to unite around the opportunity to make Scotland’s FOI system even better, and we’re delighted to play our part.

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Image: Chris Flexen

If you’ve ever wondered what your MP is interested in outside of their party alignment, a good place to look is All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs). These groups bring MPs and Peers from different parties together around shared policy interests. 

There’s a real range of causes, of size, and of activity. The groups don’t have formal powers, but they can be influential spaces for discussion and collaboration. This also makes them key sites for lobbying, and for money to enter Parliament. For all of these reasons, as part of our WhoFundsThem work looking into MPs’ financial interests, we’ve been digging deeper into APPGs. 

Alongside our regular output that makes it easier to compare each APPG register to the previous one, there’s now a big new update on TheyWorkForYou allowing you to browse your MP’s memberships for the first time.

Getting the lists

There is no central list of memberships of APPGs. The official Parliament register lists the four officers of each group, but not the wider membership list (each group must have at least 20 members to be constituted). Some APPGs have websites where they publish these lists, but others don’t have public membership lists at all.

Two things have changed in the last few years that made it practically possible to put together a (mostly) comprehensive membership list. 

The big one is that the rules changed so that APPGs need to either publish a membership list on their website or provide it on request. 

The second is that LLM technologies have made more flexible scrapers viable, meaning we can more easily extract membership lists published in lots of different forms on lots of different websites. 

We’ll write up the scraper in a technical blog post,  but by scraping the available websites and requesting the membership lists from the remaining groups, we’ve brought all of this information into one place. 

Theory vs practice

From our previous experiment asking APPGs for information, we knew there was a big gap between the rules that technically everyone has signed off on, and what APPG secretariats understood in practice. This is part of a wider problem where Parliament in principle has rules that in practice are just not strongly enforced. 

For this round we have done the minimal possible request: just asking for membership lists, rather than the wider range of documents we had published previously, and only when both our automated process and volunteers couldn’t find one. Despite this being a relatively clear rule, 94/236 groups didn’t respond to our request for a membership list. 

We also encountered a few groups who did not want to disclose full membership lists for security reasons due to the topic of their group being sensitive, while others were concerned that publishing names could lead to MPs being flooded with unhelpful lobbying. 

We’re sensitive to security concerns and don’t want to strongly argue the point given the small number affected (compared to the much larger number who just didn’t reply), but also there is currently no exemption in the APPG rules for security reasons. If Parliament wants this to be the case, the rules need to be updated to specify the conditions for this exemption from wider transparency.

We will be writing to the Parliamentary Commissioner to report this reasonably high level of non-compliance with transparency requirements of the APPG rules. 

What we discovered

Using the scraper, supported by volunteers’ work, we found memberships for 205 groups online. 

We contacted the remaining groups by email to ask for their membership lists. 140 gave us their membership information, two were in touch but declined to give their lists, and 94 did not respond.

Of the groups we have data for, we found:

• 615 MPs (94%) belong to at least one APPG. Only 35 MPs don’t take part in any at all. This list largely maps onto government ministers, who are not permitted to be a member of an APPG.
• On average, MPs are members of around 10 APPGs.
• Half of MPs are in at least 8 groups, and some are far more active: one MP is listed as belonging to 63 APPGs.

You can view and download the full dataset. 

We also discovered some interesting features about APPGs’ wider memberships  — and that the definition of membership varies between groups. The Guide to Rules states “A member is one who has asked to be on the group’s Membership List” but interpretations of this varied quite extensively. This was especially true about “non-parliamentary membership” (people and organisations affiliated with the APPG, who can be charged for memberships).  Some groups noted that this would include mailing lists with hundreds of individuals so would not share them, while others sent lists of ‘donors’, not all of whom were previously public as they did not meet Parliament’s £1,500 declaration threshold. 

Why it matters

APPG memberships can show what issues MPs care about, and where they might be working across party lines. This matters because of transparency; it’s useful for constituents to know where their MP is spending time and building networks, but also for relationship-building. We think this information can be key to foster common ground both between MPs themselves and between MPs and constituents. 

Explore for yourself

Find your MP’s page on TheyWorkForYou.com or to see their APPG memberships or download the whole dataset. You can also browse this data on the Local Intelligence Hub. Over time, we will make this available on a page per APPG. 

While you’re there, you may spot a few more new features. Join Alex and I on Thursday 23 October for a chatty catch-up on new features, plans for the site, and our vision of a more open Parliament. 

Note: If you are an MP, or on their staff, and our entry is either missing or has incorrect information, you can report issues on this form. 

Photo by Jani Kaasinen on Unsplash

Partners across the Access to Information Community of Practice have been hard at work this summer. Read on to find out what we’ve been up to, and book your tickets for our exciting new webinar!

At mySociety, we’ve had a packed few months: in May we kicked off a new three-part webinar series on the practical applications of ATI, focusing on climate. We introduced new WDTK Learn pages, and in June we were thrilled to host so many organisations at TICTeC and our ATI day. All of the sessions from TICTeC are now available to watch on YouTube: I’d definitely recommend checking out network members Marzena, Liset and Krisztina‘s sessions. 

In July, we were lucky enough to attend the International Conference of Information Commissioners (ICIC) in Berlin.  This year’s event brought together around 200 participants from 85 countries and, for the first time, featured a civil society day alongside the commissioners’ closed sessions — resulting in a civil society declaration. 

The conversations throughout the week reinforced many of the themes raised during our ATI day, including the tension between privacy rights and transparency, the shrinking civic space in some regions, and the growing need for civil society to support embattled Information Commissioners. The conference sparked new connections and revived old ones, and it left us thinking ambitiously about where the network could go next!

Speaking of the network, how about some more updates:

In Poland, Citizens’ Network Watchdog has been active on many fronts: working with partners on anti-SLAPP and AI governance; influencing policy to protect NGOs’ access to courts; continuing legal advocacy around contract transparency and government surveillance; and successfully engaging communities through podcasts, roadshows and court wins. They’ve also raised concerns about Poland’s absence from the newly launched European Network for Transparency and Right to Information (ENTRI).

In the Netherlands, SPOON and Access Info Europe collaborated to publish legal recommendations for strengthening the Open Government Act (OGA), aligning it more closely with international standards. These were shared with government, oversight bodies, and the Council of Europe’s Access Info Group. Across Europe, Access Info also just announced the second winner of the Helen Darbishire Award, congrats to The Forever Lobbying Project!

Meanwhile, Ma Dada in France continues to serve its growing community despite funding challenges. While operational work is paused, the site recently passed 2,000 users and hit 50,000 requests – a clear sign of continued demand. mySociety and MaDada are making great progress on some GDPR technical work as a result of a successful bid to NLNet.

In Croatia, Gong has wrapped up a national workshop tour and launched a social media campaign to boost ATI awareness via ImamoPravoZnati. They’ve also been testing the ATI law’s strength by filing requests and complaints around the recent local elections.

What’s next?

Whether through litigation, policy, storytelling or platform-building, it’s inspiring to see the range and reach of our collective efforts across Europe and beyond! The inspiration doesn’t stop there: please join us on Tuesday 19th August for our next FOI in practice webinar, this time focussing on the topic everyone is talking about – AI! We’ve got three great speakers and we’d love to see you there. 

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Photo by Audrius Sutkus on Unsplash

In May, SPOON hosted a thought-provoking salon for our ATI network exploring the Dutch access to information framework and the wider European movement for legal reform of access to information rights. The event brought together experts and advocates, including Liset Hamming and Tim Staal, co-founders and executive directors of SPOON, and Rachel Hanna, Executive Director of Access Info. Together, they discussed the state of transparency laws in the Netherlands, the country’s role in international access to information efforts, and how civil society can push for meaningful improvements.

Setting the Scene: A New Law, a New Opportunity

The Netherlands introduced a new freedom of information law—the Wet Open Overheid (WOO)—in May 2022, replacing the previous legislation from the 1980s. SPOON was founded just months later in October 2022 to help journalists, NGOs, and citizens navigate the new law, and to advocate for better implementation and reform where needed.

According to Liset and Tim, the Netherlands has seen a surge of interest in FOI requests since the WOO was introduced, particularly among journalists. Many media reports now begin by explicitly citing information obtained through WOO requests. Yet while the new law looks strong on paper, SPOON’s work quickly revealed ongoing challenges with how it functions in practice.

Partnering for Impact: The Role of Access Info

SPOON’s partnership with Access Info has been key to its strategy. Rachel Hanna opened the salon by explaining how Access Info uses a standard methodology—based on the Tromsø Convention and international right to information (RTI) benchmarks—to assess the quality of transparency laws. This enables consistent evaluations across countries, scored out of 300 points.

Rachel outlined Access Info’s current comparative campaign across four countries—France, Greece, Moldova, and the Netherlands—each selected for its unique legal and political context. In the Netherlands, the existence of a new law presented both a challenge and an opportunity. Although the Dutch government has not signed the Tromsø Convention, the law mandates a review within six years—offering a window to influence improvements.

Legal Gaps and Practical Problems

Tim delved into the specifics of the Dutch system. While the Netherlands was once a global leader in transparency laws, it now lags behind in some respects. The new WOO law, despite its promise, remains nearly 80% identical to the old law. Key mechanisms such as a central document register and an independent information commissioner were left out—omissions that have become more apparent as implementation issues pile up.

The government in the Netherlands is talking about a 2027 refresh, which could be an opportunity for improvements, but there are concerns that calls for reform could backfire, leading to a narrowing rather than an expansion of rights—particularly given the current political climate of distrust and civil service resistance.

Tim highlighted how the lack of a central document register leads to overly broad requests from users, which in turn burden government departments. SPOON’s solution is to work closely with users to narrow and clarify their requests, helping to make the system work despite its flaws.

Bridging the Gap Between Law and Practice

A recurring theme was the tension between legal rights and practical realities. Rachel stressed that even a well-drafted law can fall short if poorly implemented. That’s why Access Info’s recommendations focus not just on alignment with the Tromsø Convention, but on the creation of tools and institutions—like an information commissioner—that can help bridge this gap.

In the Netherlands, judicial routes are available, but they are slow and burdensome. An ombudsperson can sometimes act more swiftly, but this depends heavily on the individual’s approach. An independent commissioner would offer faster and more consistent oversight.

Next Steps: Dialogue and Evaluation

Looking ahead, SPOON and Access Info are focused on fostering dialogue with government officials ahead of the WOO law’s formal evaluation. This includes creating a dedicated platform to engage civil servants in practical discussions on transparency, implementation challenges, and ways forward. A key goal is to ensure that civil society has a seat at the table when the law is reviewed—and to push for evidence-based, internationally-aligned improvements.

The salon highlighted a “perfect storm” moment: an emerging international consensus on best practices, a recently reformed national law, and a Dutch government that, while cautious, remains open to conversation. With the right approach, this moment could be the launchpad for meaningful reform—not just in the Netherlands, but as part of a broader European movement for open government.

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Photo by Paul Einerhand on Unsplash

We’ve built a tool that helps us release a lot more useful information about All Party Parliamentary Groups, but we need humans to help us with membership lists. 

The new stuff

For each new APPG register (which are released approximately every six weeks), we now produce lists of new APPGs, removed APPGs and updated APPGs.

• New and removed APPGs

In the latest edition of the register (published 7 May) there were 32 new APPGs added, including Wine of Great Britain, Snooker and Hadrian’s Wall! In this edition, no APPGs were removed. 

That means the total number of APPGs now stands at 482, which is roughly the same as this time last year (535 in 13 May 2024 register). However, the total remains significantly lower than the 722 figure from March 2024 (the final register before new rules were introduced).

• Changes to APPG web pages

One of the tricky things about keeping track of APPGs is spotting what has changed. Who received money, which secretariats have new staff, which officers have resigned or changed? Our new tool does that for you. Here’s what we found when we compared the newest edition with the previous one:

• Several APPGs have lost an officer leaving them with only three officers, one short of the number required, according to the rules. In the case of the Pro-Life and the SME Housebuilders groups, this has also left the groups in breach of the requirement to have an officer from both the Government and Opposition parties. 
• Some groups have new organisations acting as their secretariats, whilst others have had changes to the people who are the public enquiry point at their secretariat. Devo Agency now provides secretariat services to four groups- Liverpool City Region, North East, Greater Manchester and Northern Culture. 
• Income: More than £70,000 of new financial benefits have been declared in this register, including £20,000 to the Engineering Group and £35,000 to the Environment Group.

As with the Register of Members’ Financial Interests part of this project, we’re coming up against two big problems: bad data and Parliament not enforcing its own rules. First we want complete datasets, but then we’re going to report our findings on the quality of this data. 

Over to you: help us with membership lists

Arguably the most important question about an APPG is: who’s in it? APPG membership lists help constituents and campaigners to understand which policy areas MPs are interested in, and they make it clearer who is benefitting from the resources given to groups as a whole. However, membership lists are not routinely made available.

The APPG pages on the Parliament site list the four officers, but not the wider membership. For a group to be established, it must have at least 20 members – so there’s at least 16 names we’re missing per group.

By the new rules, we should be able to ask for this information. But if groups publish their membership lists on their website, they don’t need to respond to our requests. If they don’t have a website or don’t publish their membership lists, then they do have to tell us.

So we need to a) find all the APPG websites, and b) see if they publish members lists before we can then C) ask the ones without published lists to send them to us.

Alex has built a tool which has got us most of the way there, but we need human brains to check.

We want to find out:

1. Are there websites we haven’t found?
2. Are there membership lists we haven’t found?

Right – over to you!

1. Open up the spreadsheet.
2. Choose a group, then click the link in column D (google_link), which sends you to a Google search result for the name of that group. We’re looking for independent websites run by the APPGs, not the listing on the Parliament page and not the listing on parallelparliament.co.uk.
3. If there is a website for that group, paste the URL of the website into column E (appg_website). For some groups we have found the website already, but we need you to do the next steps. 
4. If there’s no APPG website, please enter NONE for column E and column F (appg_members_page).
5. If there is an APPG website, the next thing we’re looking for is a membership list. If you can find one, enter the URL into column F. If you can’t find any membership info, enter NONE.
6. When you’ve finished, put ‘done’ in column G (review_status) and your initials in column I (reviewer_initials)

Thanks so much – this really does make a difference! No time but still want to help? Please consider donating so we can do more of this work. 

Photo by Frank on Unsplash

TheyWorkForYou Votes is mySociety’s new platform that provides more information than ever about how MPs (and other elected representatives) have voted. 

It’s launching on Monday 19th May, and we’re running an event where you can learn all about it. 

Votes in the UK’s Parliaments determine the laws that we all live by, and we want the information about who voted for what to be as accurate, easy to use and easy to understand as possible.

Whether you’re a data whizz who wants to get into the details, or a citizen who wants to know whether your MP has been paying attention to your emails, we think this new service will be helpful to you. Thanks to TheyWorkForYou Votes, we’ve been able to make improvements to our own websites (like TheyWorkForYou and the Local Intelligence Hub), and also, true to our open source principles, we’re making more data available in more formats that you can use and re-use for your own clever tools! 

Join us for our launch event at 12pm Monday 19th May to cover both why we publish votes, and what you can get out of the new platform.

Register on Eventbrite now to hear from:

• Louise Crow, mySociety’s Chief Exec 
• Dr Ben Worthy, Birkbeck University
• Alex Parsons & Julia Cushion, mySociety’s democracy team

See you in a couple of weeks!

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Image: UK Parliament (CC BY 2.0)

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