mySociety’s WhoFundsThem work combines technology and volunteers to create better data and visibility on money in politics. We’ve published a report of what we’ve learned, given evidence in Parliament, and made more information available on TheyWorkForYou. 

This update covers some recently declared freebies, cash for questions paper trails, paid membership of APPGs, and how we can help the public set the rules of the game. 

Cash for questions (if not answers)

The Sunday Times has a great papertrail on George Freeman [paywalled] (related BBC article) where he’s emailing back and forth with his second job employment about questions that he then uses his Parliamentary position to ask ministers.

It’s rare to have clear evidence of the exchange, but that “cash for questions” is probably going on is something that’s visible in the aggregate. Simon Weschle found that MPs with second jobs (especially those working in the knowledge sector) asked more parliamentary questions – specifically about internal departmental policies and projects. 

While MPs have a box they can tick to declare that they have an interest when asking a question*, this does not differentiate between “I’m asking about a health condition I have personal experience of”, and “I’m paid money by someone who would like to know more about this”. 

We want a procedure change here so the exact conflict of interest needs to be publicly declared with the question, in line with the rules on parliamentary speeches. This would hopefully shame some of the more obvious connections we’ve seen between financial interests and parliamentary questions. In the meantime, we’re exploring a prototype to suggest matches between register entries and questions to help understand more about what is happening here. 

Because all of Freeman’s questions were asked on the same day, you can see the questions and answers in the Parliament website search. Notably, all the answers are a bit vague and unhelpful. The short turnaround time of Parliamentary Questions (PQs) means you’re going to get a reworded version of a press release if one is available rather than big insider secrets.

A big change since the big cash for questions scandal of the 1990s is that we now have the Freedom of Information Act. While there are still a lot of things that PQs can do that FOI can’t,  the government is a lot more porous. Open government laws reduce corruption risks from the other end, by making it much easier for everyone to access information without needing an MP rewording questions on your behalf. 

So if you’re considering giving an MP money to ask questions for you a) don’t do that, it’s bad b) maybe you can get the information you want another way instead.

* See linked blog post – technically there is a box for more information, it’s just not made public, and nothing happens internally with the information.  

Tracking freebies

When a new Register of Members’ Financial Interests comes out, we make that available in more formats in TheyWorkForYou, and we look at the new entries to see if there are any interesting patterns. It was noteworthy looking at the release a few weeks ago to see five MPs registering free football tickets, including Keir Starmer. 

This was a big conversation last year, and there was never actually a promise to stop doing this  — just a much more limited change that they would stop accepting clothes as a donation (which as the Guardian points out, was only ever a small proportion of gifts received). There is an emerging pattern with ministers (examples for David Lammy and Jonathan Reynolds) accepting the hospitality ticket, but donating to the associated club charity an equivalent amount. 

The Starmer example is tricky, because the argument made for him is security issues around not being in a private box (in this case donated by the club). But it’s also true that when MPs are considering if they want a free day out, they can look to the top and see tacit approval in what ministers accept. Unless there’s a rule change, or leadership from the top to set a norm, this unpopular practice is just going to continue. There are entirely predictable “here are the freebies MPs got over the last five years” news stories that can be avoided at the next election —but it needs leadership now.

MPs accepting free football/concert tickets is unpopular, with a 2024 YouGov poll showing 64% found it either somewhat/completely unacceptable (and only 6% find it completely acceptable).  And to be fair, most MPs are not appearing on these lists. The reputational damage is collective, and the benefits only go to a small few.

But there is also the possibility that more is going on than appears on the register. In the latest release, Jim McMahon declared a pair of tickets valued at £580 – because of this he needed to retrospectively declare a £110 ticket received in April (the limit applies to all gifts from the same source). If an MP receives a single gift below £300, it doesn’t need to be declared at all.

We think this is too high – our recommendations on this were to both lower the threshold for disclosure from £300 to £100, and for Parliament to develop principles on when MPs should just not accept gifts, in line with how this practice works outside Parliament. 

There are questions about what the right lines are to draw here. Does donating the value solve the problem? Do we view tickets from the club differently from third parties buying tickets? Further down, there’s a good example of how the public can be bought in – but a clear first step is having more information about what is actually going on. 

APPGs – MPs, Lords, and other friends

There was a mid-June update to the APPG register: with 35 new APPGs, and three APPGs disappearing (Kuwait, Yemen and Digital Markets and Digital Money). 

We’re continuing with our efforts to build a dataset of APPG members, thanks to people who helped with our double-checking of website information. 

Something that’s less well known is that you can have associate members of APPGs (for outside organisations)  —and that APPGs can charge these groups for membership. 

For APPGs focused on an industry, this can be a practical way of spreading the costs of the group across multiple interested organisations. However, it can also look a lot like cash for access. For instance, the Events APPGs issued a press release inviting people to become members for a price:

UK-based organisations are invited to become members for £1500 + VAT by nominating a senior representative, offering them the opportunity to engage directly with MPs and influence policy decisions.

While other groups might be more subtle than this, access to legislators is obviously the value proposition of paid memberships. The Events APPG lists its external members, but hasn’t yet declared any income the pricing suggests they should have received from these memberships.

Currently the rules don’t require the pricing scheme to be published (other APPGs have external members who will not be paying £1,500). We’d like to see both this, and a central list of membership being published to make it clearer exactly what is or is not changing hands here. 

Setting the rules of the game

IPSA (the body responsible for setting MPs’ pay and business costs) is convening a Citizens Forum (representatively chosen via a sortition process) to inform IPSAs’ work. 

We’re all for this and have argued for a version of this that is also setting a job description. There’s an issue where the general public’s low lack of knowledge about how politics works is used to dismiss the idea that the public should be involved in setting the rules politicians work by. Deliberative processes like this allow a small group to be given the same opportunity and structure as political elites to fully understand options and consider trade-offs.

This is specifically something we think would be a good idea on the wider problem of funding politics, helping unblock arguments about public funding with a clearer sense of how people see different approaches. 

Support our work

We don’t want to just complain about how the system is broken: we want to do something about it. 

We think there are a lot of practical things we can do to improve transparency from the outside, and keep these issues on the agenda — but we need your support to do so. 

Donations help us make progress on the low hanging fruit we’ve identified, explore new approaches, and get the information we have where it needs to be.

If you want to support our work, please consider making a donation, or sign up to our newsletter to hear more about our work and other opportunities to volunteer. 

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Header image: Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash

Parliamentarians (MPs and Peers) have access to two different systems of getting information from the government.  As members of Parliament,  they can use Parliamentary Questions (PQs) to ask questions and receive information from government ministers. They also have the same rights as everyone else to access information from public authorities through the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. 

This blog post describes the different features of the two systems, and where it might benefit Parliamentarians to use the more general right to access information.  

Parliamentarians should use FOI when:

• The information is held by a public authority that is not a central government department or agency.
• The information is held in datasets or full documents rather than snippets of information. 
• If information is likely to be (or has already been) withheld on public interest grounds and a right of appeal would be useful. 

In general, we think that Parliamentarians should take the same interest in Freedom of Information compliance that they do in Parliamentary Questions, and recognise it as an essential way that information enters debate and facilitates parliamentary scrutiny of government. 

FOI is not just directly useful for Parliamentarians, but is part of the information environment that informs wider work and scrutiny.  FOI use by journalists, campaigners, and researchers regularly finds its way back into the parliamentary discussion. 

We think Parliament can do more to take an interest in the good functioning of the FOI system, and would always love to chat to any MPs or Peers who want to see a stronger FOI system. 

If you’d just like to learn more about Freedom of Information – we have a series of guides on WhatDoTheyKnow with everything you need to get started.

Parliamentary Questions and Freedom of Information

The Freedom of Information Act requires information to be disclosed on request except where it is covered by one of a range of exemptions. The Information Commissioner’s Office is the regulator for FOI, and the ICO’s decisions are ultimately appealable in the Information Tribunal. 

Parliamentary Questions are based on a convention of government transparency to Parliament rather than a formal law. This convention is part of the general expectation that government business should be open to Parliament, that also underpins how Select Committees ask for documents. 

This is reflected in the Ministerial Code as: 

Ministers should be as open as possible with Parliament and the public, refusing to provide information only when disclosure would not be in the public interest, which should be decided in accordance with the relevant statutes and the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

How this works in practice is led by the government’s Guide to Parliamentary Work. Parliament’s interest in the effectiveness of this system is shown through the Procedure Committee producing monitoring statistics and recommendations for updates to the guidance. 

The two systems are of comparable scale: in 2023 there were 56k Written Questions to central government departments and 70k FOI requests. Within a department, the responsibility to reply may or may not be held by the same people (there may be a practical split between wider parliamentary affairs and FOI management), although requests for information will then branch out to teams within the department. 

Differences in practice

In principle, where both mechanisms can be used to ask for the same information, they should get the same response. In practice, FOI can be a more reliable way of accessing information if the information is covered.

The government’s guidance encourages alignment between the standard applied for Freedom of Information and PQs (i.e. information should not be withheld that would be released under FOI) and the language used to deny access to information is similar across both.

However, there are examples of where information not released under PQs may be released under FOI, or the underlying source information can contradict answers given (as found early on in FOI’s availability through usage by the All Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition).

This difference does not require a bad faith approach to giving Parliament information, but this may sometimes be the case and it is something that Parliamentarians should pay attention to. The parallel systems have different compliance approaches,  and are often administered separately, and this can lead to different results.

Comparisons

	Freedom of Information	Parliamentary questions
Scope (authorities)	All public authorities	Central government departments and agencies
Scope (information)	Must be existing documents or information	May involve (within cost limit) extra analysis on top of existing documents to answer the question
Time period	20 working days	5 working days
Right of appeal	Yes – internal review, ICO and courts.	No – seen as Parliamentary activity but no explicit internal appeal system.
Cost limit	£600 (24 hours) – Central gov £450 (18 hours) – Other public bodies	£850 (34 hours)
Who can use it	Anyone	MPs and Peers
Results are…	Private/Public (it depends)	Public

 

Scope

Freedom of information covers all public authorities (Scottish public authorities are covered under the similar Scottish Freedom of Information law), while PQs can only be asked of government departments or their associated agencies. 

FOI requests must be for existing information or documents. PQs have a wider scope in that they may involve (within cost limit) extra analysis on top of existing documents to answer the question.

In practice, if seeking information from an existing document, PQs may result in an extract from this document, while an FOI response may return the whole document. 

Time period

PQs should be returned faster. The standard for PQs is they should be answered within five working days, and are considered late after ten.

Freedom of Information requests should be responded to within 20 working days. Technically, it should be as fast as possible – but information tends to be released at this last point.

A shorter time limit is an advantage for certain kinds of questions,  but may be a disadvantage when documents are hard to locate/access, leading to an incorrect “not held” response. This is one of the reasons why we recommend FOI for full documents. 

Right of appeal

A key advantage of FOI is the legal appeal route. 

Under FOI, there is an appeal regime through an independent regulator and the courts. There is no similar function for PQs. The guidance may encourage departments to apply the same logic to FOI and PQs, but the department’s logic may be wrong. Under FOI there is an external check on this, and disclosure can be compelled. 

Because the question and answer process is seen as part of Parliamentary proceedings, outside regulators and the courts cannot compel different answers. This is a construction of Parliamentary supremacy that is to the advantage of the government, and to the disadvantage of MPs.

As FOI exemptions are part of the logic used to allow information to be withheld, requests can end up in a situation where the FOI standard is used to withhold information, but without the equivalent ability to appeal.

For instance in this Written Answer there is the effective use of the FOI commercial exemption. If this was an FOI request, this could be appealed at first through internal review and then to the ICO. As a Written Answer there is no right of appeal (although it could be resubmitted as an FOI request). 

Cost limit

PQs have a higher threshold for the cost limit, meaning that in principle a slightly higher search time is allowed. 

Freedom of Information requests to central government departments and agencies have a cost limit of £600 worth of time (24 hours).The “disproportionate cost threshold” for PQs is currently £850 (34 hours)  — this is pegged at 140% of the FOI cost limit to the nearest £50.

In practice, this will rarely matter. Most responses that engage the cost limit reflect search times well above either cost threshold. An example of the disproportionate cost threshold being used can be seen here.

Who can use

Anyone can make an FOI request, while only MPs and Peers can ask PQs. 

In practice this is a fuzzy boundary. Campaigners with a friendly MP/Peer may be able to have questions asked and information released. Similarly, it might sometimes be useful for a government MP critical of party policy to have information requested by a third party through FOI. 

Information or documents released through PQs will enter the record or be a deposited paper, and so covered by parliamentary privilege and effectively public domain to use.

Information released under FOI does not have this same guarantee. Public authorities have a duty to provide information even if it is copyrighted or defamatory, and can’t be guaranteed to be legally safe to further republish. 

For instance, an FOI request for an internal report that a third party considers defamatory might be vulnerable to a SLAPP. In most cases, this is not a significant factor. When it is and the requester is an MP/Peer, key information could be covered under privilege in different ways. 

Who can see the results

The responses to FOI requests are less public by default, but this varies. 

Answers to PQs are given to the parliamentarian in question and published as part of the official record. 

FOI results are returned to the requester. If requested through WhatDoTheyKnow, the results are published in public (unless using our WhatDoTheyKnow Pro service, where results can be embargoed for a time). 

The authority may (or may not) release the results of an FOI request either through a disclosure log, or other public disclosure. For instance, information might be released simultaneously through FOI and through a public announcement to get the authority’s framing of the information across, and reduce the newsworthiness to the original requester. 

FOI is worth Parliament paying attention to

Both Parliamentary Questions and Freedom of Information open doors the others can’t. Both are important tools in a Parliamentarian’s role. 

FOI is not just directly useful for Parliamentarians, but is part of the information environment that informs wider work and scrutiny.  FOI use by journalists, campaigners, and researchers regularly finds its way back into the parliamentary discussion. 

We think Parliament can do more to take an interest in the good functioning of the FOI system, and would always love to chat to any MPs or Peers who want to see a stronger FOI system. 

Header image: Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Transparency is always a strong theme at TICTeC, and since so many members of the Access to Information Network were in town for the conference, we thought we’d take the opportunity to meet up. 

And so, the day after, several people who run Freedom of Information sites came together in an airy attic room to share knowledge and discuss challenges. 

As always when we convene this specialised interest group, participants were delighted to have in-depth discussions to other people who fully ‘get it’ — to whom the challenges of running such sites are not just academic, but form part of their day to day realities.

Sitting around the tables were Stefan and Luisa of Frag den Staat (Germany); Michael from CoST (Uganda); Ana from ForSet (Georgia); Miguel from Plaza Civica (Peru); Liset and Tim from SPOON (Netherlands); Krisztina from Átlátszónet Foundation (Hungary); Martin from Abrimos (Mexico); Rachel from AccessInfo (Europe); Michal, Piotr and Marzena from Citizens’ Network Watchdog (Poland); Laurent from MaDada (France); Maria from Fiquem Sabendo (Brazil); Matt from the Civic Tech Field Guide and Julia, Louise and me representing mySociety.

Positive wins 

We began by sharing recent successes. A few of the organisations were successful in overturning governmental attacks on, or restrictions to, FOI rights, while others had used research and activism to undermine negative perceptions around the Right To Know. We heard of successful campaigns and grant bids too — overall, sharing these wins was a great way to kick things off.

Learning new skills 

Ana gave a really insightful presentation on how ForSet had worked with ‘influencers’ to reach a new audience. Here, the term ‘influencer’ really just meant content creators with a wide following among the Gen Z audience they were trying to appeal to. 

For context, in Georgia young people have been out on the streets en masse, successfully protesting against proposed laws. Even if they weren’t yet old enough to vote, Ana pointed out, they could still influence public discourse and the political agenda. 

And now, as that generation reaches voting age, ForSet wanted to use social media platforms to encourage democratic participation.

As with everything the organisation does, the level of preparation and analysis that they brought to the project was outstanding, making sure that they fully understood who Gen Z would pay attention to, and trying out different messages to see what worked. There was so much to learn here about how to break into new audiences and how to ensure that what you were doing had an effect.

A forest of trees

Next, Rachel led us in an exercise to plot the challenges we face running ATI sites onto a tree diagram – with causes at the roots, core issues on the trunk, and consequences in the leafy canopy.  

What we discovered was first, that challenges and problems tend to be the same in every context; and second, that causes and effects are so interlinked that it is often difficult to decide which is which. For example, a lack of public understanding around ATI can both cause a low usage, and be the result of inadequate education around the topic. Authorities’ low response rates might be the result of poor governmental oversight, or the cause of public apathy – and so on.

Batch and back-ups

In the afternoon, the topics were decided upon by consensus: we had a useful conversation about the issues around batch requesting (sending the same request to multiple authorities), which sites offer in a variety of different ways ranging from it being open to most users, to being available only to staff (and some don’t offer it at all).  

Secondly, we discussed ‘backing up’ – both backups to ensure our own site archives were safe from loss, and means by which to scrape massive public archives when it becomes clear that they might be taken down by the authorities running them. This is not an imaginary scenario, as members were able to testify, and of course as we have seen recently in the States.

Finally, people voted on which topics they are keen to see covered in future webinars of the ATI Network, with youth and AI decision-making being most popular – so watch this space for those webinars to happen.

TICTeC is wrapped up for another year. The roller banners are stowed away, the lanyards saved for next year, and now we’re back home from Belgium with memories, insights and enough hope to keep us going ’til next time. 

It’s always energising to come together with the global civic tech community and share everything we’ve learned. We had attendees from 34 countries, bringing together their experiences — and judging by the comments we’re seeing, we’re not the only ones to have found it both enjoyable and valuable.

The two days were “fabulous and thought provoking”, allowing for “the exchange of experiences and coordinated actions”, and delegates said they returned “inspired, with new insights on civic tech trends and promising collaboration ideas”.

Perhaps Hendrik Nahr from make.org, summed the whole experience up best when he said, “It felt like a family gathering of the civic tech community from Europe and beyond. I’m grateful for the energy, the open exchanges, and the motivation to keep pushing forward tech for democracy.”

We are grateful too: TICTeC is not just about mySociety creating an open space for such discourse; it also depends on the people who participate and the insights they so generously articulate.

What we talked about

It’s hard to provide a full summary of such a packed event, but fortunately we’ll soon be able to share videos of the majority of the presentations, along with slides and photographs, so you’ll be able to choose what you’d like to see. 

The overall theme of the conference was tech to defend and advance democracy, and within that there were strong strands around tech to tackle the climate emergency; citizen participation and deliberation; transparency and access to information… and across everything we heard of the seismic changes to society, to tech and to democracy — both already seen, and expected soon — by the emergence of AI. 

To pull out a few high points from so many thought-provoking moments:

Marietje Schaake, delivering her keynote remotely because of last minute train strike issues, still managed to enthrall the auditorium and ignite our two days of conversation with an incisive overview of how big tech is overtaking democratic governance globally, with oversight lagging dangerously behind. We posted a summary on Bluesky in real time, if you can’t wait for the video.

Fernanda Campagnucci‘s day two keynote (summarised here) sliced up the different approaches government can take to citizen participation, from citizens feeding into decision-making processes, to citizens being invited to co-create both the data and the governance systems, featuring a nice story about an elderly lady who grumbled that everyone was talking about APIs (a way for software systems to communicate with one another) at a town meeting but she didn’t know what it meant. Once someone had explained to her, she turned up at every subsequent meeting to request APIs of every department’s output.

Colin Megill used the opportunity provided by TICTeC to launch Pol.is 2.0 to a highly relevant audience. This is a paid version of the open source decision-making platform — the basis of Twitter’s “Community Notes” functionality — which contains a ‘superset’ of new features. Its enhanced LLM capabilities allow it to break sprawling conversations into any number of subtopics, making them easier to moderate and removing blocks to overall consensus that can be created by small sticking points.

Panels brought people together to talk about aspects of parliamentary monitoring and access to information from around the world – discussions we will be continuing through our communities of practice work. 

There was a useful session on the importance of, and methods for, measuring impact — after all, TICTEC’s foundational purpose — from OpenUp South Africa, Hungary’s Átlátszónet Foundation and SPOON Netherlands.

We wrapped up the conference with an examination of how mySociety is navigating AI in recent and near future work, and an open forum about how TICTeC can evolve and continue to be useful to the global civic tech community. 

We presented how we’re thinking about, utilising and navigating both the positives and potential dangers of AI. Such considerations are also preoccupations for others in our field: several organisations are experimenting with AI to achieve or work more efficiently toward their pro-democracy aims; others are foreseeing problems that AI may bring, from amplifying misinformation to algorithm-based decisions that affect individuals’ lives. 

There wasn’t an organisation at TICTeC that isn’t thinking about AI in one way or another, as evidenced in diverse sessions across the entire conference. There’s a sense that the conversation has matured from last year, moving on from hype to clear engagement on practical uses, and for scrutiny of both model creators and government uses. We’ll write more about this in a separate post.

And also, watch this space for videos and photos from TICTeC 2025, which we’ll share as soon as they’re ready. That should keep us all going until next year.

The 2025 Scorecards launch today

Wondering how your local council’s doing around climate? With today’s launch of the 2025 Council Climate Action Scorecards, you can check their progress right now. 

And because this is the second edition of Scorecards, you can check not just your council’s scores, but also how they compare with last time. Are they doing better or worse in each of the vital 93 areas for meeting the challenges of the climate crisis?

Today, you can:

• Search for your council by name
• See at a glance how their overall score compares with others across the UK, overall and within each section of activity
• Click through for an in-depth breakdown of every question and how they scored
• See at every level of the Scorecards how their performance compares with the 2023 assessment.

What next?

Great — so you’re up to speed on the areas where your council’s doing well on climate action, and where it could be doing better. 

Start a conversation If you have thoughts about these, you can use the Scorecards to open up conversations with your local councillors — our website WriteToThem makes that super easy. (Want more data? Type your postcode into Local Intelligence Hub for lots more climate-related local info!)

Use Scorecards in your work If you’re a council climate officer or councillor yourself, we hope the Scorecards will show where you could be making improvements — and give you an idea of which other councils are doing well in those areas. You can even get in touch and swap notes! Take a look at our case studies to see how councils have been using Scorecards to learn and improve.

Help us do more

Scorecards are a joint project from Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.
If you value the work that we do to make it easier to hold authorities to account for climate action, please consider making a donation.

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Image: Alastair Johnstone / Climate Visuals

A few weeks ago, I was part of a panel giving evidence to the House of Commons’ Standards Committee on ‘outside employment and interests’ (second jobs).  Here’s the video, or the transcript. 

My evidence was based on our findings and recommendations from our WhoFundsThem project and our Beyond Transparency report. We worked with volunteers to go right through the register of members’ interests, to add new information to TheyWorkForYou, and to draw some conclusions on reform from what we learned.

The relevant section on second jobs is here in the report.

Here’s a quick summary of what the session was digging into, and what our evidence was about. 

How to handle rules

The meta-question of the session was if you are going to have rules, what form should the rules take? Should they be:

• Transparency-based – do what you like, but you have to tell people.
• Limit-based – don’t take up jobs that earn more than X, or take more time than Y. 
• Principle-based – don’t take up roles with conflicts of interests
• Role-based – don’t take up certain kinds of role

In practice, you want some combination of these – but in general we think that looking at role is a good foundation to be supported by other approaches. 

Transparency is not enough

We love transparency here at mySociety Towers – but the title of our report (Beyond Transparency) is our general message here – it’s not enough on its own even if done well, and it’s not currently well. 

If you are relying on transparency to make this system self-enforcing then the transparency needs to be really good. It’s not! We brought a group of volunteers together because we wanted humans to be able to go through the register and add extra context through research (for example, researching what a named company does) but we just ran into massive obstacles with what wasn’t there. Contradictory information, information that logically should have been updated that wasn’t. Simple questions like “is this person still a councillor” were difficult. 

Fixing this needs a systematic approach. You can’t just say it’s an MPs responsibility to do a good disclosure – you need systematic efforts (validation, prompts and audits) to make this data strong enough to be load bearing. 

Reasonable limits struggles to make practical recommendations

The limit-based approach fell apart immediately because the main proponents of “reasonable limits” (Committee for Standards in Public Life) also decided they couldn’t commit to recommending what these limits should be. Requirements on time might cause problems for medical people who need to do minimum practice, and requirements on money would cause problems for people earning book royalties. So given this, you need to have a sense of roles otherwise you end up in the situation where people do not have to defend lucrative law careers outright, but hide behind the nurses. 

Org-based risk, rather than taking people’s word 

One of the things the committee is considering was principle-based rules proposed by the Parliamentary Commissioner.

Our concern with these is they quite heavily imply that a range of activities is impermissible without actually making it so – making it vulnerable to people just actively lying or non-disclosing. 

For example, a principles-based approach: would struggle to catch an MP being given a semi-fake job, where the actual work is insider contacts and using parliamentary questions. Everyone involved is smart enough to keep what the real deal is out of the contract. They might certify there is no conflict, but there is not a good way of verifying or challenging that.

If we’re trying to prevent outright corruption (while allowing other activities), the risk is not in the role, but the organisation who is paying. The question isn’t “do you as an MP certify this job isn’t corrupt” but “are you taking a job with an organisation that poses corruption risks?” Do they supply government services? Do they separately lobby Parliament?

You want factual questions that don’t rely on any particular role, that can be independently investigated and challenged. The risk is posed by who is paying, not what they say they’re paying for.

The simplest solution (just ban things) has a lot going for it

As a TheyWorkForYou person it feels partly my job to highlight that the majority view is clearly against almost all forms of moonlighting.  By YouGov polling the only professions there was majority public support for allowing was doctor/nurse or author. And even then, a survey experiment by Rosie Campbell and Phillip Cowley found a penalty in support for a hypothetical GP decreased as the extent they continued to practice increased. The conversation in Parliament naturally reflects lots of specific examples of people this would cause problems for, but starting from the public position of almost nothing – the problem should really be trying to justify limited allowances rather than slightly increased restrictions. 

Transparency International’s position is a tight ban, with exceptions for jobs “that maintain a professional qualification, are political activity or provide an essential public service, such as army reservists”. This seems like a good starting point! There are going to be some more fiddly exemptions that need to be argued about (I’d separate out the dual mandate discussion) – but I’m much more comfortable with a list of exemptions than trying to define a list of bad jobs. 

This list of exemptions can be nuanced – and this is an area where using citizens’ panels or assemblies can be useful in really getting into the details (see other examples of select committees making use of deliberative processes). You need broad principles, but you also need to be translating that into specific rules on roles, and have processes for updating these over time. 

This needs collective decisions, not individual discretion

Whatever the approach, it is important that Parliament takes a collective view, rather than seeing this as a matter between MPs and their constituencies. This stretches from better audits of transparency, to just banning activities that are bringing Parliament into disrepute. 

Most MPs are doing the maximum individual action they can – they are not taking these jobs. Meanwhile a small number of MPs have second jobs that cause reputation problems. They get most of the private gains from this, while everyone bears the cost of the headlines. It’d be really great to have one less political trust scandal going around every few years – and a simple approach is in reach. 

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For more on the *other* problems with the current approach (especially on gifts) – please read the report!

As part of our WhoFundsThem project, we released a big report detailing what we learned while working with volunteers to explore the MPs’ Register of Members Financial Interests (RMFI). 

Many of our recommendations are for changes Parliament should make, but we always want to think about what we can do from the outside to keep things moving. 

In this post I’m going to quickly recap our recommendations, and what we think we can do to improve things and work to enable reformers in Parliament to go further. 

Better data collection

We recommend that Parliament review the categories of the register to better reflect common interest types, and capture appropriate information for different kinds of democratic problems. Whether this is making the categories easier to parse for constituents, or collecting data that is easier to compare in bulk – we need the most relevant information to be recorded for different kinds of interests. 

What we can do from the outside

While we cannot create information from thin air, we can rework and expand on what is published to make it more useful. Our enhanced election summaries are an example of how this data can be expanded through matching to other datasets and volunteer crowdsourcing. 

There is also value in making messy data more easily available – we can scale our existing spreadsheet approach to registers of interest beyond the House of Commons. We’ve now added the devolved registers of interest – but there’s a lot further to go, for instance to local government and the House of Lords. 

Stronger checks

There need to be better processes to improve the quality of the data released – through more validation rules, data audits, and enforcing Parliament’s own rules on disclosure. Parliament as an institution should stop seeing poor quality disclosures as the MP’s problem, but instead treat it as something that affects the standing of the institution as a whole (and that the majority of MPs want to see working well).

What we can do from the outside

We can more actively flag where information needs to improve – and use our position to create better correction pipelines.

For instance, we can produce automated validation approaches to flag entries with missing/conflicting information and send these back to the MP/Parliamentary Commissioner for review. 

Similarly, where disclosures in debate are not being followed, we can promptly pass this back to the MP in question and the chair of the debate who did not enforce Parliament’s rules during the debate, and keep track of incomplete disclosures in public.

Tighter rules

These recommendations aim to achieve more disclosure through lowering thresholds, and to make more interests impermissible – for instance, lower disclosure thresholds for gifts, shareholdings, or family members’ interests.

What we can do from the outside

We cannot change Parliament’s rules to capture information we think is missing, but we can demonstrate where those rules are out of step – and the specific implications of that. 

For instance, our highlighted interests page flags interests related to industries with low public support and governments of not free countries, and offers MPs opportunity for additional context. We can focus on aspects of this that produce the most benefit for least effort.

Systematic reform

Ultimately, we see systematic reform of political finance as being necessary to reduce the dependence of parties on big donors – enabling caps on political donations.  Here we recommend a citizens’ assembly on money in politics as a way of progressing arguments about public funding that have been stuck for decades. 

What we can do from the outside

While ideally an assembly would be commissioned by Parliament itself, it doesn’t have to be – and would have a lot of value if convened by civil society to move the debate forward. 

For our purposes, sharper information about public preferences (and importantly trade-offs) would help inform the rest of our work. 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.

Help us do more

Key to our work is the philosophy that we don’t have to wait for a better political system to be given to us – we can work together to make it happen now.

If you want to support our work, please consider making a donation, or sign up to our newsletter to hear more about our work and other opportunities to volunteer. 

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Header image: Photo by Dan Senior on Unsplash

If you’re someone who’s concerned about the climate but not really sure what to do about it, this webinar is definitely a good place to start.

Our event this week brought together investigative journalist Lucas Amin of Democracy for Sale; Anne Friel, Head of Just Societies at Client Earth; and Joschi Wolf of the German transparency project Frag Den Staat – all sharing their knowledge around Freedom of Information as an invaluable tool for tackling the climate crisis.

It was very encouraging to hear practical tips and thoughts that made FOI-based activism seem within reach, even to the beginner. And all from your own desk!

Watch the webinar on YouTube. We’ve also compiled the responses to the questions from the audience that there wasn’t time to answer during the session: you can see those here.

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Image: Matteo Miliddi

Today we’re launching TheyWorkForYou Votes – our new vote information platform. 

Our goal with this service is to create and support better analysis of decisions taken in the UK’s Parliaments. We want this service to both be directly helpful to the general public, and indirectly by providing new tools and data to specialists.

We ran an online event to talk about the new site and the context of this work that you can watch on the event page.

If you like our work, and want to see us go further – please consider donating to support mySociety and TheyWorkForYou.

What’s new in this site

Vote analysis

For each vote we show:

• Breakdowns for and against the motion by party/government/opposition. 
• A searchable voting list with party alignment – how far off an individual MPs vote is from the average position of their party.
• Which of eight common ‘parliamentary dynamics’ the vote falls into – reflecting who was proposing, divisions among opposition parties, and levels of participation. 

Here is an example of this for the approval vote of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill.

We calculate this daily for all new votes we know about, but for House of Commons votes this will be calculated and published within minutes of the vote being published on the Commons Votes site.

Motions and legislation tags

The day after a vote, we automatically link up decisions with the motion that is being voted on. From this we can link deeper into debates, and add extra explainers for common types of motions.

We also automatically tag votes that seem like they’re related to the same bill to make it easier to find amendments or significant stages of the bill (because of naming variations, sometimes some are missed). 

Here’s an example of that for the Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill.

 

Divisions and agreements

For the House of Commons and Scottish Parliament, we extract from the official record references to decisions made without a vote (“on the nod”) and create ‘Agreements’ from these, linking to the related motion. 

We do this to create a canonical reference for agreements. When a high profile issue may be passed without a vote, it can be hard for people to find. By extracting these from the official record, we show more of how the parliamentary process works, can tag them as being part of the process of passing legislation, and include them in voting summaries (in rare cases). 

Here is an example of an amendment made to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill that was accepted without a vote.

Voting summaries by time period

TheyWorkForYou Votes now powers our voting summaries – where we group related votes together to show a record on TheyWorkForYou. 

Building on last year’s change to how we approach scoring and vote inclusion, our new technical approach gives us more flexibility in calculating voting summaries for different time periods. We now show voting records in TheyWorkForYou by ‘all time’ but also by the different government tenures since 1997. 

By creating a view for the current Parliament, we can make recent decisions easier to discover and include, while reflecting that the implications of votes can be long running, and the record is not reset at each election. 

The voting summaries are currently updated up to the end of 2024 – we will do an update covering the first part of 2025 in early June. 

Annotations and whip reports

An impact of TheyWorkForYou has been more public explanations by representatives of how they’ve voted.

We want to start recording this, to make them more accessible to people viewing their representatives’ voting records.

Divisions, agreements, and votes by individual representatives can be annotated with additional information or a link. We can also record information about party voting instructions (the whip). 

Initially, we will be testing this out on specific votes, but our plan is to make this directly available to representatives to annotate their own votes, and have this information feed through to TheyWorkForYou. 

A hub of voting information

Over time, we will make more of the information in this platform more directly accessible on TheyWorkForYou to reach our wider audience. 

But our goal is generally to raise the standard and ease of analysis of parliamentary data for everyone. We make all our data available not just through an API, but as bulk downloads that make it easy for researchers and analysts to get the benefit of the work we’re doing to join up different data sources. 

Support our work

Through TheyWorkForYou and our wider democracy work, we take a practical approach to improving politics in the UK. Over the last two decades we’ve shone  light on UK democracy by tracking MPs’ votes, publishing registers of interests, and sending email alerts—making sure those in power know the public is watching. Because we don’t have paywalls – charities, community groups, and everyday citizens can access unbiased political information without cost.

To keep the service running and continue to innovate and adapt to changing times, TheyWorkForYou relies on supporters. A monthly contribution of £5 (or what you can afford) helps cover core costs, safeguards its independence, and lets the team keep innovating for a fairer, more transparent political system.

If you support us and our work, please consider making a one-off or monthly donation.

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Header image: photo by Christian Boragine on Unsplash

The Council Climate Action Scorecards are helping climate officers across the UK to understand which elements of their path to Net Zero are working well, and which areas need improvement.

Marina Ebbage, Procurement Policy Officer at Norfolk County Council, explained the many ways in which Scorecards have helped the authority’s Climate Hub team in their work. She began by explaining how the council came to understand that a council taking climate action is one thing; while communicating that action is something else.

“We first came across the Scorecards following Climate Emergency UK’s assessment in 2021, and through the subsequent publicity which usefully highlighted the areas of work where our actions were not publicly communicated”, says Marina.  

“We’ve found the independent and external assessment of our council’s climate action not only allows us to systematically mark our progress in tackling climate change, but helps us to maintain and strengthen our accountability to the public. 

“The Scorecards have helped us strive for greater transparency and accessibility in our climate action efforts. Following that initial assessment, we realised that a lot of information about the work we were doing was not readily available to the public – hence our initial low score. 

“A key example is our Climate Action Plan, which draws all the information we are doing together on climate-related work and is now publicly available in one place on a dedicated part of the council’s website. Previously, information was in committee papers which are publicly available but often not easy to find, or knowledge was internal rather than shared publicly.

“Since then, we’ve brought together this information and evidence on the council website, making it available and accessible to Norfolk’s citizens and businesses, and indeed more widely.” 

The benefits go more widely than communication, though — they resonate through many aspects of the council’s work, as Marina explains: “We’ve found the Scorecards valuable as a way to check the comprehensiveness of our Action Plan, ensuring that we’re taking a well-rounded approach to addressing climate change. 

“At a senior management level, the Scorecards provide an overarching view of our climate action and comparative performance, which our Climate Board has integrated into its review process, using them to assess our actions and identify areas for improvement.”  

Talking of comparative performance, Marina adds, “We benchmark our performance against other councils. This comparison helps us identify areas where we need to improve and informs discussions with other councils on what further actions we can take.” 

And the bottom line? “Ultimately, the Scorecards have provided a useful means to review and benchmark our climate actions and provided a stimulus to improve the way we communicate what we do to the public.” 

That’s great to hear — and as we near the publication of the 2025 Scorecards, we were gratified to learn that Norfolk see their use into the future: “We plan to continue using the Scorecards as a monitoring tool, ensuring that our climate action remains ambitious, transparent, and effective.”

Thanks very much to Marina for sharing Norfolk County Council’s experience with the Scorecards, which are a joint project between Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.

 

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Image: Nathan Nelson