At the start of the month we made a major update to TheyWorkForYou coverage of registers of interests. 

This added enhanced registers of election donations and gifts (using volunteers to add more details and summaries to disclosures made after the last election) and a highlighted interests page. 

We have also released a major report looking into how the Register of Interests system in the UK Parliament can be improved. 

With this release we’ve shifted our focus away from Westminster, and are publishing the registers of interests for the Scottish Parliament, Senedd/Welsh Parliament, and Northern Ireland Assembly.

On Thursday 10th April we will be running an event to run through the data we publish how journalists and researchers can access and make use of it — you can sign up now. 

What’s new

Registers of interest on MSP/MS/MLA profile pages.

For members of the three devolved Parliaments and Assemblies, you can now see their current register of interests on their profile pages, and we have made the underlying data available as spreadsheets.

To find the registers for your representatives, the postcode search on TheyWorkForYou.com will show you your devolved and national representatives. 

For users in Wales, there is a Welsh language version of the site and the registers. 

As time goes on, our register comparison tool will start to be able to show the change in these interests over time. 

Register-wide view, showing what’s new

Each Parliament now has a register of interests page where you can see all entries in the current register. For Parliaments where we have this information (which is all of them except the Senedd) you can also choose to highlight entries that are new in the last few weeks. 

Devolved register of interests spreadsheets

We have also made all the information for the devolved registers of interest available as spreadsheet and raw data downloads (both per Parliament, and a single spreadsheet that covers all our current information). 

Like all our datasets, this is searchable through an online Datasette interface. Learn more about all the data we publish. 

Ministers’ gifts and hospitality

While we’re here, we’ve fixed a transparency problem in the Government’s gifts and hospitality registry for ministers. 

This has recently all been bought together on one gov.uk page, but in the form of dozens of files (many of which are empty) per month for different departments. 

We’re now republishing this as a single spreadsheet for gifts and hospitality that will update whenever there are new releases. This is similarly accessible through a Datasette explorer. 

This work fixes a flaw identified by Transparency International: 

The Government recently introduced their promised gifts and hospitality register but it’s not what most might consider a register, rather its a series of 20 odd CSVs on one webpage. Whilst its useful these are now published together, this approach still requires researchers and journalists to download and analyse dozens of files per month, making it difficult to track patterns or identify trends. mySociety have fortunately stepped in and addressed the shortcomings of the register by making this data set accessible and searchable.

This is one of those low-hanging fruits that took about an hour to make a big improvement. We think there’s a lot more we can do in this area to build on sometimes half-hearted publication processes to make the most of data that is released. 

Learn how to use our data

On Thursday 10th April we will be running an event to run through the data we publish how journalists and researchers can access and make use of it — you can sign up now. 

We’ll cover features on the website, spreadsheet downloads, data explorers and where the raw data can be found. 

Help us go further

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.

But to make this happen we need money and support to investigate problems and understand how we can best make a difference. We want to do more to improve the data that exists, and help support new volunteer projects to build better data and services.

If you support us and our work, please consider making a one-off or standing donation. It makes a difference.

Last year we undertook a major overhaul of our approach to the voting record summaries on TheyWorkForYou. This was aimed at creating a sharper and clearer throughline to the summaries, supported by updated explanations of parliamentary voting.

We have just made the first update to our voting summaries of the new Parliament, with the information now covering votes up to the end of 2024.

Our goal is for these updates to be at least quarterly: this update has been delayed in part because we have been doing work on the underlying infrastructure.

In April we will launch a new votes explorer website, which is our replacement for the Public Whip website. This includes a new range of tools and analysis we’ve been using to understand votes, and is part of our general goal of creating better public information and understanding about parliamentary processes.

For more on what we’re doing over the next few months, see our list of upcoming new features — or subscribe to our mailing list to hear about updates.

You can view summaries for your MP on TheyWorkForYou.com – where you can also view registers of interest, and sign up for email alerts when your MP speaks.

What we’ve changed

We’ve added new policy lines for:

• Increasing windfall tax on oil and gas
• Increasing stamp duty
• Reducing minimum detention requirement before release from custody.
• Means-testing/removing universality on winter fuel payments for pensioners
• Creating a publicly owned energy investment company (Great British Energy)
• Employment rights
• Raising Capital Gains tax

And added votes to these existing policy lines:

• Assisted Dying
• Environmental Water Quality
• Publicly Owned Railways
• Tougher On Illegal Immigration
• An Elected House Of Lords
• Removing Hereditary Peers From The House Of Lords
• Proportional Representation When Electing MPs
• Taxes On Alcoholic Drinks

We have retired:

• Lowering Capital Gains Tax (this has been replaced by a raising Capital Gains tax, which is more consistent with our other policies around taxes).

Additional notes

Greater range of new policies

Previously we’ve had a conservative approach to adding new policies, as in doing so created a mix of old and recent votes for long-standing MPs, making their positions in the present moment harder to understand.

Our new technical approach calculates voting summaries for the current Parliament as well as an ‘all time’ calculation. Although this is not yet visible in TheyWorkForYou, we are in general adding a higher number of new policy lines in anticipation of being able to show both (we want to reflect ‘here are live issues’ but also just because a vote was a long time ago doesn’t mean it’s not still important).

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

There is an existing policy line that we have added the second reading vote to.

Because what is being voted on can be become clearer after revisions between the second reading vote and third reading vote, we prefer to include third reading votes if voting patterns are significantly different. We might sometimes include both when there’s not much difference (so we cover MPs who might be absent from either).

As a high profile vote it felt like it would be a notable absence not to include the vote as of this stage. Our expectation is that when the third reading vote happens, we may retrospectively downgrade the second reading and lead with the final vote being a clearer indication of where MPs stand at this stage.

Generally, the vote broke down mostly along party lines, but with a significant minority of Labour MPs voting against the second reading. As we class a significant difference from the party as anything more extreme than a 60/40 split (which this just was for Labour MPs), a number of MPs now have this highlighted on their voting record page as a new significant policy.

We also note that a lot of MPs made public comments about the reasons for their vote (part of a wider trend of greater visibility of votes leading to more public justification).As part of our new votes site we want to make it easier to collect and share comments that MPs make publicly about their voting.

Renters’ rights

The Renters’ Rights Act is not included in this round, as the third reading was in January 2025. The second reading passed by consent, but with a reasoned amendment beforehand. As such:

• It is inaccurate to say consent reflected cross party agreement: an attempt to stop the bill immediately preceded it.
• It would be confusing to present the only vote as the reasoned amendment.
• We are waiting for the Third Reading before including that and the reasoned amendment as scoring votes.

This will be part of the next release.

Ten minute rule bills

By focusing on votes affecting parliamentary powers, we exclude a range of votes that could never be impactful, but ten minute rule bills are in an ambiguous position.

In principle, as seen with the vote on proportional representation (which won, but possibly as an oversight), they are a vote to start the process of legislation. However, even when this vote is won, since parliamentary time is not allocated, it does not go anywhere.

Our policy for the moment is to continue to include ten minute rule bills where we have existing policy lines.

Anything we’ve missed

We have a reporting form to highlight votes that should be added/are incorrectly in a policy, or a substantial policy line we are missing. We will review responses for urgent problems, and otherwise feed into the periodic updates.

What else we’ve been working on

Last week we released a major new report and several new datasets onto TheyWorkForYou as part of our WhoFundsThem project.

We’ve been looking through the MPs Register of Financial Interests with a group of volunteers, and have published what we’ve found along with recommendations for change and what we think we can do next.

Over the next few months we’ll be making more improvements to our registers of interest, voting records, and political monitoring.

If you would like to support our work – please consider donating.

If you can’t make a donation now, you can still help by telling us what you value about our work. If you’d like to do this, please take our supporters survey.

Image: Paul Buffington on Unsplash.

To rebuild public trust in our political system we need better data, stronger checks, tighter rules and ultimately, systematic reform.

Over the last few months, 50 volunteers helped the TheyWorkForYou team go through the Register of Members’ Financial Interests (RMFI), line by line, for all 650 MPs. We were looking for specific bits of information, but also to more generally understand the state of the Register and how rules on transparency are working in practice. 

• Read the report here
• Join us for the launch event at 1pm today

We have many ideas on how to improve that transparency, but the goal is not ‘just’ good documentation of office holders’ conflicts of interest: rather, the minimisation and elimination of those interests in the first place. To better align politicians’ behaviour with public expectations, there is no substitute for a stricter set of rules around MPs’ financial interests. 

As such, we are making four categories of recommendations, stepping from incremental change to improve data collection, to systemic reform of the funding landscape. 

1. Better data collection to achieve more accurate interests information
2. Stronger checks to make sure the interests information is reliable
3. Tighter rules so there are fewer unacceptable interests in the first place
4. Systematic reform to decrease the role of money in the political system.

As part of this project we have also added two new features to TheyWorkForYou:

• Election registers – adding more details and summaries to disclosures made after the last election.
• Highlighted interests – bringing together interests related to industries with low public support and governments of not free countries and offering MPs opportunity for additional context.

Over the next few months, we will release follow-on work from this project, including adding Registers of Interests for the devolved parliaments to TheyWorkForYou, releasing more information on APPGs, and a blog series on conflicts of interest declared in Parliament. 

For now, do read the report. We’ll also be discussing our findings with Chris Cook of the Financial Times and Rose Whiffen from Transparency International today at 1pm: reserve your spot here.

Here’s a quick pre-Christmas round-up of what the mySociety democracy team has been up to in the last few months!

WhoFundsThem is our new project looking into MPs’ and APPGs’ financial interests. We want to improve the information available in TheWorkForYou, make better data available, and improve the standard of politics in the UK. 

We and our volunteers have been doing lots over the last few months – here’s what’s new.

New register of interests in TheyWorkForYou

A great development this year has been a big improvement in how Parliament gathers and publishes the Register of Members Financial Interests (RMFI). Information is now gathered from MPs in a much better format, making follow on analysis much easier. 

This is the result of a lot of great work by PDS, but we do also want to claim a win here. The way TheyWorkForYou publishes the register of interests has been highlighted for years (including by MPs) as an example for how Parliament can improve. We want to support people on the inside working to make things better. One of the ways we can do that is by demonstrating what is possible and helping win internal arguments and shift priorities.

Of course the downside of our “lobbying by demonstration” is that when you win you have to do work. In the last few weeks, the Commons have now turned off the old site, and the information is available on a new site and their API.  We’ve written a bridge to re-import this in a format TheyWorkForYou expects, to continue to power our comparison over time feature. This is now a lot more information than was captured before (which is great!) – so we’ve reformatted the page to make it clearer (to pick on my MP, here’s an example). 

While we’ve been doing this, we’ve also been planning out how we can improve how this information is stored in our database – and make it easier for our plans to get the registers for the other UK Parliaments in. 

We continue to publish the information as a set of spreadsheets – one is a re-publication of the official CSVs with some extra fields, and the other a backward compatible spreadsheet with all the information in a single cell. 

RMFI Crowdsourcing

Our volunteers have done a heroic job going through the registers of interests of all MPs and answering a set of questions for each. 

In some cases we were trying to gather more information about donations, or flag donations made from certain industries – but also in general we’re interested in how possible this exercise is – how are the rules working in practice, and how easy is it for people to easily parse the results?

We’re currently reviewing the results, and these will feed into two releases in February:

• A new section on TheyWorkForYou for each MP summarising what we found, and linking into the wider stories. 
• A report on the lessons we’ve learned, recommendations for improvement, and ideas on how we can go further from the outside. 

We have published the research that supported our question selection if you would like to know more. 

APPG information requests

One of the things we’re trying to do is use the new APPG rules to get more information in public. 

We’ve written this up in more detail in its own blog post, but the short version is we had mixed success with our pilot round of information requests. Some APPGs gave us the information, or were otherwise publishing the information they were supposed to – but others dragged their feet or didn’t respond. 

Given we’re going to have to spend more time chasing than we’d like, for the wider set of APPGs we’re going to reduce the scope to just getting the membership lists public. We’ve also got a planned escalation route for non-response through initially contacting the APPG chairs to encourage a response, and ultimately listing non-compliant APPGs.

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. 

Modernisation Committee 

One of the interests of the House of Commons new Modernisation Committee is on improving standards. 

We submitted a few practical recommendations based on what we’ve learned so far in the project:

• Chairs should enforce the rule that interests declared in debates should be clear.
• The details of conflicts of interests made when submitting parliamentary questions should be published.
• A few recommendations on new categories in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, to better structure common interests declared. For instance separating out payment or travel costs for media appearances, and gathering more information when MPs are receiving large donations to fund staff members for their offices.
• Parliament should gather and publish the required APPG information rather than just say it ought to be made available on request (to sidestep the problem described above). 

We are also developing a wider range of recommendations for release in February. 

As with the great new data coming out of the Parliament’s new register, there are big wins in getting Parliament to adopt better rules and publish more information. But also all of these are areas we think we can make progress on from the outside anyway – we just need support to do so. 

We can make a difference together

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. 

But to make this happen we need money and support to investigate problems and understand how we can best make a difference. We want to do more to improve the data that exists, and help support new volunteer projects to build better data and services.

If you support us and our work, please consider making a one-off or standing donation. It makes a difference. 

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. 

 

During debates in Parliament, if an MP has a conflict of interest, they are supposed to disclose this as part of their speech.

In practice, many of these disclosures don’t have detail on exactly what the conflict is. 

As part of our WhoFundsThem work, we are experimenting with a machine learning approach to detect these disclosures (technical details at the bottom of the post).

For the moment, this project is just monitoring to understand more about how declarations are made in practice. In time, we will consider practical options to encourage better disclosures and remedy incomplete disclosures. 

To support our work, and help us go further please consider donating. 

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Disclosures

There are roughly three kinds of declarations that we’re regularly seeing:

• Formal and full: clear indication of what the potential conflict of interest is
• Formal and incomplete: refer to an interest without being clear on the nature of the disclosure.
• Rhetorical: An interest is declared rhetorically to indicate special expertise or experience relevant to the debate.

Formal, full

In several debates, we saw example of good full disclosures:

• Natasha Irons – Clear interest is Channel 4 is previous employer. 
• James Naish – Clear interest is rental income. 
• Rachel Blake – clear on source of interest – husband works for a funder who has given money to Renters Reform Coalition (in this case, a disclosure beyond that required for the register). 

And the following satisfy the idea that it should be clear what the conflict is – but could be have a little more detail:

• Richard Tice talked about his interest  “as someone who has been involved in the commercial and residential property sector for over 35 years”. Which is clear about the nature of the interest (could emphasise shareholdings in property companies).
• Gideon Amos said in the renters’ rights debate he has been a landlord of registered social housing. Clear about the nature of the interest (but also could be clearer that the interest is current).

Formal, not enough details

In this category, we’re looking at formal language declaring an interest – but where the exact nature of the conflict is unclear from the speech, or even when looking in the register.

The Rules for MPs are clear that “a reference will not suffice on its own, as the declaration must provide sufficient information to convey the nature of the interest without the listener or the reader having to have recourse to the Register or other publication.”

In practice, there is a norm where MPs will simply refer to the register – which reflects an older version of the rules. MPs learn how to talk in the chamber by watching other MPs, and this leads to a mix of old and new behaviours (especially when nothing enforces the newer rule). 

Here are some examples. 

In a debate about TeamGB and ParalympicsGB:

• Toby Perkins refers to an interest but doesn’t say that it was hospitality from the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) – highly relevant given a substantial part of the speech is about LTA projects. (more on that below)
• Vicky Foxcroft declared an interest in having been able to attend the Paralympic games – which is mostly rhetorical in this context – but the key information in the register but not in the debate is that this was paid for by Allywyn Entertainment Ltd (operator of the National Lottery). (It is debatable whether it’s a *problem* in this debate, but worth tracking).
• Nigel Huddlestone referred to his register and declarations made when he was a Sports Minister (2020-2022). There isn’t anything obviously relevant in the current register – so this may refer to now expired interests, or hospitality received while a minister.

In the renters’ rights debate:

• Ayoub Khan said he registered an interest – but not what that interest was (stake in three rental properties)
• Desmond Swayne declared an interest when talking about how the ability of a tenant to end a tenancy early was a risk to the landlord. This *is* guessable from context but is not explicitly stated – the interest is rental income from two properties. 

In some cases, it’s just unclear what MPs mean. In the renters’ rights bill debate, Steve Darling referred to his register, but on reviewing it is unclear what the conflict of interest is (could be being a member of the Torquay Town Deal Board, or a specific donation). In the VAT for Independent Schools debate James Firth’s declaration isn’t explicit, but is probably about shares in an education recruitment company.

Rhetorical

A key way in which MPs use ‘I must declare an interest” is to indicate that they have expertise, or that they belong to a group they are acting on behalf of. It’s a claim that, contrary to the idea that MPs should float free of all attachments, they have a hinterland that is a vital part of their work. 

For instance, Joe Powell declares an interest in his background at the Open Government Partnership in being part of government register projects to talk about what needs to be got right with a landlord register.  Matt Rodda declares an interest because he and his family have benefited from local grassroots sports. In the debate on the VAT status of private schools, Ben Spencer, Caroline Johnson and Mims Davies (loosely) refer to their children’s private education as a personal interest, but one that connects them to a wider group of parents. 

Allison Gardner mentions her declared interest of having worked for a university in a debate about higher education. There is also a pattern of MPs with a union background or donations, bringing this up as disclosure *and* expertise. Some examples of this: Mark Ferguson, Laurence Turner. 

Interests not declared

There’s an argument that paying more attention to bad disclosures is detracting from a bigger invisible problem – when MPs have interests, but *don’t* mention them in debates.

This is a harder issue to deal with automatically – but a debate on renters’ rights makes it a bit easier to check for speeches by MPs who declare rental income in their register of interests, but didn’t disclose it when speaking. There were four in this debate: Nesil Caliskan, Shaun Davies, Danny Kruger and Andrew Griffith.

This set needs to be seen as an example of disclosure norms rather than saying anything particular about this debate. What these have in common is that they are short interventions rather than long speeches. By the letter of the rules, these should still contain declarations that are relevant, but in practice, if we keep looking at this I think we’ll find an effective norm that this isn’t the case. 

In more depth: freebies and lobbying

The example I want to think about a bit more is Toby Perkins’ incomplete disclosure of the Lawn Tennis Association gifts in his speech – and why expressing what the conflict actually is in the speech matters. 

Perkins has over the last five years received about £5k worth of tickets from the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA), and he’s not the only one. 45 MPs have made a declaration they have received a gift from the Lawn Tennis Association since 2020 (see spreadsheet).

So on one level, Perkins clearly enjoys tennis, and might well advocate for it anyway. But as mentioned in Perkins’ speech, the LTA receives government grants to refurbish public tennis courts. They would presumably enjoy more grants and subsidies for tennis. They run the APPG for Tennis, giving regular access to Parliamentarians who are disposed to like tennis, and have a history of giving MPs free tickets. I don’t think it’s too cynical to say these facts might be related. 

There are lots of people who like tennis, there’s nothing *inherently* wrong with lobbying on tennis’ behalf (or providing useful stats or information for MPs to use). But when gifts are changing hands – the least we’re owed is transparency.

Perkins’ speech would be less effective if he had disclosed gifts from the LTA at the start. But this is the purpose of the rule – to make your intervention be taken with a bit of caution because you have to preface it with “I’ve had a lot of gifts from these people I’m about to talk about positively”. And if you’re not willing to bear even this small cost of freebies, you definitely shouldn’t accept them.

Technical notes

This is part of our work exploring how machine learning can be applied to our democratic transparency work. 

In this case, we’re doing a normal search for words ‘declare’, ‘interest’, ‘register’ and then using a vector search approach to rank and list items that are likely to be declarations of interest. 

A vector search uses a language model to express the meaning of a sentence as numbers. When language models are trained on large amounts of text, this changes the internal shape of the model so that text with similar meanings ends up being ‘closer’ to each other inside the model. A vector is a series of numbers that represent this location. By looking at the distance between vectors, we can identify groups of similar terms with similar meanings. While a more basic text similarity approach would say that ‘bat’ and ‘bag’ are very similar, a model that sorts based on meaning would identify that ‘bat’ and ‘owl’ are more similar.

This helps us pick up (without huge amounts of false positives) a range of different ways interests can be declared. From there, we can cross-reference with the register of interest as republished on TheyWorkForYou and our spreadsheet export. 

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Support our work

This is part of our wider WhoFundsThem project – where we are building new datasets and crowdsourcing information about MPs’ financial interests to improve what we list on TheyWorkForYou.

Under pretty much every rock we look, we find something that needs more attention. We would like to do a lot more work like this – finding ways to apply new technology to make parliamentary monitoring more comprehensive and sustainable. 

If you’d like to help us do more – please consider supporting us with a one-off or monthly donation.

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Image: UK Parliament (CC by-nc-nd/2.0)

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

Tl;dr: Parliament has released new data, which we’ve made available in a simple format. 

As part of the new release of the register of financial interests (which we blogged about yesterday)  – Parliament has released CSVs of the new edition of the register. This isn’t just a better way of getting the data from each page individually, but contains much richer information than we’ve had previously. 

Earlier this year, Parliament improved its data collection for MPs’ interests – meaning it collects much more structured data for different kinds of interests than the free text data that was released previously. 

This is really good news – the work put in improving the data collection is so hard to do from the outside. Lots of effort has been made to clean up data in the past, but it was just fundamentally too broken. This is a big improvement on that – and means we can focus our efforts on where we can add the most value. 

We know that Parliament is looking at creating data tools to sit on top of this – but in the meantime we’ve quickly made a single Excel file – and an analysis site to explore the data.  We’ve also added our IDs from TheyWorkForYou and information on the MPs party. The great thing about Parliament making more data available is how that data can then be expanded by other datasets – for instance, the data now contains Companies House IDs, which could be joined to a range of datasets. 

Please email if there are tweaks that would make the spreadsheet more useful to you!

Some example queries that are possible with this (give the site a minute to load):

• MPs with property in the US 
• Gifts from Lawn Tennis Association 
• Donations over £50,000 

Whenever Parliament ups its game, we need to think about what we’re going to do to build on top of that. As part of our WhoFundsThem project, we’re working to create simple summaries of declarations of interests. In general, the register is full of data but lacking in context. What do these organisations who have donated 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.

 

My colleague Alex has already written about looking forward from this election, so here I am going to look back at the technical work that was involved for the election, and in getting all the new MPs into TheyWorkForYou.

Boundary changes

This election was the first UK Parliament election with boundary changes since 2010. Due to the long-running nature of TheyWorkForYou, which has been around now for over 20 years, this can throw up some interesting challenges. In this particular case, it turned out we were using two different JSON data lists of constituencies – both containing the same data, but one also included the other Parliaments and Assemblies, whilst the other included alternative names for some constituencies. I took the opportunity presented to merge these together and update the bits of code to use the one consolidated dataset, and then added in the 650 new constituencies to the JSON data.

Loading the new constituency data into TheyWorkForYou then threw up another historical problem – the constituency table was still using the very old Latin-1 character set encoding, rather than a more modern encoding such as UTF-8, that almost everything we have uses. This had been fine until now, with even Ynys Môn covered by that encoding, but the new constituency of Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr contained a letter that Latin-1 could not cope with, leading to a quick emergency upgrade of the table to UTF-8 (thankfully this is a backwards compatible encoding, so worked without issue).

We had already generated data of the new constituencies and loaded these into our lookup service MapIt before Christmas. Ordnance Survey more recently published the official dataset of the boundaries, which we could then import via our usual processes, though even this raised a small issue to be resolved. It turned out in the last data release OS had given the parts of two county council electoral divisions with detached parts (Lightwater, West End and Bisley and Thorpe St Andrew) different identifiers, which they had reverted in their new release, causing our import script to get a bit confused – resolved with a small manual script.

Displaying on TheyWorkForYou

In the period before the election, we knew people would be using our site as a postcode lookup, perhaps to look up their previous MP but perhaps also expecting something useful for the upcoming election, which we wanted to provide, and so we used Democracy Club’s API to show election candidates and link to their WhoCanIVoteFor and WhereDoIVote services. We also displayed your boundary changes using the new constituency data mentioned above.

TheyWorkForYou isn’t just the UK Parliament, though, it also covers the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments, and the Northern Ireland Assembly, so we also had to maintain the provision of that information to people – email alerts for those bodies continued throughout as usual, and the postcode lookup kept showing people their representatives in the devolved nations.

Once the election closed, we automatically updated our messaging, and the next day switched back to our normal behaviour of taking you directly to your MP page in England, and showing you your MP and other representatives elsewhere.

We had a fun issue where some people were getting their new MP, whereas some were getting the old MP – during the period of dissolution, when there are no MPs, we have a configuration flag to enable the site to know it should return the latest result even if it’s not current (you don’t want this all the time, when e.g. an MP has resigned or died), but once new data was being loaded in, one database query was returning results in a random order; fixed by adding some sorting by descending end date.

Election result data

At the last election in 2019, we took a live feed of election results from Democracy Club, who have collected all the candidate information for their Who Can I Vote For service – which all began as the result of a mySociety project back in 2010.

Democracy Club were performing the same service this time, and gratifyingly it was quite a small change to have our 2019 code work with any 2024 changes to the source information (incidentally, there aren’t a lot of narrative doctests in our codebase, but I quite like the one in use there!).

This script would do half the job, of taking in some source data (who has been elected, and including their TheyWorkForYou identifier if they already had one due to being a previous representative of some sort) and amending our source JSON data to add the newly elected representative.

The other half is loading that source data into the TheyWorkForYou database for display on the site. Our normal loading script works fine, but looks through all the source data to see if there have been any changes to take account of. For the election, we don’t need it to do all that, so I tweaked the script to only do the minimal necessary to load in newly created information.

These two scripts were then added to a cron on our server, running every few minutes through the night. I did stay up long enough to check that the first few worked okay, before leaving it to itself from then on. I also set it up to pipe its output to our Slack channel, so people could see it operating:

This also meant as the final few trickle through, it’s popping up reminding us it’s still doing its job:

All the results (bar the one we’re still waiting for) are now committed to the repository, joining all our other open data.

Support TheyWorkForYou and our work

TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem are run by mySociety, a small UK charity. We’re a very efficient operation and do a lot with a small team; if we had bit more money, we could achieve a lot more.

We want to see a transparent, resilient democracy, with equal access to information, representation and voice for citizens. If you believe in this vision please donate today to enable greater transparency and accountability of the next government.

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Image: Moritz Kindler

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