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. 

In our WhoFundsThem work, we want to make MPs’ financial interests much easier to understand and more transparent. One of the ways we think our work can make a difference is in highlighting processes that don’t make sense, and prodding Parliament to see what happens.

In this case, we’ve noticed an issue in how declarations of interests by MPs on Written Questions are handled — and raising this has triggered a review of the process.

We have also released a new dataset of Written Questions where an interest has been declared.

What’s the problem?

When submitting parliamentary questions, MPs should say if they have any relevant interests, and if so what they are. In the guide to submitting Written Questions online, MPs are told “If you have an interest to declare, click the box saying ‘yes’ and explain what the interest is.” Similarly, on the offline form, members are told to email the Table Office to say what the interest is.

However, only the ‘yes/no’ bit of this gets onto the Written Questions section of the Parliament website. The actual interest being disclosed is never released. The problem is this is a lower level of public disclosure than contributions to debates, where the standard is now (in theory) that it should be clear what the interest is as well as the fact that it exists. For oral questions, that interests need to be declared on the form is explicitly given as a reason there is no need for further declarations in the chamber. This would be reasonable if the information was available to be added to Hansard later – but as stands it is not.

Both in the chamber and on the form, MPs may refer to interests they have already declared, or raise something with a closer connection to the topic that doesn’t otherwise need to be disclosed. As well as financial interests, this might represent more personal interests (for instance, a health issue they have an interest in because of their own experiences).

Because we only have ‘an interest has been declared’, different types of disclosure are lumped together. This requires more work from anyone who wants to understand whether a declaration has further financial implications, or simply added context/personal background. In this case, it’s not even that the MPs are at fault: they’re disclosing information, but the process means that it’s not going anywhere.

Asking for more information

To see what would happen, we made a Freedom of Information request for this information that’s being recorded but not released.

As we mostly expected, this was withheld under the exemption that gives Parliament control over publishing its own proceedings (we can’t compel extra information to be published even if it exists). However, there was a recognition that this gap was a problem and as a result the process is being reviewed:

Nonetheless, while there is no statutory right to this information, Mr Speaker considers greater transparency would be desirable and has commissioned an urgent review of the publication policy. The review may well lead to the information you seek being provided on a non-statutory basis, but it will take a little time to carry out.

This is great news, and better future publication would help make disclosure more uniform and effective.

This response also confirmed that the current process is a bit of black hole, with it being inappropriate for officials to screen questions as a result of interests declared:

It is Members, not officials, that are responsible for deciding what to register or declare, and deciding whether or not their interests are of a sort which should prevent them asking a particular question or taking part in a debate.

As such, the disclosures MPs make as part of this process are functionally going nowhere (except as an honesty exercise for the MPs involved): they have no public visibility and no internal decisions are made as a result of information disclosed.

Why this matters

We’re interested in Written Questions because they’re both an important part of how Parliament holds the government to account, but also a potential way that MPs can use their public position for private gain.

MPs have privileged access to government information. Written Questions are both faster than Freedom of Information requests (normal reply of five days rather than 28 days), and can ask questions that might require producing new information (while FOI only applies to data and information that already exists).

In the 90s, there was a Cash for Questions scandal, and there is reason to suspect that some version of this continues. Simon Weschle found a statistical connection between a group of MPs with second jobs (especially those in the “knowledge sector”) and increased numbers of questions asked. Looking at the content of these extra questions, he found these MPs asked more questions about internal department policies and projects. While Weschle is careful to avoid suggesting impropriety by any single MP highlighted, this suggests a slightly less immediately transactional version of cash for questions. Companies that can hire MPs have the ability to extract more information about government work, that may enrich the company, even if the MP’s formal role is tangential to this work. In general, MPs should strive to avoid even the appearance that this is what is happening.

What can we do in the meantime?

We’re going to keep an eye out for changes made as a result of this review, but there’s more we can do in the meantime.

The first thing we’ve already done is make the dataset of questions with declared interests more accessible. Using the Parliament website’s Written Questions service, you can’t easily pick out just those with a declared interest. We’ve set up a process to republish Written Questions with declared interests as a spreadsheet and through a data explorer.

If we decide to start weekly summaries of interests declared in debates, we could similarly keep track of new questions with declared interests and try and reconcile them to information elsewhere. The volume is low enough we could email MPs to ask what they’ve declared if unclear.

Something we considered was categorising questions with interests disclosed as part of our crowdsource of the register of interests, but we left this off to keep the scope of the exercise manageable. However, the real issue to dig into is not the relatively small number of questions with interests disclosed (around 256 last year), but understanding whether there are interests undisclosed in the 40,000 other questions submitted.

This is too great a volume to easily crowdsource, but we’d like to explore whether we can pair the task with a machine learning approach to narrow the problem down to a smaller list of entries for manual review. As part of the current crowdsource, our volunteers are collecting information about associated companies. This might be a first step in exploring this problem.

Help us go further

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 turn over, 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.

Image: Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

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. 

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)

Ok, doing these regularly fell apart at *about* when the election happened – but let’s get back on track!

WhoFundsThem

On the WhoFundsThem work, last week we inducted the 50 volunteers who are going to answer 32 questions for 650 MPs. We’re using the crowdsourcing software we developed for the Council Climate Scorecards with CE UK (and taking big inspiration from their general approach). We’ve also released the underlying research we’ve based the questions on. 

It’s been really exciting to meet the volunteers, and getting to grips with the fine detail of what’s in the registers. This is the reason we wanted this to be a volunteer project, because while you can get good aggregate stories through data analysis, to get good analysis on an individual level, you really have to go through it by hand. 

Over the next six weeks we’ll be going through that process, then reviewing the results and making a right of reply available to MPs, before a launch in the new year.  

On our “ask the APPGs for the information they have to give out on request” project. We’ve made our first information request to the APPGs, getting some resistance here (eg APPGs who say all the information is on the website when it’s not) but waiting to see what we get back by the deadline later in the week. Depending on the level of disclosure, we might stagger the questions we ask to balance “the rules say you should know this and make it public” with “in practice, awareness is low and these are run by small organisations”. But we’ll see what happens. 

One of the things we’ve started to pay more attention to is written questions, given reasonable suspicion that there has been some cash for questions happening. There’s something odd in that Parliament seems to ask what the conflict of interest might be, but doesn’t publish it (just says it exists). We’ve got an FOI request in to see if there’s some more information we can get Parliament to publish (or flush out what’s happening in the processes there). 

Julia’s been down the rabbit hole of trying to understand the different donation disclosure systems (visiting her local council to see what the disclosures look like there). We think there’s some under-disclosure nationally, so we’re checking in on ways we can validate that. 

Across these areas, there’s basically a set of things where there are “rules” that exist, but in practice no one is actually monitoring them to enforce  — and we might get some improvement just by paying attention and trying to kick other processes into motion. Along these lines we’ve got an experimental machine learning approach going, to feed possible “conflict of interest” disclosures in debates to our volunteers, but we’re also thinking about doing a weekly blog post about the number and quality of disclosures that week (there’s in general something interesting about how MPs rhetorically use ‘I declare an interest’ to speak to personal experience). 

Previously: 

The new Register of Members Financial Interests is out and we have thoughts (and spreadsheets) / mySociety

New register of interests spreadsheet – with much richer data / mySociety 

Monitoring and voting updates

The stars (and funding) have aligned to get Struan to spend a month on a range of TheyWorkForYou updates we’ve had planned. The key work here is to improve TheyWorkForYou as a political monitoring platform.

One of TheyWorkForYou’s most impactful features is the email alerts – we’re going to make it much easier to manage ‘keyword’ alerts (for people interested in topics rather than people). 

Alongside just making it easier to manage, we’re planning to use the same approach we used in CAPE, to help people search for the right things by offering related search terms (based on a vector analysis of the TheyWorkForYou corpus). 

Something that came out of our previous research was how helpful it was that TheyWorkForYou converts written answers into email alerts. We want to do the same for devolved Parliaments by adding three new scrapers for written questions, so that all answers published are searchable and alertable through the same platform, giving a common toolkit to organisations working across the UK. 

A new coat of paint

Lucas has refreshed the TheyWorkForYou homepages and made a suite of colour changes for better accessibility throughout the site. 

In general, on TheyWorkForYou we’re trying to pick off design improvements as we go through related projects. On the MP profile pages we’re gradually moving elements out of one long page and into their own pages with supporting content. This also, in the long run, will help a bit with the display of people who are in multiple parliaments at the same time (or who move between them). 

Machine learning

We’ve been doing a big set of experiments exploring how vector searches (which use some of the more basic bits of large language models) might fit into our future plans. 

In general, I’m much more comfortable with uses of machine learning that are enabling better search or discovery rather than summarisation at this point. Obviously there’s some good proof of concepts already out there in terms of summarising debates — we just feel there’s a big space to use these new tools to speed up old approaches (improved linking to glossaries rather than creating glossaries, for example) without getting too into generated content. 

TICTeC

As part of our community of practice around Parliamentary Monitoring Sites we had a good session on subnational PMOs with some organisations focused on municipalities. I’ve got a longer write-up coming from this because I think it’s a related but different problem to parliamentary monitoring where we need a slightly different toolkit. 

What else are we doing

The answer to this question is usually “applying for grants”.  We’ve put together a good set of ideas over the summer – and if we get them or not I’ll do some more public write-ups of what we think the direction of travel is. 

But for a quick taste, we’ve got pitches around:

• A big revisit of WriteToThem – and how we pivot that into solving some of the big democratic problems of the current moment (getting the right message to the right place in a layered democracy). 
• Getting good at public education through TheyWorkForYou — we have the potential to add a lot of value beyond just republishing debate transcripts, but need to redevelop the annotation and glossary tools from earlier in the site’s history for the modern era.
• Making Parliament work better — there remains very basic “this data is in a PDF and doesn’t have to be” work to be done, that can improve not just outside understanding of the process, but provide more tools to people working inside Parliament. 
• Better digital tools and transparency for citizens’ assemblies  — how do we take the same “improve transparency/improve efficiency” philosophy and apply it to deliberative approaches?

Less developed, but in the works:

• House of Lords: not going anywhere anytime soon  — but is also unpopular. We want to get better at presenting how it works and applying pressure to perform well, while contributing to the picture of evidence for reform. Some tools we have for the Commons can move across well to the Lords (eg registers of interest), but what special approaches do we need for this large appointed house?
• Mayoral scrutiny: there’s wide acknowledgement of a big scrutiny gap here. We have some ideas on how best to support this – but also an awareness that the tools of TheyWorkForYou aren’t quite right to deal with what is less “one institution”, but one among many in area governance. 

I am once again…

As ever, if you’ve read this far, and you’re not a monthly donor to mySociety,  would you consider becoming one? There is even an anonymous form on that page to tell us why you don’t want to, which is always helpful for us to understand more about. 

Related, but if you are someone (or know someone) with lots of money  — we have really clear plans of how we’d make use of it in a wide range of areas!

One of the reasons we do this work is because we don’t think there’s a more efficient way of improving UK politics/democracy than making TheyWorkForYou (and friends) better. Obviously it’s our job to make that case well, and I’m always happy to hear from people.

Image: Marko Blažević

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

In our new WhoFundsThem project we are making summaries of MPs registers of financial interests to add to TheyWorkForYou. We want to take these existing disclosures and add context to make them easier to understand. To do this, we are taking a hard look at how all the existing disclosure processes work (and when they don’t) to understand how we might best apply pressure for improvements. 

One of our motivations here is that we think the rules about what MPs can and can’t do should be led by public expectations. To reflect that in our work, we’ve put together a literature review of the current picture of evidence around how MPs’ financial interests operate, and how these are perceived.

We’ve published this review online, but here are some quick thoughts I’ve taken away from this. 

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There’s been a big shift in the role of MPs from 40 years ago – in practice and in public perception, being an MP is a full time job. There is some nuance here in public perception: while some professions are more approved in general (doctors/nurses), generally as the pay or involvement goes up, the work is considered less favourably. 

There’s too much focus on the problem of second jobs being a distraction for the MP, and not enough on the problem of privileged access to Parliament for those who can pay for it. We should be asking questions about when MPs are selling their access rather than expertise. This encourages paying more attention to written questions – where MPs have a privileged ability to get answers to questions (and there’s indirect evidence this has been happening as part of some MPs’ second employment). 

We need to care where donations come from, rather than being too focused on what they were spent on.  A general throughline in the discourse is catching when people are benefiting privately from their position (e.g. receiving gifts) – but there’s also the situation that private donors are supporting the public work of politicians (for instance, funding researchers in their offices). With a “follow the money” hat on, this should be seen as an investment in relationships with politicians that might pay off later rather than being purely public spirited. 

We need to be aware that transparency in this area has been a hedge against more substantial reform (e.g. disclose bad things rather than stop doing bad things). This compromise position has usefulness for both sides. For those who want stricter rules, it encourages politicians to have one eye on public opinion through disclosure requirements, and generates a regular series of news stories helpful in future reform. 

But for those opposed to stricter rules, transparency can be framed as approval – where the electorate is argued to have endorsed MPs’ choices. Conversations become about if the rules were followed rather than the underlying issues, and when the regime is only half-heartedly supported, non-disclosure can be common (meaning that scrutiny falls more on those correctly disclosing rather than those who do not). 

In general, we see increasing the transparency and getting the most out of the information that is available as the tool we have been given to improve the situation. But we shouldn’t lose sight that transparency is a means, not an end in itself. 

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From this work, we’ve created a set of questions that make sure we draw out important aspects of the register. Next week our volunteers will start to answer these questions. 

These questions cover all sections of the register. We’re asking volunteers to help us understand which industries are showing up in MPs’ registers, and whether they are declaring an interest in debates and questions when they’re supposed to be.  We’ll compare the Register of Interests against Companies’ House with support from new data from Any One Thing, and we’ll get volunteers to give MPs’ registered interests and overall transparency score. The process will also include a right of reply, so MP’s can respond to the summaries we write. 

We do this work because we think it is possible to make politics better from the outside. Through combining the effort of volunteers with the lever of technology, we can make a real difference in how things work. 

If you’d like to support this project – please donate today.

The first register of All Party Parliamentary Groups since the general election has just been published, and 519 of the 553 groups have vanished, leaving just 34. 

What is an APPG?

All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) are self-selecting groups of MPs and Lords with an interest in a particular policy area. Most groups are supported by a secretariat, which is usually a charity, membership body or consultancy organisation.

The logic behind APPGs is to create legitimate avenues for experts and interested parties from outside Parliament to discuss policy with MPs and Lords – but unfortunately they can also be vehicles for corruption. 

Our WhoFundsThem project is going to be taking a closer look at APPGs, to see which MPs are members (this information is currently not published) and a closer look at the organisations providing secretariat support. We have also updated our public APPGs spreadsheet with the new register. 

So why have so many groups disappeared?

A change in rules last year meant that we saw a huge drop-off from the 800+ groups registered in March to around 450 in April, and then a steady increase to 553 by the end of May. The 28th August edition has just 34 registered groups.

Since the general election, we think are there are three factors that might be influencing the dramatic decline in registered groups:

1. New officer rule – there’s a new rule that MPs are now only allowed to be an officer of a maximum of six groups.
2. The reduced size of the opposition – the ‘all party’ nature of APPGs means that they must have at least one member of the official opposition as an officer. Before Parliament was dissolved for the election in May, the then Labour opposition had 206 MPs. Now, the Conservative opposition has 121 MPs. Conservative Lords are allowed to be officers of APPGs, but the APPG Chair must be an MP.
3. Summer recess admin delay – in order to meet the deadline for this register, groups had to hold their new AGM to elect officers before summer recess began on 30 July. This gave them just a couple of weeks after the election, which was a hectic time, especially for the majority of MPs who were new to Parliament, and busy setting up their offices.

What next?

Given that we’ve just had one register, we can’t be sure which of these factors is having the biggest effect, but a second edition of the register should help us to understand the scale of the admin delay problem. 

We expect a large number of groups will have used the summer to get established and recruit officers and members – but they will need to hold an AGM fairly soon after Parliament returns next week in order to make the new register, which should be published in about six weeks’ time.

We’ll be looking in detail at the work of these groups, and the people behind them, in our project WhoFundsThem. Please consider donating to help us do more of this work. 

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

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.

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

Update: Even more spreadsheets – see new blog post.

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

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

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

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

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

In general, the register is full of data but lacking in context. What do these organisations who have donated actually do? What’s the top-line figure on outside income? Is this affecting how MPs behave in parliament?

These are the questions we want to answer through WhoFundsThem. If you also want to know the answer, you can donate to support our work.