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

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

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

Getting the lists

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

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

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

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

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

Theory vs practice

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

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

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

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

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

What we discovered

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

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

Of the groups we have data for, we found:

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

You can view and download the full dataset. 

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

Why it matters

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

Explore for yourself

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

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

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

Photo by Jani Kaasinen on Unsplash

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

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

Just asking questions

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

It’s rare to have clear evidence of the exchange, but that there is a connection between second jobs and asking questions is visible in the aggregate. Simon Weschle found that MPs with second jobs (especially those working in the knowledge sector) asked more parliamentary questions – specifically about internal departmental policies and projects. 

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

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

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

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

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

Tracking freebies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

APPGs – MPs, Lords, and other friends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Setting the rules of the game

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

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

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

Support our work

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

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

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

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

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Header image: Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash

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

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

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

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

How to handle rules

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

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

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

Transparency is not enough

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

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

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

Reasonable limits struggles to make practical recommendations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This needs collective decisions, not individual discretion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better data collection

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

What we can do from the outside

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

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

Stronger checks

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

What we can do from the outside

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

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

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

Tighter rules

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

What we can do from the outside

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

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

Systematic reform

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

What we can do from the outside

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

For our purposes, sharper information about public preferences (and importantly trade-offs) would help inform the rest of our work. Joining civic power to deliberative democracy provides power in one direction, and legitimacy in the other – a powerful force to engage with conflicts within Parliament to shift official rules and responses.

Help us do more

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

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

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Header image: Photo by Dan Senior on Unsplash

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

The new stuff

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

• New and removed APPGs

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

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

• Changes to APPG web pages

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

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

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

Over to you: help us with membership lists

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

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

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

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

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

We want to find out:

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

Right – over to you!

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

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

Photo by Frank on Unsplash

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.

Yesterday we had a launch event for our new features on TheyWorkForYou and report on money in politics.

We didn’t get time for all the questions,  so we’ve answered a few now.

You can also a look at the report, the new features on TheyWorkForYou, and donations are appreciated if you like this direction for our work.

Information questions

Is access to all your data available via CSV or APIs?

All the data we make available is currently listed on the registers page of TheyWorkForYou. This includes reworkings of the published registry into spreadsheets and json. We’re not yet publishing our extra information as a spreadsheet, but will be in the coming weeks (working on some additional spreadsheets we’ll release at the same time).

Are there public lists other than the MP list of members’ financial interest available from the Parliament website please?

So Parliament publishes a few different registers: MPs, Lords, APPGs, MPs staff, journalists. 

Of these, the MPs has been the one most recently looked at and is in the best condition to access data-wise. 

As we understand it, PDS are currently looking at the staff register list (and we have some recommendations around that in the report). 

On APPGs, some things need to be released in the register, but also APPGs are supposed to provide these on request – we’re having some trouble with that. Ongoing work!

Do you track donations to constituency parties as these may be a way to donate to Members indirectly?

In principle, the register of interests has passthrough rules for donations to local or national parties, that mean the original donor should be declared in the register. The ones to be more concerned about are unincorporated fund-raising clubs or other intermediate organisation that are *not* parties as these are not covered by the rules. We think they should be. 

We did some digging to see if we could detect problems in party donations by comparison electoral commission data to the registry – but the data and time period are either covering different things,  or the EC data comes *from* the registry in the first place. 

Systematic reform

Will the new ban on MPs doing consultancy/providing advice on Parliament make a difference and clean up politics?

For background on this change, when the new reforms take effect they will not substantially ban second jobs – but further restrict MPs giving advice on public policy or how Parliament works as part of paid employment. 

This is a good change, but the concern is that this was not actually what the exchange was for, just one of the more plausible reasons to have them on the payroll – and that other semi-plausible ways to extend credit to MPs remain.

We’ve made two recommendations to double down in this area:

• The first is that currently the parliamentary commissioner can ask for the MP’s contract (or similar) to ensure it aligns with this rule. We see no reason this shouldn’t just be required to be made public.
• The second is creating more disclosure around the nature of the organisation rather than the role. For instance,  if MPs need to declare “does this org lobby parliament/government” or “is this organisation a government contractor” – ‘yes’ to either question really shifts the evaluation of corruption risk regardless of what is on paper is the specific role. 

Direct corruption has given way to a “you scratch my back” culture – the reciprocal “favour” coming years later & benefit associates. How can this be monitored?

We talk a bit about this in the original literature review, where the UK as a high trust society makes these kinds of deferred rewards more possible. MPs and officials don’t need to be explicitly told about job prospects (and the kind of actions that would make them less eligible for those job prospects), but understand the system as it has been modelled to then. There are few brown paper bags (but not none) – in general there is more of a series of ambiguous events where money changes hands for individually semi-defendable reasons.

That doesn’t mean we can’t make progress. We have longer (and actually enforced) periods where people who have worked in senior jobs can’t accept jobs in relevant industries. ACOBA currently makes recommendations on whether appointments break the government’s rules, but doesn’t have strong powers. They have themselves recommended some improvements that don’t require new laws. We could build some more scrutiny here – linking to relevant ACOBA reports from the register. 

Institutions

Should an appropriately funded arms length organisation be created to pursue this scrutiny job more systematically and thoroughly?

Yes, transparency in this area has always been trying to head off calls to create strict rules enforced by real regulators – because once a scandal concedes there should be rules other than what Parliament itself sets, that’s a big shift in how our democracy works. 

The question is “is putting restrictions on elected representatives democratic?” and I think the answer to that can clearly be yes. There are arguments made that given the electorate elect with second jobs, the electorate is fine with this. But in reality, we can, and do, ask the electorate if they have opinions about ethical standards for MPs, and they come back with nuanced opinions about what those standards should be, and support for processes outside elections (like enforced codes of conduct with independent regulators) that ensure the standards are met.

MPs work for the public, other organisations can also work for the public to make the overall system work. 

If funded, would mySociety run its own citizens assembly on the reforms needed?

Would definitely be happy to be part of a consortium supporting one – although we’d leave running it to others. In general, we think anchoring our work in deliberative approaches would help make us more effective, and help participants in seeing results from their work that isn’t “does the government accept this or not”. 

In this project we’ve tried to stick close to principles we can identify in existing polling and research, but building a better picture of public expectations (and especially considered trade-offs) would help align our work to a civic agenda. Joining civic power to deliberative democracy provides power in one direction, and legitimacy in the other — a powerful force to engage with conflicts within Parliament to shift official rules and responses.

Going further

Can you also include the Mayors of combined authorities in any later editions of WhoFundsThem?

One of our questions at the moment is how to best approach devolution in England. Longer blog post about one of our funding attempts here.

One of the areas we think we can add value is just bringing together all the local authority registers of interest, but there are lots of these. Doing this in waves by combined authority would be a good approach – and as always interested in anyone who has an interest in local government scrutiny to help find funding for this (it’s one of those “very possible, just tedious” projects). 

Does Tortoise’s recent piece of work, the Peer Review, relate at all to your work?

So I’ve been interested in the wave of work looking at Lords conflicts of interests (Tortoise’s series and some recent work from the Guardian).

We don’t currently have the Lords register on TheyWorkForYou, we’re loosely waiting to see if it’s going to be migrated to the same format as the Commons because then it’d be really easy to copy our existing process. We can do it without that, but we don’t have unlimited funds (in fact, we have quite limited funds) so trying to work out what are the easiest approaches, or where we should try and build funding for a strong move.

In general, we want to have a good think about the House of Lords. We’ve got a document of potential ideas, but we need a different approach to how we approach elected chambers. A key feature (and reason for stalled reform) is its several kinds of chambers fused into one. It’s a technocratic revising chamber, it provides a deescalation venue for bad ideas in a less partisan setting, it’s an underpowered talking shop, jobs are hard won by expertise, and given as political gifts. Depending who you’re looking at, it’s either incredibly functional or incredibly not. 

And really neither house can be understood without the other. Effective manoeuvring in the Lords depends on understanding where there are openings in the Commons. Similarly, poor scrutiny in the Commons makes more sense as part of this dance between the two chambers. 

Much more than the Commons, conflicts of interests are just part of the fundamental design (and that’s bad). How we scrutinise it from the outside needs to be different to how we look at MPs, because there are questions about “judging it by its own (odd) standards” versus “the point of scrutiny here is to show it shouldn’t exist”.

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That’s it for event questions – but please take a look at the report, the new features on TheyWorkForYou, and donations appreciated if you like this direction for our work.

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.