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.

WhoFundsThem is our new project looking to uncover the influence of money in politics. You can donate or volunteer to support this project.

Last month, we asked “What happened to all the APPGs?” because between March and April over a third of All Party Parliamentary Groups were deregistered, from 722 down to just 445. This story was covered in the Byline Times and the Parliament Matters podcast.

On Monday, we got a partial answer to our question. 

The May register shows an increase of 90 groups – up to 535.

We’ve crunched the numbers, and found that 86 of the 277 groups that were removed in April have been re-registered for the May edition. We can’t know for sure why this happened, but we know that Parliamentary authorities did an audit of compliance ahead of the April register, which might have contributed to lots of groups being removed. It’s possible that these groups have since passed the necessary requirements to be re-registered in time for the May edition.

Taking into account the last three registers, we found:

• 2 groups were deregistered in May (Thrombosis and UK Shared Prosperity Fund)
• 6 new groups were registered in May (Channel 4, Midlands Engine, Neurodiversity in Defence & National Security, Rare, Genetic and Undiagnosed Conditions, Slovenia and Tajikistan)
• 14 new groups were registered in April
• 86 groups were removed in April, but re-registered in May
• 205 groups were removed in April, but haven’t re-registered
• 429 groups were present in March, April and May

Dive into the data yourself

We’ve updated our public spreadsheet with the new register and an ‘All groups’ tab that shows which groups fall into the six categories above.

What next?

We’ve launched our WhoFundsThem project which is requesting information from all APPGs (yes, our job just got a bit bigger!).

We need your help – please consider volunteering, or donating £10 to help make this work happen. 

Photo by Zetong Li on Unsplash

We’ve kickstarted the WhoFundsThem project, and now we have a (tight!) timeline of work

WhoFundsThem is our new project looking to uncover the influence of money in politics. You can donate or volunteer to support this project.  

On Friday, we sent our first batch of requests for information to 25 All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) as part of our WhoFundsThem work. 

This is a test batch to see how well the template we’ve made works as a method for getting information back from APPGs. The new rules require them to make quite a lot of different kinds of information available, and there are 445 APPGs — so we want to ask in a way that makes sense for them, and for us.

We’re asking for this information because we think it’s important to have it openly available for the public benefit. There are loads of possible uses for it: for example, we’d like to improve the APPG membership information we include on the Local Intelligence Hub, but once the information is public, it will be available for all sorts of other projects and individuals to use. 

To select the lucky 25 APPGs who would make up our test batch, we took Parliament’s A-Z list of all of the APPGs, numbered them, and then randomly generated 25 numbers. The selected APPGs were:

1. Africa
2. Denmark
3. Japan
4. Poland
5. South Africa
6. Tibet
7. Artificial Intelligence
8. Arts and Heritage
9. Biodiversity in the UK Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies
10. Children of Alcoholics
11. Deafness
12. Disability
13. Ethnic Minority Business Owners
14. First Do No Harm
15. Future of Work
16. Human-Relevant Science
17. Internet, Communications and Technology
18. Life Sciences
19. Microplastics
20. Packaging Manufacturing Industry
21. Responsible Vaping
22. SME (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) House Builders
23. Sport
24. Taxation
25. United Nations Global Goals for Sustainable Development

On Friday,  we emailed these groups a copy of the template, and informed them that as per the rules they’ve got 28 days to get back to us, making a deadline of Friday 7 June 2024. After this deadline we’ll review the feedback and responses, make any adjustments necessary, and then email the template to all of the remaining 420 APPGs. This should give us responses from every APPG by the middle of July.

Don’t forget, this is just one of the two parts of the WhoFundsThem project. While we’re waiting for APPG responses, we’ll spend the month of May recruiting volunteers, and then in June we’ll begin answering questions for the other stream of the project which looks at the Register of Members’ Financial Interests (RMFI). By mid-July, we’re hoping to have turned those answers into individual summaries for each MP. Then the right of reply process begins: MPs will have a month to respond to our summary of their financial interests.

All being well, as we send off these summaries to MPs, we’ll be able to switch back to looking at APPGs, as the returns from the second batch should be back ready for us to clean and analyse. By the end of August, we should have both clean APPG data and RFMI summaries with MP feedback. We’ll then spend some time auditing this data ready for publication in the autumn.

Well, that’s the plan at least!

If you’re interested in being one of the volunteers who will work on this exciting new project, you have until 28 May to fill in our short application form! On Tuesday evening (14th), we’re hosting a Q&A event to explain more about the project and answer any questions about volunteering. We know not everyone can give up their time, though, so if you want to support projects like these in another way, please consider financially supporting us.

Want to find out more about APPGs? I wrote a blog post last month explaining what APPGs are, how the rules changed, and the impact that change had. 

As ever, if you’re interested in the work we do, make sure you’re signed up to our newsletter. Thanks!