Episode 2: September 2024
We’ve got updates from Julia on this Parliament’s first Register of Financial interests, showing what second jobs and gifts, etc, MPs have declared; and on the startlingly diminished list of All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs).
Meanwhile, Gareth tells us how to get a discount on WhatDoTheyKnow Pro, and we hear from AccessInfo about a new award – the winner will be invited to Madrid to present their work.
Alongside all of that, Myf explains how a WhatDoTheyKnow user harnessed the power of Reddit to verify the responses they were receiving to their FOI requests.
Enjoy!
Links
- Blog post on the Register of Financial Interests spreadsheet; and more details on what it contains
- Blog post about Reddit, WhatDoTheyKnow, and Physician Associates
- Blog post on the diminishing number of APPGs
- AccessInfo Impact Awards
- Full details on how to get a discount on WhatDoTheyKnow Pro by linking to your outcomes
- Our TikTok account
- Our Bluesky account
Music: Chafftop by Blue Dot Sessions.
Transcript
[0:04] Myf: Hello. Thank you very much for tuning in.
[0:07] This is our second monthly collection of news and updates from mySociety, and my name is Myf Nixon. I’m mySociety’s Communications Manager.
[0:15] This month, I’m going to share with you five pieces of news — two from our democracy work, and three from our transparency side.
[0:27] OK, to start off, exciting times as this Parliament publishes its first Register of Financial Interests. Here’s Julia explaining how we’ve made that a lot easier to access and understand, and how, with the help of a team of volunteers, we’re going to be looking much more deeply at this data with our WhoFundsThem project.
[0:50] Julia: You might have seen some of the stories that are in the news at the moment about MPs’ donations, and the reasons that they are around at the moment is because Parliament has just released the first edition of the Register of Members’ Financial Interests since the general election, and the Register contains all of the information about the donations the MPs declared, along with loads of other information about whether they have second jobs, whether they’re a landlord and if they’re a charity trustee or a director of another organisation, and if they’ve been on any trips abroad.
[1:16] The Register is published by Parliament as both a CSV file, as a spreadsheet now – which is great – or as a really long PDF.
We’ve reproduced that spreadsheet with even more data in it, such as MP party, so you can filter by party if you want to, and we also made that information available on our website TheyWorkForYou, on individual MP pages.
If you go to TheyWorkForYou and put in your postcode, you’ll be taken to your MP’s profile page.
[1:37] And on that, there is a tab which says Register of Interests. And that’s really handy because it saves you from looking through all of the data and just seeing what is relevant to your MP.
[1:46] And we also make clear the changes over time. So stuff that’s in green is new and stuff that’s in red has been recently removed.
Please do go and check it out. There’s loads of interesting information available in the Register of Members’ financial interests, and TheyWorkForYou makes it really easy to understand.
[2:00] Myf: Thanks Julia. We’ll be hearing again from her in a little while.
[2:07] One part of my job is to talk to people about the way that they’ve used our sites and write it all up for our blog, and I was really excited about this one.
[2:16] Here’s me explaining in a short video.
[2:20] Have you heard about this thing that they’re covering doctors’ shortages by putting in less qualified medical staff, called PAs or Physician Associates?
[2:30] Yasmin Marsh had been using mySociety’s Freedom of Information site WhatDoTheyKnow to get to the bottom of just how many hospitals and doctors are covering shortages in this way.
[2:40] She was able to cross-check the facts that she was getting back from the doctors and hospitals by taking them to a subreddit called r/DoctorsUK and saying, “Does this tally up with your actual experience?”.
[2:52] Some of those people on Reddit were saying, “I work in those hospitals, and I can say for a fact that while that Freedom of Information request came back saying we never use PAs to cover doctor shortages, I’ve seen the rotas and I know different.”
[3:05] It was really interesting to see this way of using both WhatDoTheyKnow and Reddit to do a mash-up of fact finding.
[3:12] And as with all of these clips, you can read the fuller details in our blog posts which are linked to in the show notes.
[3:23] We want to tell you about how you can enter a new award: this is an award for using Freedom of Information to make a positive impact on society, so we know that some of you people listening will be very qualified to enter for that.
[3:37] Rachel: I’m Rachel Hanna and I am Deputy Director of AccessInfo Europe.
AccessInfo is an organisation based in Madrid, and we focus on the promotion and the protection of the right to information.
[3:47] The AccessInfo Impact Award has been set up to recognise the impressive work and achievements of our founder, Helen Darbishire, and it recognises those who have leveraged their right information to have a positive impact on society.
[4:03] And that positive impact could be, for example, through advancing human rights, environmental protection, democracy and/or anti-corruption efforts.
[4:11] The award is open to both self nomination and third party nominations and nominees can come from various different disciplines. So from civil society advocates to campaigners to journalists.
[4:23] And what we’re looking for from nominations is that it can be shown that the Right to Information was used to have a tangible positive impact.
[4:32] Positive impact can be demonstrated through various mechanisms such as research, political advocacy, litigation, or journalist investigations. The only real limits we’ve put on nominations is that the work must be done in the past three years, and it must have been conducted in Europe.
[4:48] The winner will be invited to speak at the 2025 Open Government Partnership Summit in Spain. We are in collaboration with this award with Open Government Partnership.
[5:02] And they will be invited to speak at the summit and their travel will be covered. And during the summit they will be given a platform to share their story and share their insights with an international audience.
[5:12] You can nominate yourself or someone else through our nomination form that you can find on the Access Info website or on our Twitter, and the deadline to apply is the 9th of September.
[5:24] We plan to announce the award ahead of September the 28th, which is the International Right to Know Day.
[5:32] Myf: Now back to Julia to explain about APPGs and why the number of them has dwindled from 553 to a surprising 34.
[5:42] Julia: More than 500 parliamentary lobbying groups seem to have disappeared since the general election, and there were only 553 to begin with. So what’s going on here?
[5:50] Well, All Party Parliamentary Groups are groups of MPs and Lords from different parties that work together on different policy areas, and they can be totally legitimate and really effective vehicles to get policy change. But they can also be a route for corruption.
[6:04] So at mySociety, we’ve been paying a bit of attention, and the number of APPGs has shifted quite a lot over the last year or so because there have been new rules, but we’ve never seen a change like this.
[6:15] In the 30th of May register, there were 553 groups, and then the Register that was published yesterday on the 28th of August, there were just 34.
[6:24] And so the decrease of over 90% of groups was a bit alarming. So we looked into this and we found that actually the reasons behind it might not be that worrying after all.
[6:34] One of them is just that there is one new rule that’s come in since the election, which is that MPs can only be an officer of six groups.
[6:40] Another one is just the size of the opposition. The nature of them being ‘all party’ means that they have to have MPs from or a member of the House of Lords from the official opposition, which is now the Conservative Party.
[6:54] When the Labour Party were the official opposition before the election, they had 206 MPs and now the Conservative Party only have 121.
[7:03] But we think that actually the biggest factor that’s going on here is just summer holidays. We just think it’s an admin delay, because there were only three basically working weeks between Parliament coming back after the election and finishing for summer recess, for them to have their AGM where they left their offices, and to fill in all the paperwork that they need to.
[7:23] And so we think that they’ve probably been working on this stuff over the summer, that they’ll be having that their AGMs when they come back next week, and hopefully we’ll see a lot more groups reregister in the next edition of the register, which should come out towards the end of September. They come out every six weeks or so.
[7:40] We’ll be paying attention and we’ll keep you updated. We have a great new project called WhoFundsThem, which is looking at both this and the Register of Members financial interests.
[7:49] So yeah, please follow along with us at mySociety and all the work we’re doing on WhoFundsThem if you’d like to see more transparency in politics.
[7:57] Myf: And just to wrap things up, here’s Gareth explaining how you could get a reduction on your WhatDoTheyKnow Pro subscription if you add a link to any stories that come from your Freedom of Information requests.
[8:10] Gareth: For a while now, there’s been a feature on WhatDoTheyKnow that lets you link your Freedom of Information requests to news articles, campaigning pieces, or research papers.
[8:17] And we’ve recently made it easier for you to link back requests to these types of stories in the same way.
[8:22] To celebrate, we’ll be offering free credit for WhatDoTheyKnow Pro subscribers who add links from the batch requests to the stories or papers that the requests are fed into. So for each link added during August, we’ll credit your account with a coupon that gives you a 20% discount on one month of Pro, and for several links, and you’ll get several coupons so you could have 20% off for many months.
[8:42] If you’re a journalist, campaigner or researcher, we hope this is a useful way to give your stories some more readership, not to mention a nice inbound link from a highly ranked site. We’re always keen to spot stories and research based on FOI requests made on WhatDoTheyKnow, but articles don’t always cite a source or link back to the site, so when you use this feature, you’ll be really helping us understand what sort of impact the site is having, which helps us to continue to improve it.
[9:06] Myf: Thanks, Gareth. As with all of these clips, you can get full details on how to take up that offer via the link in our show notes.
[9:13] This is part of our experiments at the moment with audio and videos. But don’t worry, we’ll always keep our written blog posts as well. We just want to give you the opportunity to listen while you’re on the bus, or walking the dog, or doing the washing up.
[9:25] And this month, we’ve even dipped into TikTok, because we’re really keen to find out if we can reach a younger people as well, so we can tell them all about the joys of participating in democracy with the use of mySociety tools, of course, so do follow us there if you are also an avid TikToker. We promise we’re not going to be doing any viral dances, but we are experimenting with what works.
[9:50] And if you’re not a TikToker, but you’re one of the many that have perhaps migrated across to BlueSky – a bit more staid, but very good for the civic tech community, it seems – you can follow us on BlueSky as well.
[10:03] Until the end of this year, we’re basically posting everything everywhere, in every format, and we’re seeing what sticks and we’re learning as we go along.
[10:12] So if you’ve got this far and you have some opinions about where and how you like to consume our content, please do send us some words of encouragement. Or the opposite. It’s all useful.
[10:22] Thank you very much for listening. And until next time, goodbye.