Who Funds Them launches today
It’s March 4 2025, and we’re releasing a bunch of new data on TheyWorkForYou, around each MPs’ financial interests: that’s whether they have second jobs, what donations helped them campaign ahead of the general election, and whether they’ve received gifts such as Taylor Swift tickets.
In the course of assembling this data — with the help of our brilliant team of volunteers — we’ve come to understand exactly what the problems with the current system of reporting are.
If you’re seeing this on the morning of release, we’ll also be launching a report at 1pm today, and you’re welcome to join us. (Don’t worry if you’re too late; we’ll be sharing the video afterwards. Just make sure you’re signed up for our newsletter to be alerted when it’s available).
Don’t forget to check out your own MP, to see who funds them, on TheyWorkForYou.com. And if you have any questions about this project, the data, or MPs’ financial interests in general, send them to us at whofundsthem@mysociety.org.
If you appreciate this type of work, please help us do more of it by making a one-off (or even better, a regular) donation. Thank you!
Transcript
[0:00] Julia: If you’ve ever wondered if your MP has a second job, what donations they received, or if they were one of the ones that got a free Taylor Swift ticket, we’ve got the answers for you.
[0:08] Hi, I’m Julia, and at my work at mySociety, over the last six months I have personally looked through every single MP’s Register of Members Financial Interests.
[0:18] That means I’ve looked at every donation, second job, shareholding, trip abroad. Everything that has been declared to the Register by every MP, my eyes have seen it. And we’ve learnt a lot in this process. And I’ve been supported by 50 amazing volunteers and the rest of the mySociety team.
[0:33] 50 volunteers helped us go through all of this information about second jobs, gifts and donations for all 650 MPs.
[0:40] We’re making that available on TheyWorkForYou on Tuesday the fourth of March. There’s new summaries and extra information about whether your MP received money from oil and gas companies, gambling companies, or if they took visits to countries which are scored ‘not free’ by Freedom House.
[0:56] In the process of doing all of this work and adding all this information to the Register, we’ve got some opinions on how it can work better, both in terms of collecting the data so that it’s accurate and so that we know who is donating, but also changing some of the wider rules to make sure that there is less of an influence of private money in politics.
[1:13] The first recommendation that’s coming out of the WhoFundsThem project is about the data itself. And that might sound boring, but it’s really fundamental to us being able to have trust in the system.
[1:23] At the moment, the forms that are being used by MPs to declare their donations and their second jobs just aren’t capturing the right information. There’s all sorts of things going on here.
[1:32] Sometimes the questions that are being asked aren’t very good. Sometimes the questions are right, but they’re not required, so MPs can skip them. Or sometimes the right questions aren’t even being asked.
[1:43] All of the rules seem to be interpreted in slightly different ways by new MPs or by older MPs, and fundamentally, it just made the project really hard, because the same questions were being answered in such different ways that when we’re trying to compare all MPs, it felt like comparing apples and oranges.
[1:58] We’ve got more recommendations later on in the report, which have bigger implications on how we fund politics. But we have to start from the beginning. We have to ask the right questions to get the right data, to even understand what’s going on.
[2:10] The second recommendation from our report is about scrutiny, which is a boring word for an important thing, which is, how do we check that the information that we’re being given is accurate and it’s correct?
[2:19] Our first recommendation was about changing the forms and doing better data collection to begin with. But that’s not enough. We also need to have mechanisms in place to check that the data is accurate, and fundamentally, we think that that has to be Parliament’s job.
[2:32] This is tricky, because the capacity in Parliament is stretched, and we totally appreciate that, but there’s some key things that can be done.
[2:38] We’re recommending a quarterly audit of just a handful of MPs to check the donations are being reported. At the moment, we’re surprised that there are some quite high profile MPs who haven’t declared a single donation over the last year.
[2:49] This may be the case, but I think an audit process would improve compliance and improve trust as a whole.
[2:54] There’s also a problem that we’re not sure that the data is up to date. And so, for example, there are a lot of new MPs that declared that they were councillors who aren’t councillors any more now, we found that out in our research, but they hadn’t updated the register to say that.
[3:06] At the moment, it seems that MPs can just choose whether or not to update the Register, whereas we’d like that to be changed so that every quarter at least, an MP has to do a declaration to the Register, even if it’s just to say that there’s been no changes.
[3:20] One more little thing in this category is that when MPs ask a question in Parliament, especially if it’s a written question, on the form where they submit the question, they have to say whether they have a relevant interest.
[3:30] And just for some strange reason, at the moment, Parliament will tell you whether or not they ticked yes, they have an interest or not, but they don’t tell you what that interest is. And we’d like that to change.
[3:39] If an MP has declared to Parliament that they have an interest that relates to the topic they’re asking a question about, that interest should be made public.
[3:47] So there’s a few of our ideas in this kind of second category of recommendations, which is all about improving the checks on the donations and the other information that gets declared to the Register.
[3:57] The third set of recommendations, as part of our Who Funds Them project are all about the rules themselves. So our first set of recommendations were about stronger data collection to get better data in the first place. Then the second set of recommendations were about checks for that data: are we sure it’s accurate? Are we sure that everything is being declared?
[4:15] And this third set is actually about the rules themselves, what qualifies as meeting the threshold to be declared. And in lots of the cases, we think that the thresholds need to be lowered so that more information gets declared.
[4:27] At the moment, MPs have to declare donations over £1,500 . Overall, we think that this threshold should be lowered to £1,000, and that will just capture more – and you know, £1,000 is a lot of money.
[4:40] We think the rules on gifts need to be stricter: both that more gifts need to be declared. At the moment, the threshold is £300, whereas in the civil service, it’s often £20. And so we think that needs to be lowered dramatically.
[4:51] And we also think there needs to be more rules on what should be accepted.
[4:54] Our fourth set of recommendations we’re calling Systematic Reform, and that’s about trying to decrease the influence of private money in politics.
[5:02] The biggest part of this fourth set of recommendations is this idea that we think there should be a citizens assembly on money in politics.
[5:10] A citizens assembly is when a group of people get brought together that are broadly representative of the public as a whole. They get given a really complicated or controversial policy question, and then over a few sessions, they get invited to hear from experts and witnesses, and they debate and discuss and come to conclusions about what should happen going forward.
[5:30] These have been used on issues that are really controversial, such as climate change, abortion and assisted dying.
[5:36] And we get that our recommendations as part of this report, where we’re saying that private money should play a lesser role, and therefore public money needs to play more of a role, like taxpayers’ money will be going more to political parties, is controversial.
[5:50] On the whole, people don’t generally support more money going into politics from taxpayers’ money, but we think it’s necessary, or at least we think that there are some trade offs to be had here. There’s a conversation that needs to happen.
[6:01] Are we happy that there is the amount of private money going into politics that there currently is? A citizens assembly seems to us a good way to draw out some of those debates.
[6:10] I have all of this information in my head now, and a lot of it has gone into the report, but the report is really long, and so if you have any questions on how money and politics works in the country, any questions about your individual MPs or what we’re going to do with the data, then let me know. But don’t forget that you can read the report in full on our website.