On March 4, we launched new data on TheyWorkForYou, making MPs’ financial interests easier for everyone to access and understand.

This wasn’t an easy undertaking! To explain the difficulties we encountered, and the recommendations we have for the way MPs declare their interests, we also put out a report.

At our launch event, we chatted through the challenges and our recommendations, together with Rose Whiffen of Transparency International, and Chris Cook from the Financial Times.

Links

• 📄Our report, Beyond Transparency.
• 🙏Donate to mySociety, so we can do more of this kind of work.
• 📺Rather watch this as a video instead of a podcast?

 

Transcript

Myf Nixon 0:01
Hi, Myf here, Communications Manager from mySociety. At the beginning of March, we launched the findings from our WhoFundsThem project. And you know what? This was a major undertaking for mySociety.

Myf Nixon 0:14
We worked with a big team of volunteers, which is something that we haven’t done for quite some time, and those volunteers helped us go through a variety of sources to figure out two things.

Myf Nixon 0:25
First of all, where do MPs get their money, gifts and donations from? And then, what is wrong with the system by which MPs report money, gifts and donations? That’s the Register of Financial Interests.

Myf Nixon 0:40
So we’re sharing the audio here from the online launch event for WhoFundsThem. We invited along Rose Whiffen from Transparency International, and Chris Cook from the Financial Times. And you’ll also hear mySociety’s own Julia Cushion and Alex Parsons, who have been leading on the WhoFundsThem project. But we started off with an introduction from mySociety’s Chief Executive, Louise Crowe,

Louise Crow 1:03
Hi everyone. Welcome. Thank you for joining us. I’m Louise Crow.

Louise Crow 1:07
I’m Chief Executive of mySociety. mySociety is a charity. We use digital services to remove barriers to democratic participation, equipping people to take action and drive meaningful change.

Louise Crow 1:19
Our parliamentary monitoring platform TheyWorkForYou helps people make sense of what’s happening in the UK parliaments.

Louise Crow 1:26
Today, I’m really delighted to welcome you to this event presenting our report Beyond Transparency, which lays out the initial set of findings from WhoFundsThem, our project looking at money in politics, in particular through the lens of the Register of MPs’ Financial Interests.

Louise Crow 1:41
I’m going to briefly set the scene before handing you over to our four expert speakers, and then I’m going to give you a chance to ask questions. So some extremely brief history: like TheyWorkForYou, the first Register of MPs’ Financial Interests was published independently from outside Parliament.

Louise Crow 1:58
This was a private publication called The Business Background of MPs, and it was created by journalist Andrew Roth in the 1950s in order to expose the way in which MPs, directorships, shareholdings and sponsorships were influencing their actions.

Louise Crow 2:13
Further scandals then led to the creation of the official parliamentary register in the 1970s, and while there’s been a journey towards greater transparency over the years, the register has also been a concession made to avoid stronger rules and the external enforcement of standards.

Louise Crow 2:26
So some modern politicians have argued that interest disclosed in the register must be endorsed implicitly by voters if those voters continue to elect them, and that as they’re not secret, they can’t be scandalous.

Louise Crow 2:38
In the last few years, from the Owen Paterson scandal to more recent cases of freebies given to politicians, there’s been a sense that parliamentary culture is too comfortable with conflicts of interest, and they suddenly have business as usual noticed by the press and public, which makes previously overlooked information an important part of the national conversation.

Louise Crow 2:59
So for a long time we’ve built on the official release of the register to create a much more usable version in TheyWorkForYou, tying interests to MPs’ profiles long before the official parliamentary website did that, and making it easy to track changes over time to help highlight new information.

Louise Crow 3:15
This WhoFundsThem project has given us the opportunity to work with a really amazing set of volunteers to do the kind of analysis that can only be done by hand, building an understanding of what’s in the register, what isn’t in the register, how the register relates to other sources of information, and how we can help shape more effective transparency and rules.

Louise Crow 3:33
So the report covers what we’ve learned from this deep dive, making four sets of recommendations covering better data collection, stronger checks on the quality of disclosures, tighter rules on what’s allowed, and ultimately, wider systemic reform of the influence of money in politics.

Louise Crow 3:49
Now, some of these recommendations can only be acted on by Parliament and politicians, but we’ve also been thinking about what we can do from the outside to help bring the culture of politics in line with public expectations. So today, alongside the report, we’ve added two new sections to TheyWorkForYou.

Louise Crow 4:05
Firstly, election summaries, which add more crowdsourced information about company donations and gifts, and secondly, highlighted interests. And this brings together a set of interests related to industries with low public support or to the governments of not free countries, and it also offers MPs a chance to add further context to those declarations.

Louise Crow 4:25
I want to take a moment at this point to thank the JRSST Charitable Trust and the Indigo Trust for their support for this project, which has made the whole thing possible. Over the coming weeks and months, we want to build on the work we’re going to talk about here, working together with other people who are pushing for reform to make sure it happens now. It’s obviously more important than ever that we make our democratic processes robust, resilient and trustworthy.

Louise Crow 4:49
So I’m really delighted that we’re joined here today by two long standing advocates for reform, Chris Cook and Rose Whiffen. Chris is a senior reporter at the Financial Times, where he leads the newspaper’s data heavy investigations. He started at the FT, where he covered finance and education, before heading off to the BBC, where he worked for five years as a public policy editor on BBC Newsnight.

Louise Crow 5:10
Rose is a Senior Research Officer at Transparency International UK, specialising in political corruption. Her work covers issues of money and politics, lobbying, revolving door and open governance. She’s been the lead researcher and writer of several of TI UK publications, as well as contributing to the House of Cards report, which explored access and influence in UK housing policy, and the Checks and Balances report, which explored money in politics more broadly. She’s previously held roles at Democracy Club and Spotlight on Corruption, and has an MA in Corruption and Governance.

Louise Crow 5:43
Alongside Chris and Rose, you’ll be hearing from Julia Cushion and Alex Parsons from mySociety, who’ve led the WhoFundsThem project and written the report. And huge thanks to both of them and all the volunteers who’ve worked with them. It’s been an enormous labour. So at this point, that’s enough from me. I’m going to hand over to Chris to give us his perspective on MPs’ financial interests as a journalist.

Chris Cook 6:05
Thanks very much. I think the first thing it’s worth saying about approaching this topic as a journalist, and one that’s often, I think, approached differently by people in other sort of disciplines, is that one of our real challenges is that there’s a lot of hay and not many needles.

Chris Cook 6:19
I think we have to sort of start from that position; that we can’t start from the position that MPs are definitely crooks. You can’t start from the position that donors are definitely after something.

Chris Cook 6:29
If we have a system where there isn’t public funding for political parties, then we rely on people to give money. And I feel like the conversation on this stuff often starts off from the presumption that everyone involved in this is definitely on the make and they’re definitely after something, but actually, the average donor is genuinely someone who just has a sort of set of values, and they like the local MP and they’d like them to win again.

Chris Cook 6:51
And the I do think we have to sort of couch everything we think about in those terms. That said, my real problem with the rules as they stand is that there are needles in there, and the rules are not very good for letting us discover the needles right? There are bad actors. There are people who misbehave.

Chris Cook 7:07
And the rules themselves, I think, don’t encompass a broader range of problems as they should. So I think intellectually, the rules that are given to the House of Commons have one real aim in mind, which is to defend the proceedings of the House of Commons. So the intellectual idea that sort of underpins the way the rules are constructed, are that if you do something in the House of Commons that relates to something that you have a financial interest in, you should tell everyone about it before you do anything.

Chris Cook 7:36
That’s the big backstop that exists in the rules. There are others: you also have to declare if you have a lot of money invested in something, or if you have particularly tight entanglements with people. But the big backstop and the rules is if you talk in the House of Commons, if you vote in the House of Commons, if you do something in the House of Commons that relates to something where you have a financial interest, you are supposed to tell everyone.

Chris Cook 7:55
The fundamental problem with this is twofold, really. The first is that’s not the only way that corruption can happen, right? So it’s not just cash for questions.

Chris Cook 8:04
These are rules that stop, in principle, stop cash for questions. The MPs have to tell you before they do anything relating to, say, gambling, if they’ve received money from a betting company.

Chris Cook 8:13
The problem is, what if you know as an MP that there is legislation that’s likely to come down the track that is probably going to fail? Or if you know that a select committee is writing a report, what if you’re a private parliamentary secretary, and you know, so a like a bag carrier to an MP, in and out of places all the time, and you know, for example, that Serco is unlikely to win its next contract or so on.

Chris Cook 8:37
You know, there is market sensitive information, as we would think of it at the FT, that the MPs do come in contact with and do have intelligence on, and the rules don’t presuppose that they might want to trade on those things.

Chris Cook 8:49
So at the moment, you’re allowed to own £70,000 of shares – deranged, by the way, in a completely berserk way. But you’re allowed to own £70,000 of shares without telling anyone in a company, so long as you don’t control the company, you’re allowed to own as much cryptocurrency as you like, without having to tell anyone you can own gold or silver, but without selling anyone.

Chris Cook 9:10
These are all things which are amenable to… whose prices can be affected by public policy. The whole idea of the whole rule set in terms of what you do and don’t have to declare preemptively is, I think, completely berserk.

Chris Cook 9:24
There’s a secondary thing, which is that the whole thing presupposes, well, that you will basically be honest, and that you’re not going to be on the make. I think one of the things that is, one of the sort of sad things about Parliament, is a lot of people who enter Parliament, possibly very young, who think they’re definitely going to be Prime Minister, and they quite quickly realise that they’re actually pretty bad at politics, and they stay for the rest of their careers. And they are the people that turn up in the me too investigations and the bullying investigations, that stuff.

Chris Cook 9:49
They’re also the people, I suspect, are the ones who think, you know what, I can make some money out of doing some of this stuff. And there are carve outs for lots of people to take money from, basically, for lobbying.

Chris Cook 9:59
So. So, I mean, lawyers are the ones that I think are the most egregious. So if you’re a lawyer in the House of Commons, which a lot of them are, you don’t have to tell anyone who your clients are. You just have to declare roughly how much money you’ve made and when.

Chris Cook 10:12
And the consequence of that is there’s just a sort of enormous carve-out. And actually dentists are the same. We have one dentist in the House of Commons, but I’m not actually that worried about a dentistry cabal taking over the country… it’s odd to me that, for example, people who ran lobbying operations like, I mean, Stephen McPartland, the former MP for Stevenage, was a lobbyist for the furniture industry.

Chris Cook 10:33
When he was an MP, he was paid, I think, about £36,000 a year to advocate for high fire safety standards for British furniture makers, which, coincidentally, stopped foreign furniture makers from being able to sell them to the UK.

Chris Cook 10:47
Shockingly, you know, what a happy coincidence that was. He had to declare it, because he was paid directly. If he’d been paid as a lawyer, he wouldn’t have to tell anyone who his client was. We would never know. He would just, he could genuinely just have an interest in the chemical composition of furniture.

Chris Cook 11:02
One of the other things that comes up a lot as a reporter is that the data is an absolute nightmare. So I say this not to gloat, but one of our rival publications had to issue a correction for getting an MP’s private earnings wrong by £600,000.

Chris Cook 11:16
It’s not their fault. Fundamentally, it’s because the filings are so difficult to parse. They are unbelievably complicated. You end up with these peculiar declarations where people say, I was paid £36,000 a year for 12 hours of work a month, and I am paid on a weekly basis. And you end up having to do, like logic puzzles to work out what’s going on.

Chris Cook 11:42
And that one case, you end up with these problems where… Jeffrey Cox is prone to doing this. He’ll say, I was paid £10,000 by the solicitor for this work. He will then later register, I received £10,000. And he won’t provide a key. So you know, it’s the same £10,000. It looks like it’s probably £20,000. But we don’t know.

Chris Cook 12:03
There are other people like Jonathan Finucane the Sinn Fein MP, who accidentally said that he worked 48 hours a week, I think it was for his law firm, and then had to correct his 40 hours a month, but he didn’t withdraw the old record. So it looked like in consecutive records, he just, he was just declaring extra income.

Chris Cook 12:26
People just put in effectively the same record with the corrected dates of corrected numbers. And you don’t know whether it’s new money or old money. Or how do these things relate? Is this a change in circumstance versus correction?

Chris Cook 12:38
There’s all these sorts of problems with actually just reconciling this data. And fundamentally, there’s no way, as an outsider, without ringing them and asking them, there’s no way to find out from the records, what the actual numbers are.

Chris Cook 12:51
So it’s very striking that when you look, you never see, very rarely see people try and work out how much an individual MP is actually brought in from any cause.

Chris Cook 12:59
We did a big project at the FT looking at earnings, and we decided the end what we would do is look at the the industries of the businesses of that had supported MPs, because we knew that data was safe, right? It didn’t matter if they double counted. Once you’ve received money from a lawyer, you receive money from a lawyer, like, tick, done because we couldn’t work out the numbers.

Chris Cook 13:19
We’re safely at scale. People only ever look at the top two or three. And it was, in fact, Jeffrey Cox’s earnings that caught out another publication. Even when you look at one person’s earnings, you can be caught out because the data is so bad.

Chris Cook 13:33
So yeah, I think that’s my big points. Data is absolutely terrible. The system is carved out with holes. Some of those holes relate to the fact that the rules do not do what we want them to do, which to say, stop opportunities for self dealing.

Chris Cook 13:49
They relate to an idea that what happens in the chamber is this is the central ambition of of these rules, when in fact, they should take a broader view.

Chris Cook 13:59
And I think it’s always, Isuspect your reports will you know, lead us in this direction: the American – it is extraordinary for British people, I think, to discover that American rules on money and politics are actually stricter than ours when it comes to actual legislators.

Chris Cook 14:13
Lawyers are not allowed to practice while they belong to the US Congress. You are forbidden from having a client as a lawyer, because it’s understood that you can’t be a faithful advocate for that person and a faithful advocate for the public.

Chris Cook 14:27
At the same time, the they have to declare shareholdings. Have to declare basically, not everything, not enough, but a lot. And they have to declare moments of trades, which is very important and a potential source of self dealing and insider trading.

Chris Cook 14:46
So, yeah, I think that is the direction we should move. I confess that when I see people writing in law rules for themselves that say things like, we can hold £70,000 worth of shares without having to tell anyone, my sort of spidey sense starts tingling about why they came up with this rule, and such an obnoxiously high number. I’ll leave that there.

Louise Crow 15:06
Terrific. Thanks, Chris. Really illuminating. At this point I’m going to turn the conversation over to Rose to talk about her experience of the register and Transparency International’s work in this area.

Rose Whiffen 15:20
Thank you so much. Good afternoon, everyone. And just firstly to say a big congratulations to mySociety for undertaking this very ambitious project, and I can’t wait to in my own research, use some of the work and information that they’ve uncovered.

Rose Whiffen 15:37
So firstly, just an introduction to Transparency International, UK. For those who are not familiar, we are an anti corruption NGO, and we operate globally with more than 100 organisations around the world.

Rose Whiffen 15:51
So for this presentation, I was asked two particular questions, how do we use the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, and what problems have we identified.

Rose Whiffen 16:01
So as an anti corruption organisation, we have a definition of corruption, which is “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain”, and where the Register of Members’ Financial Interests comes into this is that private gain, is that financial interest part of what parliamentarians have, and the mitigation is the Code of Conduct for parliamentarians, which tries to regulate these financial interests, and in particular, they require that MPs across 10 different categories of financial interest, register them, and we use that data for our investigations and for our policy and monitoring of issues.

Rose Whiffen 16:50
And I would also, you know, echo Chris’s remarks in terms of when we’re doing our investigations, not all parliamentarians are, you know, bad apples. They’re not all on the mark.

Rose Whiffen 17:03
You know, the majority of public servants are trying to serve their constituents, but there are a few who we have seen in the past do breach the Code of Conduct, and those are the examples that we’re looking for.

Rose Whiffen 17:15
So for our investigations, we are looking for financial interests that are unduly influencing the behaviour of the parliamentarian, just the fact that they’ve received a financial interest, you know, maybe it’s extremely high, but in terms of the amount they receive, but just the fact they receive a financial interest would not be enough for us to sort of flag it as a corruption issue.

Rose Whiffen 17:41
They have to have then partaken in some type of behavior as a result of the financial interest. So the types of things that we normally look at is their employment.

Rose Whiffen 17:52
Do they have any secondary employment, aside from their MP role? Have they gone on any overseas trips? Have they received particular donations, any shareholdings that they have, and also the hospitality that they have received, the tickets to gigs and things like that.

Rose Whiffen 18:09
So that’s the financial interest we’re looking at. That’s the sort of private gain part of our definition. But then we’re looking to see how parliamentarians’ behaviours might have been shaped as a result of this financial interest.

Rose Whiffen 18:24
So we’re looking for things like their contributions in Parliament, the questions that they put down, and maybe any letters that they might have written to ministers that would be obtained through FOI, which we saw in a particular egregious case of lobbying by an MP, so those are the sort of patterns that we’re looking for in our investigations.

Rose Whiffen 18:48
And we use the Register of Members’ Financial Interests to identify these different financial interests and then to see how that shaped the MPs’ behaviours.

Rose Whiffen 18:58
So I just wanted to give one example of an investigation that we did, I used the register to identify that several MPs were undertaking overseas trips to Northern Cyprus. And I felt like why that was interesting was it’s quite a niche area to go to.

Rose Whiffen 19:19
And I wondered about where the funding was coming from, and I started to see that several MPs had undertaken these trips. So that’s the first thing, that was the financial interest that I identified.

Rose Whiffen 19:33
And then I wanted to see how a parliamentarian’s behaviour had changed, potentially as a result of that, and if they had followed the rules of declaring their interests and registering their interests.

Rose Whiffen 19:48
So I found that several parliamentarians had submitted written questions about Northern Cyprus. So. I found that there were several, and working with OCCRP, as you see, and Democracy For Sale, where I’d identified a number of these parliamentary questions, and we realised that many of them in this instance, were not declaring their interests.

Rose Whiffen 20:17
So part of the rules is not only that you register them in a public place that everyone can see. It’s also that when you have a contribution in Parliament, whether that be in the House, in a debate, or whether that be when you write a written question, you have to declare your interests if there is a relevant one.

Rose Whiffen 20:38
But in this circumstance, there was no interest flagged, as answered by the Department for Business and Trade. We would normally see a little image of a flag there if there was a declaration, but we saw that there was none.

Rose Whiffen 20:52
And this then led to an investigation into the MP Samuel Wilson, where he eventually apologised for not declaring his interest, and that was investigated by the Standards Commissioner.

Rose Whiffen 21:05
So not only do we use the Register of Members’ Financial Interests for our investigations, we also use it for our policy development through the monitoring of issues, so we try and identify trends and patterns what types of conflicts of interest, what types of companies could be unduly influencing MPs.

Rose Whiffen 21:27
And so, for example, this was one instance of where we did that. So we identified several MPs who were being paid for advisory roles which we deemed to be sort of high risk corruption roles where they could embark in corruption.

Rose Whiffen 21:43
And we then formulated a recommendation by identifying that pattern, which has now been implemented, but yeah, there’s still room for improvement, and we will be continuing to use the Register of Members’ Financial Interests for policy and monitoring with the upcoming – there’s an inquiry into outside employments and interests, so we use the data within the Register to flag some more trends and patterns.

Rose Whiffen 22:12
So what problems have we identified with the register? This is going to sound very similar to Chris, but probably is the same for anyone that’s tried to wrangle this data is, yeah, just accessibility and usability of the Register.

Rose Whiffen 22:26
It really is a jigsaw puzzle that you have to put together yourself, and it’s really difficult to search across time periods and historical interests, which is why, yeah, mySociety do a great job.

Rose Whiffen 22:40
I always use the feature that displays the historical interests of MPs, and also they have recently updated how they present this information, how Parliament present this information, and you now can download it in a CSV format.

Rose Whiffen 22:59
And as I mentioned earlier, parliamentarians have to register across 10 categories. So what they’ve done is they’ve released the interests based on the 10 categories. So that can be useful if you’re looking at just one category in particular, eg, shareholdings.

Rose Whiffen 23:17
But if you want to do analysis of MPs across all 10 categories, you’ll see that you would have to download each of these individual CSV files to do that.

Rose Whiffen 23:29
So yeah, it’s quite a challenging dataset to use, and also we see issues with the rules. I mean, there’s sort of almost too many to mention here. And Chris has flagged, you know, sometimes these quite arbitrary thresholds, for example, the £70,000 threshold for registering shareholdings.

Rose Whiffen 23:51
But I would also say there’s an interesting one when it comes to hospitality in the Houses of Parliament, which is £300.

Rose Whiffen 24:01
And there was a recent case of an MP in a sting operation by the media who were trying to hire him as a lobbyist for a gambling company. And he said, “You know, there’s lots of ways to keep corporate hospitality secret. You’d be amazed at the number of times I’ve gone to the races, and the tickets come to £295”, so that’s just below the £300 threshold for registration.

Rose Whiffen 24:29
So I mean, that’s a bit anecdotal, but it does flag an issue with this sort of quite arbitrary threshold. And even ministers have to register 140 pounds their gifts. So you can see that there’s sometimes a bit of an overlap with what ministers have to declare, and this can sometimes create loopholes for registration and sort of picking like shopping, which rules to adhere to.

Rose Whiffen 25:00
So, yeah, those are the main problems. I would say accessibility of the register in the data and also the rules of themselves mean that we miss quite a lot of the interests.

Louise Crow 25:11
Thanks so much, Rose, and thanks for your work putting that jigsaw together. I’m going to pass now to Julia, who’s going to talk about how we carried out the WhoFundsThem project, what we learned and where the surprises were.

Julia Cushion 25:24
Thank you so much, Louise, and thank you so much to our brilliant speakers for setting the scene there for us and all of the problems with the Register, which we obviously hope we are now going to suggest solutions for.

Julia Cushion 25:34
Mostly the solutions I’ll leave to Alex, who’s talking about recommendations, but I want to talk everyone through how we ran this project.

Julia Cushion 25:40
It’s worth just saying briefly, before we get into it, that mySociety is obviously a registered charity. You might know us from some of our other websites, but this WhoFundsThem project sits within our Democracy strand.

Julia Cushion 25:51
You’ll see a lot of the results on TheyWorkForYou, which I’ll be talking about in a second.

Julia Cushion 25:55
When we set out on this project, WhoFundsThem, it was about this time last year, actually, and it got a little bit delayed because of the General Election, but the key aims that we’re carrying through the project are these:

Julia Cushion 26:06
We’re trying to improve the information environment for everyone interested in money flowing in and out of Parliament. And so I think we’ve had already today great examples of how of journalist and NGO use of that.

Julia Cushion 26:16
But hopefully I’m going to talk to you today a bit more as well about how we want ordinary everyday people to be able to access this information better, and encourage Parliament to improve their reporting, to make the information environment better upstream.

Julia Cushion 26:28
So that’s really important to us. We think that we can kind of model by example and show that, yes, it took us a lot of time and a lot of volunteers, but better information is possible in this area if we ask better questions.

Julia Cushion 26:39
And ultimately, we don’t just want better data about bad interests. We want to promote better behaviour from MPS, resulting in increased public trust.

Julia Cushion 26:47
And to put that in a nice way, we really do believe here that we don’t have to wait for a better politics to be given to us. We can work together to make it happen now, and that is what I told our volunteers at the start of the process, and thankfully, many of them took that on board and worked really hard with us. And we’re very, very grateful.

Julia Cushion 27:05
So it’s worth thinking about why we used volunteers as part of this. And we’ve been republishing the Register of Members’ Financial Interests data for quite a long time now, and we were aware of the problems with it, and many of them have been covered already today, by our great speakers.

Julia Cushion 27:19
And there have been some machine learning approaches. And you know, we’ve used elements of machine learning too, but on the whole, we found that the original data is so poor, so full of gaps, so differently filled out by different MPs, that we needed human beings to help us go through that data and work it out.

Julia Cushion 27:34
And yes, we recruited 50 wonderful volunteers for our original plan start in May, but then that was pushed back to the autumn, and so volunteers helped us go through every single MP’s register of interest across all categories, line by line, answering questions about them all.

Julia Cushion 27:50
And then as the mySociety team, we reviewed those. And it’s taken us a bit of time, but we’re really, really pleased with what we’ve come out with.

Julia Cushion 27:57
And yeah, we had about 30 active volunteers, and some really, really active ones who went above and beyond to do their fair share. So I want to say a huge thank you.

Julia Cushion 28:04
And it is a long report that we’ve written, but if you get to the end, all the volunteers names are listed, and we want to say a big thank you to them.

Julia Cushion 28:10
So yes, as we were setting out on this project, we wanted to have a think about the questions that we were going to ask about all of the MPs. And we actually published this back in August of last year: we have got a literature review, which we link on the website, that you can go and have a look at where we were considering what we wanted to find out.

Julia Cushion 28:26
And it’s worth just noting here some polling we were looking at in terms of the industries of low public support, and that I’ll come back to, because we have highlighted those industries, and then also some polling on second jobs.

Julia Cushion 28:38
So there was a kind of research background to this that we then took forward in our questions. Mostly we wanted to prioritise, given that we were taking this human centered approach where we could add value to the register by getting people to look through it, do Google searches, add extra information.

Julia Cushion 28:53
And one of the primary ways that we’ve done that, and we’re really excited to launch today, is the work that the volunteers did, researching and categorising the businesses and individuals that appear in the register.

Julia Cushion 29:04
Because at the moment, you go onto the register and it will say J.Smith or ABC limited, and you don’t know what those organisations do.

Julia Cushion 29:10
So line by line, MP by MP, our amazing volunteers helped us research those individuals and organisations, and that is now on TheyWorkForYou in a special tab called ‘2024 election donations’, and we’ve then been able to group those by category so you can see which industries might be particularly dominant in donating to your MP and these are across all of the 10 categories that Rose showed us earlier as well.

Julia Cushion 29:34
We’ve gone through line by line. It’s worth saying here, although I’m mostly leaving recommendations to Alex in the latter section that this was really hard because there are no unique identifiers for individual donors, and a lot of the time, even companies don’t have to give their Companies House registration number – that’s really applied differently across the Register.

Julia Cushion 29:54
So identifying these weren’t weren’t easy, and we do have recommendations to try and make sure that in future, if this exercise were to be repeated, it would be a lot easier to identify both the organisations and individuals involved.

Julia Cushion 30:05
Next up, as we’ve mentioned, we were looking for specific industries with low public support across the Register, and we now have a dedicated web page on TheyWorkForYou, where you can look at these industries that we highlighted.

Julia Cushion 30:16
They were oil and gas, gambling and not free countries. We also gave MPs the opportunity to add a comment to this to explain their interest, and we talk about it a bit later, but we didn’t have very many responses from this, but you can go and have a look at all of this data.

Julia Cushion 30:33
Another two sets of data that we kind of uncovered with the help of our brilliant volunteers, but actually aren’t standalone pages: instead, they’ve become part of our report.

Julia Cushion 30:42
Firstly, Companies House: we had an amazing tool that was built by our friends at Any One Thing, and they’re cited in the report, which went through and they identified all of the Companies House pages for all of the different MPs.

Julia Cushion 30:53
And that’s a really hard job, because you need MPs’ birth dates to be able to do that, and Parliament doesn’t publish those anymore. So that’s another of our small recommendations.

Julia Cushion 31:02
And so we were going through and checking if there were any companies that were declared to Companies House that weren’t in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

Julia Cushion 31:09
And interestingly here, on the whole we found that actually there was good levels of declaration. We only found 37 entries that we thought merited passing back to MPs. There were quite a lot of dormant companies still hanging around that weren’t declared, but those we weren’t investigating: the ones that we did look at were things like this, charity trustee positions, LLP memberships.

Julia Cushion 31:29
And we got some interesting responses from that, which I’ll share in a bit. But this isn’t standalone data, just because it is quite a small group, and we want to focus on other things.

Julia Cushion 31:39
And then next, another question that our volunteers answered was we were looking specifically at staff members paid for by other organisations that were being declared in the Register.

Julia Cushion 31:49
And as you can see, there was quite a lot of money at play here, and quite a lot of MPs were receiving considerable donations to fund multiple members of staff in their office from business interests. And that’s an area where we have recommendations in the report, because at the moment, it’s being declared alongside other donations of just £2,000.

Julia Cushion 32:09
We very rarely know what any donation goes towards, because the description element is entirely optional. But in this case, we didn’t feel like we were getting enough information given the size of these donations and the amount of work these people were doing.

Julia Cushion 32:22
So this was as much as we could pull out from this area. But it is somewhere that we have recommendations in the report.

Julia Cushion 32:29
This time we did ask some questions where we couldn’t actually extract all the data that we wanted to. And there’s good reasons for that that have kind of already been covered.

Julia Cushion 32:36
The second jobs, additional employment area – the data is so poor that we, even with our additional research, we couldn’t fill in the gaps. In many cases, MPs didn’t tell us the kind of work that they were doing. We couldn’t identify the companies.

Julia Cushion 32:49
There was a lot of cases of MPs declaring that they were still a councillor and then not updating the Register, even though, in our research, we found that they weren’t.

Julia Cushion 32:57
So it was really, really hard to kind of build an accurate data set for this, so we need better source data to work with in that case, and then, yeah, interestingly that both our speakers have talked about declaring interests in Parliament, we have a tool that we’ve built where we can search Hansard using a vector search for this, so that we can look for whether MPs are or are not declaring relevant interests.

Julia Cushion 33:17
But in our window of looking at this project, it was September 2023 to September 2024 and so many of the new MPs hadn’t had enough chance to speak for us to make a full data set, but we’re going to be going back to that and doing some more live analysis. So do stay tuned.

Julia Cushion 33:32
And then very quickly, I just wanted to show you that, because mySociety is a data and technology charity, that the way that we delivered this project was with our inhouse crowdsourcing software that our amazing developer, Struan has made.

Julia Cushion 33:44
It was originally made for the Council Climate Action Scorecards project that we do with Climate Emergency UK, and we have repurposed it for this.

Julia Cushion 33:53
And so just to say, we have a blog post out about how we did this, the technicalities of it, and we’re really proud, and, you know, really pleased we could use this brilliant software.

Julia Cushion 34:01
And you can see there’s different views for us as admin seeing the progress, and also for the volunteers getting to go through and answer their questions.

Julia Cushion 34:10
These links here that you can see on this page are what become the links on our 2024 elections tabsummary. It’s one of the things we’re most proud of that you can now see company name, click it and go straight to their website.

Julia Cushion 34:20
But also these additional notes helped us understand what was going on. Was it a tentative identification? Were they really confident on it, that sort of thing.

Julia Cushion 34:27
Finally, just to say, as part of this process and the highlighted industries and missing companies, we gave MPs a right of reply. We got more responses about missing companies and really useful responses.

Julia Cushion 34:37
We asked them, “Our understanding of the rules is that these should have been declared; they haven’t been – what do you think is going on?”.

Julia Cushion 34:43
We had a few people say they’re non financial, therefore they don’t need to be declared. That isn’t our understanding of the rules. A couple more said, “Oh, thank you for flagging this. I need to follow up with Companies House.”

Julia Cushion 34:52
But the majority that go back to us said, “OK, yes, I have checked the rules, and you’re right, this should be declared”, and they are now going to go and declare it.

Julia Cushion 34:59
And so that’s a really positive outcome for us. And then, yes, we have emailed MPs about the highlighted industries. We had a couple of comments for publication, but we’ll be keeping an eye on that and publishing more if MPs get back to us.

Julia Cushion 35:09
Very quickly then just on the crowdsourcing bit itself, before I hand over to Alex, who’s going to talk about the report recommendations, we’re so grateful to our volunteers, and we think loads of interesting information has come out of this.

Julia Cushion 35:19
Even though we did identify a lot of data gaps, we overall think it shouldn’t have been this hard to do this project. The data quality was worse than we expected.

Julia Cushion 35:27
And also, I think it’s worth noting that the range of responses and the different ways that new MPs approached the Register and their declarations varied quite dramatically, which suggests Parliament needs to do some thinking about this kind of onboarding and induction of new MPs.

Julia Cushion 35:40
Despite the quality problems, where we could double check, for example, this Companies House checking that we did, there was good disclosure.

Julia Cushion 35:48
However, there were still some big grey areas where the rules aren’t clear.

Julia Cushion 35:52
Finally, yeah, a big reflection is we’ve just seen a lot of out of date information. MPs aren’t updating their registers regularly.

Julia Cushion 35:59
We’ve seen lots of MPs declare at the start of a new parliament, and then not for a long time. So it’s hard to trust the information that’s there, and that’s what a lot of our recommendations are about.

Julia Cushion 36:07
And we do have a fear that lots of information isn’t being declared, and there’s more on that in the report, which is a good time for me to hand over to Alex. Thanks everyone.

Alex Parsons 36:16
So I am now going to talk through the big groups of recommendations we’ve got coming out this massive project.

Alex Parsons 36:21
So these break down into four groups. We have better data collection, stronger checks, tighter parliamentary rules and systematic reforms.

Alex Parsons 36:29
I’m going to quickly talk to the broad themes in those areas, and then what we can do from the outside for continued change.

Alex Parsons 36:35
So first area, better data. So as Julia and our other speakers have described, one of the key lessons we’ve had is trouble working with the data, aside from the data quality issues, there’s a sense that the Register is not structured to collect information that can answer the sign of questions we want to ask about.

Alex Parsons 36:49
So we recommend there should be an overall review of the Register’s categories. The goal is to distinguish better between different kinds of interest, both in terms of similar data collection needs, but also be in response to the different democratic problems posed by different kinds of interest.

Alex Parsons 37:03
So, for instance, a common kind of second job is being a councillor. Now, if this is a good or a bad thing is, you know, a democratic question sort of beyond this, but it’s also something that we could collect much clearer data on than is currently true in the Register.

Alex Parsons 37:14
And one of the frustrating and surprising things was how difficult it was to have someone to stop being a councillor or not.

Alex Parsons 37:18
So many media appearances are a fairly common source for MPs, and this is a different kind of disclosure to sustained employment in a second job. So separating these out will make the Register clearer and sort of collect more relevant information on both sides.

Alex Parsons 37:30
Similarly, Julia talked about secondment supporting specific staff. The staff register needs an overhaul anyway, and a better cross link between the two would be useful on the general second jobs question.

Alex Parsons 37:39
We recommend moving from rules that look at the role, to asking if the organisation itself has a plausible conflict of interest, as rules of increasingly specify what isn’t permissible activity.

Alex Parsons 37:52
It’s helpful as a evaluation of risk to understand is this, if we assume this role isn’t quite honest, like, is there an essential risk from the organisation itself.

Alex Parsons 38:02
Does this organisation do lobby of Parliament? Does it get government contracts? Because even if that doesn’t show wrongdoing one way or the other, it helps evaluate if it’s something that requires a closer look from the outside.

Alex Parsons 38:12
We can’t create information from thin air, but we can rework and expand on what’s published and make it more useful.

Alex Parsons 38:17
Our enhanced election summary is an example of how we can use this data to expand it through other data sets and add volunteer crowdsourcing. And there’s also value of making messy data more easily available so we can scale our existing spreadsheet approaches to register of interest beyond the House of Commons, looking at devolved Parliament soon, but also potentially local governments, in the sense that, given the data is messy, being able to explore and search large mass data earlier help inform what the next questions are.

Alex Parsons 38:41
The second set of recommendations is around better audit enforcement. And so what we’ve noticed in a few areas is where, in principle, Parliament has a reasonable rule, but in practice it isn’t being followed and it isn’t being enforced by anyone.

Alex Parsons 38:52
This lets Parliament announce new, stronger rules, but little actually changes. So we want to encourage Parliament to better enforce its rules by highlighting why this isn’t happening and putting more pressure on.

Alex Parsons 39:01
One of our key recommendations here is that Parliament should adopt systematic measures to improve data quality.

Alex Parsons 39:06
So the data Parliament publishes is now great at dividing things into more fields, but this has made it easier to see where contradictory or incomplete information has been published, and what we’ve seen in a few areas is complying with the rules as an ‘MP’s problem’ attitude.

Alex Parsons 39:18
But what’s actually needed is an institutional focus on good data quality, so poor compliance with the rules contributes to this negative spiral of lower standards and low public trust.

Alex Parsons 39:27
So the collective Parliament should feel empowered by the collective support of MPs, most of whom want this system to work,

Alex Parsons 39:33
and not put in the bad records, to support them to make good declarations and have clearer reject and improve standards for poor quality declarations.

Alex Parsons 39:41
Along those lines, we recommend regular prompts to update, especially on updates to ongoing interests, and the option of ‘no update’ responses to help guage that the information is up to date.

Alex Parsons 39:50
Similarly, auditing a limited sample of MPs returns can help improve compliance with the rules and shape wider guidance they give.

Alex Parsons 39:56
So for instance, our experience for the Companies House data was not really active non compliance, but an issue of non awareness, that picking on a few examples can then create guidance that has a greater impact.

Alex Parsons 40:05
The other major issue we found, was around rules, around declaring interest in the chamber, and when asking parliamentary questions by the rules, declaration should always be clear about what the interest and potential conflict is.

Alex Parsons 40:15
But it remains common for MPs to say things along the line of “I refer to my entry in the Register of Interest”.

Alex Parsons 40:20
By the rules, this just shouldn’t happen. It’s sort of explicitly what they’re not supposed to say, but that the chair never, ever corrects.

Alex Parsons 40:26
This is a sort of an example of Parliament’s own rules just not being enforced by Parliament on written questions.

Alex Parsons 40:32
We found that while MPs do as Rose was talking about, when they’re asking written questions, they have to declare if they have an interest on their form, they can say what the what that interest is.

Alex Parsons 40:41
That information is never made public, so that currently, the table office receives the information about what the interest is, but that’s never published in parliamentary records.

Alex Parsons 40:49
So we asked this information from the Speaker’s office. They now say they’re reviewing publication policy. We don’t know the current progress of this, but we’ll keep an eye on it.

Alex Parsons 40:58
And because, in principle, we feel that if MPs are tellin Parliament what the interest is, that should also be made public to be clear about what’s happening.

Alex Parsons 41:07
So we recommend that in parliamentary debates, the chair should take more of an interest in enforcing this rule. And in general, the nature of an interest declared not should be published as well as if, just if there was an interest from the outside.

Alex Parsons 41:20
We can’t compel fixes. We can do more flagging where information needs to improve and use our position to create better correction pipelines.

Alex Parsons 41:27
So for instance, in some of these things, it’s obvious just looking at one piece of information that is incomplete or incoherent. And so we can produce automated validation approaches to flag entries with missing or conflicting information back to the MP or the Parliamentary Commissioner.

Alex Parsons 41:40
Similarly, when disclosing debates aren’t being followed, we can use our new automated approach to pass this back to the MP in question.

Alex Parsons 41:46
But more importantly, we sort of feel to the Chair in debates, because most MPs will this will happen infrequently, but in principle, it should be seen as the job of the Chair to make sure this rule is being followed.

Alex Parsons 41:56
It feels like a standard that can be shifted in Parliament.

Alex Parsons 41:59
The third set of recommendations is around these better rules. And this is the issue is that more transparency is not necessarily the same as more trust if the transparency keeps showing things the public is going to approve of.

Alex Parsons 42:10
So we focus on gifts and shares here because there are clear examples of other regimes that are more functional but also more restricted and release more information.

Alex Parsons 42:19
So as previous speakers talked about, in the case of gifts, currently, MPs have to declare gifts over £300 in a year from the same source. This is a really high bar.

Alex Parsons 42:27
And putting aside all the gifts we know about, there’s a possibility of a lot we don’t and in general, we also know from wider gifts and hospitality policies across the public sector that also applies to councillors, that there are much, much lower standards for both disclosure and recording.

Alex Parsons 42:42
So the public sector has these rules because Parliament passed the Bribery Act, but it hasn’t internalised this in its own rules of how MPs must declare.

Alex Parsons 42:50
So we have sort of paired recommendations here that the registration limit should be brought well down. Somewhere between £20 and £40 will be in line with wider practice.

Alex Parsons 42:58
And also there should be guidance which just does currently exist about the kind of gifts that MPs shouldn’t accept.

Alex Parsons 43:03
Even broad principles in line with the civil service code would be an improvement.

Alex Parsons 43:07
Similarly, as Chris talked about, shareholdings is another one with the thresholds out of sync with the restof the Register, there’s a massive inconsistency, and needing to clear non financial company directorships or shareholders up to £70k don’t need to be declared.

Alex Parsons 43:18
Lowering the threshold here would be a massive win. And similarly, drawing on the US disclosure system to look more transactional data would also help understand what is happening and reduce the potential for conflicts of interest.

Alex Parsons 43:30
So from the outside, what we can’t do is create the missing data. What we can create more focused versions of the Register to highlight where the rules and public sentiment are out of step.

Alex Parsons 43:38
So that’s what we’re trying to do with this highlighted interest page, where we brought together a relatively small number of interests, as hard as the register goes, but focused on gambling and oil and gas companies when there’s a low public support for those industries and payments made by governments and not free countries.

Alex Parsons 43:51
In general, an obstacle we found into this approach is only having broad ideas of misalignment based on polling.

Alex Parsons 43:56
And one of the things that would improve this is better and more focused information on what the rules would be if the public could set them, which brings us a final set of recommendations around systematic reform.

Alex Parsons 44:05
So where things get fiddly is this sort of connection. When we start looking at like donations made by large donors, as Chris brought up, there is sort of questions like, the system depends on large donations.

Alex Parsons 44:16
At the moment, the UK is, you know, it is an outlier in this respect, but parties are dependent on large donor support, election administrative work, and this shifts the incentives of parties.

Alex Parsons 44:25
And there’s a fundamental problem that as long as UK political parties are overwhelmingly reliant on donors, conflicts of interest are sort of an inherent part of that that either have to be accepted or the basic assembly needs to be changed.

Alex Parsons 44:36
So we’ve gone back through previous reform attempts, and while there is often general agreement or restrictions on large donors that’s also publicly popular. This is often paired with arguments to replace the money made with some form of public funding, which is less popular.

Alex Parsons 44:48
We fundamentally still agree with this in the sense that if you want the public to a policy to benefit the public, you don’t want it to be published by someone else, and it’s a full saving to let wealthy people and companies pick up the bill if the access they get in return is to our collective disadvantage.

Alex Parsons 45:02
So in our report, we sum up some of the options or how party funding could work. But it’s not the mechanism that’s the problem.

Alex Parsons 45:07
It’s that this reform is frustrated by a lack of cross party agreement, and it’s gridlocked, sort of rather locked in by evidence of public opposition to public funding.

Alex Parsons 45:15
So looking at the evidence for this public fund, polling does show opposition, but it also shows lack of knowledge and lots of ‘don’t know’ responses and lack of structures to consider trade off.

Alex Parsons 45:24
So for instance, the current donor funded status quo is also pretty unpopular as such. Our recommendation is that either Parliament or civil society groups should convene a citizens’ assembly on money and politics to try and unblock some of these wider arguments about reform and inform civic action.

Alex Parsons 45:39
And so by this, we mean recruiting a representative group to deliberate on the question as a way to push past the knowledge problems and get a better sense of trade off priorities, which could help with both civic and parliamentary action.

Alex Parsons 45:50
Citizens’ assemblies are a useful anti corruption device that can enhance electoral democracy because it lacks the conflict of interest from politicians setting their own rules and creates processes to better develop public views.

Alex Parsons 46:00
So in general, it’s a mistake to advocate for a citizens’ assembly because you believe the public would agree with you if only they knew better.

Alex Parsons 46:06
I think there’s genuinely question marks about what a representative group of people would support, but any of the things they might come back with would progress the debate. If it really is true, we’re locked in a situation where, you know, donor funding is the only way to go, then transparency is the right way forward.

Alex Parsons 46:20
But unlocking this understanding, if the opposition is on principle, or if you can put together a series of individual measures, as is the case in, say, Canada, that will be interesting in trying to unlock the next stage in that discussion.

Alex Parsons 46:32
So those are our recommendations going from the ‘please adjust this’ field to ‘completely change howeverything is funded’, and at any point you can sort of step in and sort of, you know, find a practical thing to try.

Alex Parsons 46:43
Now we, I think we move into the Q and A.

Julia Cushion 46:44
Brilliant. Thanks so much, Alex. And thank you everybody at home who is submitting questions.

Julia Cushion 46:49
This one is perhaps less of a question, but maybe people would like to respond.

Julia Cushion 46:53
Anonymous says, “It sounds like Parliament may need help designing a form which is easy to complete, to generate the Register and a system which keeps it up to date”.

Julia Cushion 47:01
And we are saying, yes, we think that that form should be looked at. And so agree with you.

Julia Cushion 47:05
Another person has asked, “Are there any plans to cross reference the data from the Register of Members’ Interests to APPGs”, which, if you don’t know, are All Party Parliamentary Groups?

Julia Cushion 47:14
And they’re saying both past and present. That is something that we are looking at. And in fact, there’s a really interesting example in the report where we look at a trip to China that has been declared by two MPs, and they both cite an APPG for China as part of that trip, but they declare very different information about the trip, and also the declarations were three months apart.

Julia Cushion 47:35
Also, in total, I think, more than £5,000 was spent on this trip to China that’s funded by the APPG. But when you look at the APPG page for China, no declarations are made, so we don’t actually know the true source of funding of that trip. So it’s a really, really interesting and good point about cross referencing these different registers.

Julia Cushion 47:54
And we are looking at APPGs next as part of the project. So we going through and asking for more information than is currently made available.

Julia Cushion 48:02
We have another question here from Keith from the UK Open Government Network: “How do we change the culture related to transparency so politicians celebrate scrutiny and accountability as a sign of a strong democracy and a tool to foster trust?”

Julia Cushion 48:16
Nice question there about celebrating transparency.

Rose Whiffen 48:19
I think that this question was very pertinent in the aforementioned Owen Paterson case. So he was an MP who had two outside jobs with two companies, and was found to be lobbying on behalf of these companies.

Rose Whiffen 48:39
And at the time, a question that we were asking ourselves is even if he thought that at the time he wasn’t breaking any rules, was there no one else in Parliament who maybe thought he was and were aware of, you know, his roles and what he was doing, and was there no one there to say to him, maybe you should not be employed by these people, and maybe you should not be undertaking, you know, writing letters to different departments.

Rose Whiffen 49:11
And we would want to foster more checking from MPs of each other, and more peer accountability. And I think that probably ties into some of the recommendations that we’ve heard today about reminding MPs of the rules and more training.

Rose Whiffen 49:31
And also I think that we have a system that’s overseen by the Registrar of the register. Sorry, it’s a bit repetitive there, but I think that their role is really key in being very open to giving advice.

Rose Whiffen 49:48
And there’s a particular provision within the MPs’ Code of Conduct called the Safe Harbour provision whereby if they ask the registrar about a particular interest that they have when they get clarification on those rules, they can’t be investigated for wrongdoing.

Rose Whiffen 50:08
So I think that’s a way to create positive behavior, instead of only using the stick. I think that’s a way of trying to create more of a culture of good behaviour.

Chris Cook 50:21
The Owne Patterson case is interesting, partly because he thought he was just, I mean, in his own head, he convinced himself, at least, that he was just sticking up for a business he believed in and all this, you know, that he was trying to just do the right thing.

Chris Cook 50:34
There’s another interesting case in that universe, which I think, where I think the MP is an otherwise difficult character, but Andrew Bridgen, who, latterly has been espousing some extremely strange views.

Chris Cook 50:44
But before that, he was actually brought up by a pair of bookmakers. So he actually is from a gambling family whose family business was trackside bookmaking, I think.

Chris Cook 50:53
And he has a long standing very, totally legitimate view that bookies are good employers, that he is a fan of the gambling industry, and they identified him as someone who didn’t need really very much persuading to be on their side.

Chris Cook 51:10
But he is a funny thing, where I think if he had done what Owen Patterson had done, but for bookies, it would have been, I would have been in two minds about it, because that is genuinely his view.

Chris Cook 51:20
Like we know this as, like a long standing thing, and he has a sort of long biographical reason for why he believes in this stuff. The challenge of this stuff is always going to be identifying the Pattersons.

Chris Cook 51:32
And a part of that, I think, as Rose says, has got to be about cultural norm and about building expectations about what should follow.

Chris Cook 51:40
If you take money from people, in a funny way you should want the bookies to stay away from Andrew Bridgen, because Andrew Bridgen was always going to stick up for them and leave him sort of with clean hands to express his views sort of firmly.

Chris Cook 51:51
Yeah, it’s very difficult to sort of make a rule set that accounts for these different sort of sets of norms and biographical beliefs. I mean, we don’t want legislators with a variety of interests.

Chris Cook 52:00
Some of whom will like gambling, some of whom will think it’s poisonous. I don’t know what the Stoke MPs currently their position on it is, you know, very, very large local employers and the sort of the main beneficiary to some of the town’s civil society coming from gambling at the moment. But yeah, it’s it is not, it is not a straightforward thing.

Julia Cushion 52:19
Just from our side. I think it’s maybe worth thinking saying that we are also trying to think about both the carrot and the stick side.

Julia Cushion 52:25
And in the report, we do try to mention when we see examples of good practice. And so, for example, there’s a new MP called Blair McDougall who does really, really detailed, and, you know, excellent declarations of their previous employment before they came into Parliament, and from well before the election, in the 12 months before.

Julia Cushion 52:42
So the next question is, “Is it possible or beneficial to have a traffic light rating system for each MP based on their transparency, etc? Maybe there are few, if any, green”.

Julia Cushion 52:51
So this was one of the things we literally asked the volunteers to do so that we had a like overall rating for transparency, which, from our point of view, we use to sort of identify ones that we wanted to take a closer look at which were like, mostly speaking, we have paid attention to the great and the poor to try and understand, like, what was very good and what was very bad.

Julia Cushion 53:06
But the trouble is, like, it can all be very well declared, but we don’t know what’s not there. So like, it can all be good data, but subject is not declared, or the rules don’t require to declare in the first place.

Julia Cushion 53:16
And similarly, in some cases, what you what you’re trying to encourage, is not having interests, and suddenly that will get an N/A rather than a good.

Julia Cushion 53:23
So the answer is, I think we can do traffic light systems around data quality. It’s difficult to understand if that is traffic light to transparency, because we don’t have all the information we need only they do. So I think if we revisit that, we’d want to be sort of very clear about what we are and aren’t saying with it.

Rose Whiffen 53:40
A lot of the issues are the way that the data is collected. So especially the issue about if you have an employment and how you declare your earnings based on how much you get, a month, a week, a year, the problem is more in the data collection. So MPs might be unnecessarily penalised for actually how the data is collected rather than how they’ve declared it.

Chris Cook 53:59
I think the data collection methods like giving them a form with a validated sets of replies they have to give is the long term answer to all of this.

Julia Cushion 54:10
Just to say, yeah, we encourage everybody watching to go and have a look at TheyWorkForYou, where we have uploaded all this data that you can look at by MP or download as raw data.

Alex Parsons 54:17
If you go to TheyWorkForYou, click the Register of Interests button, scroll towards the bottom, there’s the spreadsheets, and there’s links to the other data and APIs we have, as well as in some of our older blog posts about Parliament’s new APIs.

Julia Cushion 54:29
We would like to do loads more of this work on devolved registers, devolved members and all of the other interest registers.

Julia Cushion 54:35
There’s actually a staff interest register that we talked about briefly in the report, which is really interesting, does not line up with the staff that we’ve seen get declared in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. So there’s work to be done there.

Louise Crow 54:45
Thanks, Julia. All I’m going to say at this point is thank you all, Julia and Alex and all the volunteers who worked on the project for this last nine months of work, Chris and Rose for a lifetime of work on these kinds of issues.

Louise Crow 54:58
A super interesting hour from all of you. And thank you all for joining us to delve into the world of the register.

Myf Nixon 55:09
So that’s it. Thanks very much for listening.

Myf Nixon 55:12
And thanks to our guests, Rose Whiffen of Transparency International and Chris Cook from the Financial Times.

Myf Nixon 55:20
And if you value this type of work, we would love to do lots more of it, and your donations make that possible. So please check out the show notes and you’ll find a link to our donations page. It really helps. Thank you very much.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai