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/RSS FeedWe’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. (more…)
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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):
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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
- Africa
- Denmark
- Japan
- Poland
- South Africa
- Tibet
- Artificial Intelligence
- Arts and Heritage
- Biodiversity in the UK Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies
- Children of Alcoholics
- Deafness
- Disability
- Ethnic Minority Business Owners
- First Do No Harm
- Future of Work
- Human-Relevant Science
- Internet, Communications and Technology
- Life Sciences
- Microplastics
- Packaging Manufacturing Industry
- Responsible Vaping
- SME (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) House Builders
- Sport
- Taxation
- 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!
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Over Easter, some groups went missing in Parliament.
No, not lost tourists: of the 722 All Party Parliamentary Groups registered in March, only 444 are left – a 39% decrease in the space of a month. What caused this, which groups have been removed, and what happens next?
Tl;dr: we’ve published the changes as a spreadsheet.
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. Browsing the list might help you find out that you have more in common with MPs than you think; subject-based APPGs include Craft, Jazz, and Parkrun, and country APPGs range from Albania to Zimbabwe. 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 – but unfortunately they can also be vehicles for corruption. As Transparency International argue: “While APPGs can help inform debate, time and time again we see examples of MPs and Peers exercising poor judgement by accepting all-expenses-paid trips from regimes with highly questionable records on corruption and human rights.”
Why were so many groups removed?
New rules came into place on 31st March 2024 that required:
- Increased financial reporting
- A ban on funding from foreign governments
- Increased reporting on secretariat support
- A minimum of 20 members
- Exactly four officers, two of whom must be MPs
How did the Register change?
Parliament maintains the Register of all APPGs that gets updated approximately every six weeks. The last edition before the rule change, published on 6th March 2024, showed 722 groups in total – 130 country groups and 592 subject groups. The 8th April edition shows 444 in total – 74 country groups and 370 subject groups. In total, 39% (278) groups were removed, with the countries list shrinking by 43% and the subjects list by 38%.
Why does this matter?
We don’t know exactly why each group was removed from the register. In some cases they simply may not meet the new 20 member threshold, but in others, deregistering might be an attempt to evade scrutiny.
Deregistered “unofficial” groups can operate in very similar ways to registered APPGs (and there is some evidence they are already doing so) but will not have to abide by the same rules. This means that the only way to track the activities and spending of these groups, and the outside interests that fund them, is through individual Members’ Registers of Financial Interests. Parliament’s rules are clear that MPs are supposed to declare all benefits received through group membership (whether or not a group is an official APPG) but in practice this can be inconsistent.
Which groups were removed?
We’ve published the full list of groups from the last two registers, the changes, and the list of removed groups as a spreadsheet.
What next?
TheyWorkForYou has a long history of making MPs financial interests data easier to access and understand. We make it easier to see changes in MPs’ declarations over time and are now publishing this information as a big spreadsheet.
We have a lot more work in the pipeline around both APPG data and Register of Members Financial Interests data (stay tuned for details in our newsletter).
If you think what we’ve done so far is valuable, and want to help us go further: please donate.
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Tl;dr: We’re now releasing our register of interests data as a spreadsheet.
High quality data about the external interests of our MPs and ministers is vital to identifying conflicts of interests, and discouraging politicians from having conflicts of interest in the first place.
Lack of clarity on the interests and income streams of MPs is a corruption risk. The problem with second jobs and outside interests is less that MPs might be distracted from their main job – but that when they stand in Parliament, they may be representing groups beyond their constituents, asking questions (or not asking questions) depending on their outside work.
When outside interests exist, it’s vital they are clear and transparent. The Register of Members Interests contains a list of disclosures MPs are required to make of financial interests or benefits which “others might reasonably consider to influence his or her actions or words as a Member of Parliament”. Following the Owen Patterson scandal, there was renewed interest in this data, as it was clear that there were a number of potential stories and scandals hidden in plain sight – just requiring someone to join up the data.
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Building a data ecosystem
A key problem is that the data is not easy to work with. The data is released (roughly fortnightly) on the parliament.uk website as a HTML document for each MP. This process technically releases the information, but makes it hard to compare releases of the same MP over time, or to make comparisons between different MPs.
TheyWorkForYou improves on this by creating structured data from the HTML release. Using this we can highlight the changes in each release from the previous release. This is useful for journalists and campaigners in quickly understanding what has changed in each release. For instance, the change in Rishi Sunak’s register over time can be seen here.
We want to avoid people doing the same work of cleaning the data over and over. We make our version of the data available publicly, so other people can use our work to do things that we haven’t done ourselves. For instance, Open Innovations have built on top of the data we publish to link the data to other datasets and create a Register of Members’ Financial Interests Explorer.
While projects like the Tortoise/Sky News Westminster Accounts create new value in joining up datasets and cleaning the data for their own work – ultimately the new datasets they have created are only usable by those organisations. That’s their right as the people doing the work – but we think there is a bigger (and more sustainable) impact to be had in improving the data in public.
Making our data more accessible
Previously, we have published our interests data as a series of XML files, which is useful for programmers, but harder for other specialists to work with. We did some thinking with OpenDemocracy last year to explore if there were small changes we could make that would make the work we already do more useful.
As well as the XML files, we now publish an experimental spreadsheet version of all data since 2000, and the register for the current 2019 Parliament.
These sheets show the earliest and latest disclosure of an interest, and include some (very) basic NLP analysis to extract mentioned orgs from the free text and make it easier to quickly parse when scrolling.
This data can also be explored through Datasette, which can be used to query the datasets in the browser, and save the queries as links that can be shared.
For instance, the following links go to specific queries (we’re using an in-browser version for prototyping and this might take a minute to load):
- Paid visits to outside UK mentioning the UAE
- Gifts from England Lawn Tennis Club
- Declarations involving a helicopter
- Declarations new in latest release
We want to continue to improve our approach here – and welcome feedback from anyone this spreadsheet helps.
Parliament can do better data publication
A key problem run into by everyone working with the data is that it’s broken to start with. MPs fill things out in inconsistent ways that makes the overall data different to analyse without cleaning first (see both the Open Innovations and Tortoise/Sky News methodology notes). Fixing this up is a key first step towards aggregate analysis – and the easiest place to fix it is with validation when the data is collected at the start.
While work can be done to improve the data after the fact (and experiments with Generative AI have found it to be quite good at fixing inconsistent formatting), improving the initial data collection is the most effective way of improving the quality of the data. There are active moves in Parliament to fix some of these problems. Producing more information in machine readable formats, and adding methods to make sure the data is correct to start with, will make the transparency process simpler at every stage.
Similar issues apply to the register published for All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs), which should publish as “machine readable” data the range of data that the groups are formally supposed to make publicly available. APPGs are semi-official groups that MPs can form around specific interests or issues. Many of these are useful ways of having discussions, but these can also be an avenue for corruption, with outside interests supporting the group and its activities. The register includes the officers of groups and financial assistance and gifts received by the group – but not the overall membership. APPGs are separately required to disclose their wider membership on their website (or if they don’t have a website, if someone asks) but this isn’t included in the register, and so can’t be consistently scraped to produce data. While MPs are supposed to disclose benefits from groups on their individual disclosure, clearer data on what is officially “public” memberships would help ensure that there is nothing missed between these two datasets.
Separately there is a register of ministerial interests that applies to MPs who also have government positions. This is in principle more strict, requiring disclosures of relevant interests of family members, and avoiding even perceived conflicts of interest. However, in practice the information does not contain the specific financial value of gifts or benefits, just that they exist. The disclosure cycle is also longer, being published every six months rather than monthly. In practice – this means that relevant interests may not be public for a significant time after a minister is appointed (and potentially never published, if the minister has again moved on by then).
There is a lot of work that can be done from the outside to build on official data. But the more Parliament does things that it is uniquely able to do, the more we can focus on analysis and data comparisons that are best done outside.
What mySociety can do
A very basic thing we can do is beat the drum (and work with those who have been doing this for ages) for better publication of data from Parliament.
But if this happens or not, we can do work to make the data better. If it looks like Parliament’s data is unlikely to be fixed at the source, then a project of improving the data in public in a way that multiple projects could then build on would be useful. But if the data gets better, then we can better spend our time doing more work on top of this data. This might include joining up the official data with other datasets (including those of the UK’s other Parliaments and Assemblies) to draw out connections and better analysis.
But our work here isn’t just about producing good data – it’s about displaying it in a way that’s useful and understandable by people. Chris Bryant MP (former Chair of the Standards Committee) has argued that Parliament’s own display of the history of registers should match what’s provided by TheyWorkForYou. If Parliament improved its own display to the public of registers of members’ interests this would be fantastic news – and we in turn would need to think about if there are new approaches that would be useful on top of that.
One approach we are thinking about would be to find out what people wanted to know the answers to about their MPs interests, and then using volunteers to answer a set of common questions. This is the kind of editorialising that Parliament itself would find much harder to do – while providing something different from aggregate analysis of the data all together. This is something we could do with the data as it exists, but is something where better data would let us create new tools so volunteers could answer more complicated questions.
Making MPs’ interests clearer and easier to understand is key to spotting conflicts of interest and keeping politicians accountable. We hope our new spreadsheet version of the data helps make the work we’re already doing more useful and accessible – while we think about the road we want to take in future to improve TheyWorkForYou and the project of a transparent democracy.
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Image: Wilhelm Gunkel on Unsplash.
