We’ve built a tool that helps us release a lot more useful information about All Party Parliamentary Groups, but we need humans to help us with membership lists.
The new stuff
For each new APPG register (which are released approximately every six weeks), we now produce lists of new APPGs, removed APPGs and updated APPGs.
In the latest edition of the register (published 7 May) there were 32 new APPGs added, including Wine of Great Britain, Snooker and Hadrian’s Wall! In this edition, no APPGs were removed.
That means the total number of APPGs now stands at 482, which is roughly the same as this time last year (535 in 13 May 2024 register). However, the total remains significantly lower than the 722 figure from March 2024 (the final register before new rules were introduced).
One of the tricky things about keeping track of APPGs is spotting what has changed. Who received money, which secretariats have new staff, which officers have resigned or changed? Our new tool does that for you. Here’s what we found when we compared the newest edition with the previous one:
- Several APPGs have lost an officer leaving them with only three officers, one short of the number required, according to the rules. In the case of the Pro-Life and the SME Housebuilders groups, this has also left the groups in breach of the requirement to have an officer from both the Government and Opposition parties.
- Some groups have new organisations acting as their secretariats, whilst others have had changes to the people who are the public enquiry point at their secretariat. Devo Agency now provides secretariat services to four groups- Liverpool City Region, North East, Greater Manchester and Northern Culture.
- Income: More than £70,000 of new financial benefits have been declared in this register, including £20,000 to the Engineering Group and £35,000 to the Environment Group.
As with the Register of Members’ Financial Interests part of this project, we’re coming up against two big problems: bad data and Parliament not enforcing its own rules. First we want complete datasets, but then we’re going to report our findings on the quality of this data.
Over to you: help us with membership lists
Arguably the most important question about an APPG is: who’s in it? APPG membership lists help constituents and campaigners to understand which policy areas MPs are interested in, and they make it clearer who is benefitting from the resources given to groups as a whole. However, membership lists are not routinely made available.
The APPG pages on the Parliament site list the four officers, but not the wider membership. For a group to be established, it must have at least 20 members – so there’s at least 16 names we’re missing per group.
By the new rules, we should be able to ask for this information. But if groups publish their membership lists on their website, they don’t need to respond to our requests. If they don’t have a website or don’t publish their membership lists, then they do have to tell us.
So we need to a) find all the APPG websites, and b) see if they publish members lists before we can then C) ask the ones without published lists to send them to us.
Alex has built a tool which has got us most of the way there, but we need human brains to check.
We want to find out:
- Are there websites we haven’t found?
- Are there membership lists we haven’t found?
Right – over to you!
- Open up the spreadsheet.
- Choose a group, then click the link in column D (google_link), which sends you to a Google search result for the name of that group. We’re looking for independent websites run by the APPGs, not the listing on the Parliament page and not the listing on parallelparliament.co.uk.
- If there is a website for that group, paste the URL of the website into column E (appg_website). For some groups we have found the website already, but we need you to do the next steps.
- If there’s no APPG website, please enter NONE for column E and column F (appg_members_page).
- If there is an APPG website, the next thing we’re looking for is a membership list. If you can find one, enter the URL into column F. If you can’t find any membership info, enter NONE.
- When you’ve finished, put ‘done’ in column G (review_status) and your initials in column I (reviewer_initials)
Thanks so much – this really does make a difference! No time but still want to help? Please consider donating so we can do more of this work.
Photo by Frank on Unsplash
