As part of our WhoFundsThem project, we released a big report detailing what we learned while working with volunteers to explore the MPs’ Register of Members Financial Interests (RMFI).
Many of our recommendations are for changes Parliament should make, but we always want to think about what we can do from the outside to keep things moving.
In this post I’m going to quickly recap our recommendations, and what we think we can do to improve things and work to enable reformers in Parliament to go further.
Better data collection
We recommend that Parliament review the categories of the register to better reflect common interest types, and capture appropriate information for different kinds of democratic problems. Whether this is making the categories easier to parse for constituents, or collecting data that is easier to compare in bulk – we need the most relevant information to be recorded for different kinds of interests.
What we can do from the outside
While we cannot create information from thin air, we can rework and expand on what is published to make it more useful. Our enhanced election summaries are an example of how this data can be expanded through matching to other datasets and volunteer crowdsourcing.
There is also value in making messy data more easily available – we can scale our existing spreadsheet approach to registers of interest beyond the House of Commons. We’ve now added the devolved registers of interest – but there’s a lot further to go, for instance to local government and the House of Lords.
Stronger checks
There need to be better processes to improve the quality of the data released – through more validation rules, data audits, and enforcing Parliament’s own rules on disclosure. Parliament as an institution should stop seeing poor quality disclosures as the MP’s problem, but instead treat it as something that affects the standing of the institution as a whole (and that the majority of MPs want to see working well).
What we can do from the outside
We can more actively flag where information needs to improve – and use our position to create better correction pipelines.
For instance, we can produce automated validation approaches to flag entries with missing/conflicting information and send these back to the MP/Parliamentary Commissioner for review.
Similarly, where disclosures in debate are not being followed, we can promptly pass this back to the MP in question and the chair of the debate who did not enforce Parliament’s rules during the debate, and keep track of incomplete disclosures in public.
Tighter rules
These recommendations aim to achieve more disclosure through lowering thresholds, and to make more interests impermissible – for instance, lower disclosure thresholds for gifts, shareholdings, or family members’ interests.
What we can do from the outside
We cannot change Parliament’s rules to capture information we think is missing, but we can demonstrate where those rules are out of step – and the specific implications of that.
For instance, our highlighted interests page flags interests related to industries with low public support and governments of not free countries, and offers MPs opportunity for additional context. We can focus on aspects of this that produce the most benefit for least effort.
Systematic reform
Ultimately, we see systematic reform of political finance as being necessary to reduce the dependence of parties on big donors – enabling caps on political donations. Here we recommend a citizens’ assembly on money in politics as a way of progressing arguments about public funding that have been stuck for decades.
What we can do from the outside
While ideally an assembly would be commissioned by Parliament itself, it doesn’t have to be – and would have a lot of value if convened by civil society to move the debate forward.
For our purposes, sharper information about public preferences (and importantly trade-offs) would help inform the rest of our work. Joining civic power to deliberative democracy provides power in one direction, and legitimacy in the other – a powerful force to engage with conflicts within Parliament to shift official rules and responses.
Help us do more
Key to our work is the philosophy that we don’t have to wait for a better political system to be given to us – we can work together to make it happen now.
If you want to support our work, please consider making a donation, or sign up to our newsletter to hear more about our work and other opportunities to volunteer.
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Header image: Photo by Dan Senior on Unsplash
