If you’ve ever wondered what your MP is interested in outside of their party alignment, a good place to look is All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs). These groups bring MPs and Peers from different parties together around shared policy interests.
There’s a real range of causes, of size, and of activity. The groups don’t have formal powers, but they can be influential spaces for discussion and collaboration. This also makes them key sites for lobbying, and for money to enter Parliament. For all of these reasons, as part of our WhoFundsThem work looking into MPs’ financial interests, we’ve been digging deeper into APPGs.
Alongside our regular output that makes it easier to compare each APPG register to the previous one, there’s now a big new update on TheyWorkForYou allowing you to browse your MP’s memberships for the first time.
Getting the lists
There is no central list of memberships of APPGs. The official Parliament register lists the four officers of each group, but not the wider membership list (each group must have at least 20 members to be constituted). Some APPGs have websites where they publish these lists, but others don’t have public membership lists at all.
Two things have changed in the last few years that made it practically possible to put together a (mostly) comprehensive membership list.
The big one is that the rules changed so that APPGs need to either publish a membership list on their website or provide it on request.
The second is that LLM technologies have made more flexible scrapers viable, meaning we can more easily extract membership lists published in lots of different forms on lots of different websites.
We’ll write up the scraper in a technical blog post, but by scraping the available websites and requesting the membership lists from the remaining groups, we’ve brought all of this information into one place.
Theory vs practice
From our previous experiment asking APPGs for information, we knew there was a big gap between the rules that technically everyone has signed off on, and what APPG secretariats understood in practice. This is part of a wider problem where Parliament in principle has rules that in practice are just not strongly enforced.
For this round we have done the minimal possible request: just asking for membership lists, rather than the wider range of documents we had published previously, and only when both our automated process and volunteers couldn’t find one. Despite this being a relatively clear rule, 94/236 groups didn’t respond to our request for a membership list.
We also encountered a few groups who did not want to disclose full membership lists for security reasons due to the topic of their group being sensitive, while others were concerned that publishing names could lead to MPs being flooded with unhelpful lobbying.
We’re sensitive to security concerns and don’t want to strongly argue the point given the small number affected (compared to the much larger number who just didn’t reply), but also there is currently no exemption in the APPG rules for security reasons. If Parliament wants this to be the case, the rules need to be updated to specify the conditions for this exemption from wider transparency.
We will be writing to the Parliamentary Commissioner to report this reasonably high level of non-compliance with transparency requirements of the APPG rules.
What we discovered
Using the scraper, supported by volunteers’ work, we found memberships for 205 groups online.
We contacted the remaining groups by email to ask for their membership lists. 140 gave us their membership information, two were in touch but declined to give their lists, and 94 did not respond.
Of the groups we have data for, we found:
- 615 MPs (94%) belong to at least one APPG. Only 35 MPs don’t take part in any at all. This list largely maps onto government ministers, who are not permitted to be a member of an APPG.
- On average, MPs are members of around 10 APPGs.
- Half of MPs are in at least 8 groups, and some are far more active: one MP is listed as belonging to 63 APPGs.
You can view and download the full dataset.
We also discovered some interesting features about APPGs’ wider memberships — and that the definition of membership varies between groups. The Guide to Rules states “A member is one who has asked to be on the group’s Membership List” but interpretations of this varied quite extensively. This was especially true about “non-parliamentary membership” (people and organisations affiliated with the APPG, who can be charged for memberships). Some groups noted that this would include mailing lists with hundreds of individuals so would not share them, while others sent lists of ‘donors’, not all of whom were previously public as they did not meet Parliament’s £1,500 declaration threshold.
Why it matters
APPG memberships can show what issues MPs care about, and where they might be working across party lines. This matters because of transparency; it’s useful for constituents to know where their MP is spending time and building networks, but also for relationship-building. We think this information can be key to foster common ground both between MPs themselves and between MPs and constituents.
Explore for yourself
Find your MP’s page on TheyWorkForYou.com or to see their APPG memberships or download the whole dataset. You can also browse this data on the Local Intelligence Hub. Over time, we will make this available on a page per APPG.
While you’re there, you may spot a few more new features. Join Alex and I on Thursday 23 October for a chatty catch-up on new features, plans for the site, and our vision of a more open Parliament.
Note: If you are an MP, or on their staff, and our entry is either missing or has incorrect information, you can report issues on this form.
Photo by Jani Kaasinen on Unsplash
