WhoFundsThem is our new project looking into MPs’ and APPGs’ financial interests. We want to improve the information available in TheWorkForYou, make better data available, and improve the standard of politics in the UK.
We and our volunteers have been doing lots over the last few months – here’s what’s new.
New register of interests in TheyWorkForYou
A great development this year has been a big improvement in how Parliament gathers and publishes the Register of Members Financial Interests (RMFI). Information is now gathered from MPs in a much better format, making follow on analysis much easier.
This is the result of a lot of great work by PDS, but we do also want to claim a win here. The way TheyWorkForYou publishes the register of interests has been highlighted for years (including by MPs) as an example for how Parliament can improve. We want to support people on the inside working to make things better. One of the ways we can do that is by demonstrating what is possible and helping win internal arguments and shift priorities.
Of course the downside of our “lobbying by demonstration” is that when you win you have to do work. In the last few weeks, the Commons have now turned off the old site, and the information is available on a new site and their API. We’ve written a bridge to re-import this in a format TheyWorkForYou expects, to continue to power our comparison over time feature. This is now a lot more information than was captured before (which is great!) – so we’ve reformatted the page to make it clearer (to pick on my MP, here’s an example).
While we’ve been doing this, we’ve also been planning out how we can improve how this information is stored in our database – and make it easier for our plans to get the registers for the other UK Parliaments in.
We continue to publish the information as a set of spreadsheets – one is a re-publication of the official CSVs with some extra fields, and the other a backward compatible spreadsheet with all the information in a single cell.
RMFI Crowdsourcing
Our volunteers have done a heroic job going through the registers of interests of all MPs and answering a set of questions for each.
In some cases we were trying to gather more information about donations, or flag donations made from certain industries – but also in general we’re interested in how possible this exercise is – how are the rules working in practice, and how easy is it for people to easily parse the results?
We’re currently reviewing the results, and these will feed into two releases in February:
- A new section on TheyWorkForYou for each MP summarising what we found, and linking into the wider stories.
- A report on the lessons we’ve learned, recommendations for improvement, and ideas on how we can go further from the outside.
We have published the research that supported our question selection if you would like to know more.
APPG information requests
One of the things we’re trying to do is use the new APPG rules to get more information in public.
We’ve written this up in more detail in its own blog post, but the short version is we had mixed success with our pilot round of information requests. Some APPGs gave us the information, or were otherwise publishing the information they were supposed to – but others dragged their feet or didn’t respond.
Given we’re going to have to spend more time chasing than we’d like, for the wider set of APPGs we’re going to reduce the scope to just getting the membership lists public. We’ve also got a planned escalation route for non-response through initially contacting the APPG chairs to encourage a response, and ultimately listing non-compliant APPGs.
What we don’t want is that rules brought in to reduce “bad” APPG behaviour are in effect only followed by “good” APPGs. We need to get more responses, and start highlighting when the information isn’t being published.
Modernisation Committee
One of the interests of the House of Commons new Modernisation Committee is on improving standards.
We submitted a few practical recommendations based on what we’ve learned so far in the project:
- Chairs should enforce the rule that interests declared in debates should be clear.
- The details of conflicts of interests made when submitting parliamentary questions should be published.
- A few recommendations on new categories in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, to better structure common interests declared. For instance separating out payment or travel costs for media appearances, and gathering more information when MPs are receiving large donations to fund staff members for their offices.
- Parliament should gather and publish the required APPG information rather than just say it ought to be made available on request (to sidestep the problem described above).
We are also developing a wider range of recommendations for release in February.
As with the great new data coming out of the Parliament’s new register, there are big wins in getting Parliament to adopt better rules and publish more information. But also all of these are areas we think we can make progress on from the outside anyway – we just need support to do so.
We can make a difference together
Through TheyWorkForYou and our wider democracy work we take a practical approach to improving politics in the UK, looking for opportunities to make things better through putting the work in, and where we don’t need to ask permission to succeed.
But to make this happen we need money and support to investigate problems and understand how we can best make a difference. We want to do more to improve the data that exists, and help support new volunteer projects to build better data and services.
If you support us and our work, please consider making a one-off or standing donation. It makes a difference.
