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Home » WhoFundsThem Update: July 2025 / mySociety
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WhoFundsThem Update: July 2025 / mySociety

By uk-times.com2 July 2025No Comments8 Mins Read
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mySociety’s WhoFundsThem work combines technology and volunteers to create better data and visibility on money in politics. We’ve published a report of what we’ve learned, given evidence in Parliament, and made more information available on TheyWorkForYou. 

This update covers some recently declared freebies, cash for questions paper trails, paid membership of APPGs, and how we can help the public set the rules of the game. 

Cash for questions (if not answers)

The Sunday Times has a great papertrail on George Freeman [paywalled] (related article) where he’s emailing back and forth with his second job employment about questions that he then uses his Parliamentary position to ask ministers.

It’s rare to have clear evidence of the exchange, but that “cash for questions” is probably going on is something that’s visible in the aggregate. Simon Weschle found that MPs with second jobs (especially those working in the knowledge sector) asked more parliamentary questions – specifically about internal departmental policies and projects. 

While MPs have a box they can tick to declare that they have an interest when asking a question*, this does not differentiate between “I’m asking about a health condition I have personal experience of”, and “I’m paid money by someone who would like to know more about this”. 

We want a procedure change here so the exact conflict of interest needs to be publicly declared with the question, in line with the rules on parliamentary speeches. This would hopefully shame some of the more obvious connections we’ve seen between financial interests and parliamentary questions. In the meantime, we’re exploring a prototype to suggest matches between register entries and questions to help understand more about what is happening here. 

Because all of Freeman’s questions were asked on the same day, you can see the questions and answers in the Parliament website search. Notably, all the answers are a bit vague and unhelpful. The short turnaround time of Parliamentary Questions (PQs) means you’re going to get a reworded version of a press release if one is available rather than big insider secrets.

A big change since the big cash for questions scandal of the 1990s is that we now have the Freedom of Information Act. While there are still a lot of things that PQs can do that FOI can’t,  the government is a lot more porous. Open government laws reduce corruption risks from the other end, by making it much easier for everyone to access information without needing an MP rewording questions on your behalf. 

So if you’re considering giving an MP money to ask questions for you a) don’t do that, it’s bad b) maybe you can get the information you want another way instead.

* See linked blog post – technically there is a box for more information, it’s just not made public, and nothing happens internally with the information.  

Tracking freebies

When a new Register of Members’ Financial Interests comes out, we make that available in more formats in TheyWorkForYou, and we look at the new entries to see if there are any interesting patterns. It was noteworthy looking at the release a few weeks ago to see five MPs registering free football tickets, including Keir Starmer. 

This was a big conversation last year, and there was never actually a promise to stop doing this  — just a much more limited change that they would stop accepting clothes as a donation (which as the Guardian points out, was only ever a small proportion of gifts received). There is an emerging pattern with ministers (examples for David Lammy and Jonathan Reynolds) accepting the hospitality ticket, but donating to the associated club charity an equivalent amount. 

The Starmer example is tricky, because the argument made for him is security issues around not being in a private box (in this case donated by the club). But it’s also true that when MPs are considering if they want a free day out, they can look to the top and see tacit approval in what ministers accept. Unless there’s a rule change, or leadership from the top to set a norm, this unpopular practice is just going to continue. There are entirely predictable “here are the freebies MPs got over the last five years” news stories that can be avoided at the next election —but it needs leadership now.

MPs accepting free football/concert tickets is unpopular, with a 2024 YouGov poll showing 64% found it either somewhat/completely unacceptable (and only 6% find it completely acceptable).  And to be fair, most MPs are not appearing on these lists. The reputational damage is collective, and the benefits only go to a small few.

But there is also the possibility that more is going on than appears on the register. In the latest release, Jim McMahon declared a pair of tickets valued at £580 – because of this he needed to retrospectively declare a £110 ticket received in April (the limit applies to all gifts from the same source). If an MP receives a single gift below £300, it doesn’t need to be declared at all.

We think this is too high – our recommendations on this were to both lower the threshold for disclosure from £300 to £100, and for Parliament to develop principles on when MPs should just not accept gifts, in line with how this practice works outside Parliament. 

There are questions about what the right lines are to draw here. Does donating the value solve the problem? Do we view tickets from the club differently from third parties buying tickets? Further down, there’s a good example of how the public can be bought in – but a clear first step is having more information about what is actually going on. 

APPGs – MPs, Lords, and other friends

There was a mid-June update to the APPG register: with 35 new APPGs, and three APPGs disappearing (Kuwait, Yemen and Digital Markets and Digital Money). 

We’re continuing with our efforts to build a dataset of APPG members, thanks to people who helped with our double-checking of website information. 

Something that’s less well known is that you can have associate members of APPGs (for outside organisations)  —and that APPGs can charge these groups for membership. 

For APPGs focused on an industry, this can be a practical way of spreading the costs of the group across multiple interested organisations. However, it can also look a lot like cash for access. For instance, the Events APPGs issued a press release inviting people to become members for a price:

UK-based organisations are invited to become members for £1500 + VAT by nominating a senior representative, offering them the opportunity to engage directly with MPs and influence policy decisions.

While other groups might be more subtle than this, access to legislators is obviously the value proposition of paid memberships. The Events APPG lists its external members, but hasn’t yet declared any income the pricing suggests they should have received from these memberships.

Currently the rules don’t require the pricing scheme to be published (other APPGs have external members who will not be paying £1,500). We’d like to see both this, and a central list of membership being published to make it clearer exactly what is or is not changing hands here. 

Setting the rules of the game

IPSA (the body responsible for setting MPs’ pay and business costs) is convening a Citizens Forum (representatively chosen via a sortition process) to inform IPSAs’ work. 

We’re all for this and have argued for a version of this that is also setting a job description. There’s an issue where the general public’s low lack of knowledge about how politics works is used to dismiss the idea that the public should be involved in setting the rules politicians work by. Deliberative processes like this allow a small group to be given the same opportunity and structure as political elites to fully understand options and consider trade-offs.

This is specifically something we think would be a good idea on the wider problem of funding politics, helping unblock arguments about public funding with a clearer sense of how people see different approaches. 

Support our work

We don’t want to just complain about how the system is broken: we want to do something about it. 

We think there are a lot of practical things we can do to improve transparency from the outside, and keep these issues on the agenda — but we need your support to do so. 

Donations help us make progress on the low hanging fruit we’ve identified, explore new approaches, and get the information we have where it needs to be.

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. 

—

Header image: Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash

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