WhoFundsThem – the launch event
On March 4, we launched new data on TheyWorkForYou, making MPs’ financial interests easier for everyone to access and understand.<br>This wasn’t an easy undertaking! To explain the difficulties we encountered, and the recommendations we have for the way MPs declare their interests, we also put out a report.<br>At our launch event, we chatted through the challenges and our recommendations, together with Rose Whiffen of Transparency International, and Chris Cook from the Financial Times.<br>Links<br><br>📄Our report, Beyond Transparency.<br>🙏Donate to mySociety, so we can do more of this kind of work.<br>📺Rather watch this as a video instead of a podcast?<br><br> <br>Transcript<br>Myf Nixon 0:01<br>Hi, Myf here, Communications Manager from mySociety. At the beginning of March, we launched the findings from our WhoFundsThem project. And you know what? This was a major undertaking for mySociety. (more…)
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Transcript
Hi. Miff here, communications manager from mySociety. At the March, we launched the findings from our Who Funds Them project. And you know what? This was a major undertaking for mySociety. We worked with a big team of volunteers, which is something that we haven't done for quite some time, and those volunteers helped us go through a variety of sources to figure out two things. First of all, where do MPs get their money, gifts, and donations from? And then what is wrong with the system by which MPs report money, gifts, and donations? That's the register of financial interests. So we're sharing the audio here from the online launch event for Who Funds Them. We invited along Rose Whiffin from Transparency International and Chris Cook from the Financial Times. And you'll also hear MySociety's own Julia Cushin and Alex Parsons, who have been leading on the Who Funds Them project. But we started off with an introduction
MySociety. MySociety is a charity. We use digital services to remove barriers to democratic participation, equipping people to take action and drive meaningful change. Our parliamentary monitoring platform, TheyWorkForYou, helps people make sense of what's happening in The UK's parliaments. Today, I'm really delighted to welcome you to this event, presenting our report Beyond Transparency, which lays out the initial set of findings from Who Funds Them, our project looking at money in politics, in particular through the lens of the register of MPs' financial interests. I'm gonna briefly set the scene before handing you over to our four expert speakers, and then I'm gonna give you a chance to ask questions. So some extremely brief history. Like they were for you, the first register of MPs financial interests interests was published independently from outside parliament. This was a private publication called the business background of MPs, and it was created by journalist Andrew Roth in the nineteen fifties in order to expose the way in which MPs' directorship, shareholdings, and sponsorships were influencing their actions in government. Further scandals then led to the creation of the official parliamentary register in the nineteen seventies. And while there's been a journey towards greater transparency over the years, the register has also been a concession made to avoid stronger rules and the external enforcement of standards. So some modern politicians have argued that interest disclosed in the register must be endorsed implicitly by voters if those voters continue to elect them, and that as they're not secret, they can't be scandalous. In the last few years, from the Owen Patterson scandal to more recent cases of freebies given to politicians, there's been a sense that parliamentary culture is too comfortable with conflicts of interest, and they suddenly have business as usual noticed by the press and public, which makes previously overlooked information an important part of the national conversation. So for a long time, we've built on the official, release of the register to create a much more usable version in TheyWorkForYou, tying interest to MPs profiles long before the official parliamentary website did that and making it easy to track changes over time to help highlight new information. This who funds them project has given us the opportunity to work with a really amazing set of volunteers to do the kind of analysis that can only be done by hand, building an understanding of what's in the register, what isn't in the register, how the register relates to other sources of information, and how we can help shape more effective transparency and rules. So the report covers what we've learned from this deep dive, making four sets of recommendations covering better data collection, stronger checks on the quality of disclosures, tighter rules on what's allowed, and ultimately wider systemic reform of the influence of money in politics. Now some of these recommendations can only be acted on by parliament and politicians, but we've also been thinking about what we can do from the outside to help bring the culture of politics in line with public expectations. So today, alongside the report, we've added two new sections to TheyWorkForYou. Firstly, election summaries, which add more crowdsourced information about company donations and gifts. And secondly, highlighted interests. And this brings together a set of, interests related to industries with low public support or to the governments of not free countries, and it also offers MPs a chance to add further context to those declarations. I want to take a moment at this point to thank the JRSST Charitable Trust and the Indigo Trust for their support for this project, which has made the whole thing possible. Over the coming weeks and months, we want to build on the work we're going to talk about here, working together with other people who are pushing for reform to make sure it happens now. It's obviously more important than ever that we make our democratic processes robust, resilient, and trustworthy. So I'm really delighted that we're joined here today by two long standing advocates for reform, Chris Cook and Rose Whiffon. Chris is a senior reporter at the Financial Times where he leads the newspaper's data heavy investigations. He started at the Feet where he covered finance and education before heading off to the BBC where he worked for five years as a public policy editor on BBC Newsnight. Rose is a senior research officer at Transparency International UK, specializing in political corruption. Her work covers issues, money and politics, lobbying, revolving door, and open governance. She's been the lead researcher and writer of several of TI UK's publications, as well as contributing to the House of Cards report, which explored access and influence in UK housing policy, and the Checks and Balances report, which explored money and politics more broadly. She's previously held roles at Democracy Club and Spotlight on Corruption and has an MA in corruption and governance. Alongside Chris and Rose, you'll be hearing from Julia Cushion and Alex Parsons from mySociety, who've led the Who Funds Them project and written the report. And huge thanks to both of them and all the volunteers who've worked with them. It's been an enormous,
labor. So at this point, that's enough for me. I'm gonna hand over to Chris to give us his perspective on MP's financial interests as a journalist. Thanks very much. I think the first thing it's worth saying about approaching this topic as a journalist and one that's often, I think, approached differently by people in other sort of disciplines is that one of our real challenges is that there's a lot of pay and not many needles. I think we have to sort of start from that position that we don't we can't start from a position that MPs are definitely crooks. You can't start from the the position that donors are definitely after something. If we have a system where there isn't public funding for political parties, then we rely on people to give money. And I feel like the the conversation on this stuff often starts off in the presumption that everyone involved in this is definitely on the make, and they're definitely after something. But, actually, the the average donor is genuinely someone who just has a sort of set of values, and They like the local MP, and they'd like them to win again. And the I do think we have to sort of couch everything we think about in those terms. That said, my real problem with the rules as they stand is that there are needles in there, and the rules are not very good for letting us discover the needles. Right? The there are bad actors. There are people who misbehave. And the rules themselves, I think, are not, don't encompass a as broader range of problems as they should. So the the I think, intellectually, the the the the rules that are given to the House of Commons have one real aim in mind, which is to defend the proceedings of the House of Commons. So the idea that sort of the intellectual idea that sort of underpins the way the rules are constructed are that if you do something in the House of Commons that relates to that relates to something that you have a financial interest in, you should tell everyone about it before you do anything. That's the big backstop that exists in the rules. There are other p you also have to declare if you have a lot of money invested in something or if you have particularly tight entanglements with people. But the big backstop in the rules is if you talk in the House of Commons, if you vote in the House of Commons, if you do something in the House of Commons that relates to something where you have a financial interest, you are supposed to tell everyone. The fundamental problem with this is twofold really. The first is that's not the only way that corruption can happen. Right? So it's not just cash for questions. These are rules that stop in principle, stop cash for questions. The MPs have to tell you before they do anything relating to say gambling if they've received money from a betting company. The problem is, what if you know as an MP that there is, legislation that's likely to come down the track that is probably gonna fail? Or if you know that a select committee is writing a report, what if you're a private parliamentary secretary and, you know, so a like a bad carrier to an MP in and out of places all the time, and you know, for example, that Serco is unlikely to win its next contract or so on. You know? There are there is market sensitive information as we would think of it at the Feet that the MPs do come in contact with and do have intelligence on. And the rules don't presuppose that they might want to trade on those things. So at the moment, you're out to own £70,000 of shares, deranged, by the way, in a completely berserk way. But, you're allowed to earn £70,000 of shares without telling anyone in a in a company so long as you don't control the company. You're allowed to own as much cryptocurrency as you like without having to sell anyone. You can own gold or silver without telling anyone. These are all things which are amenable to, whose prices can be affected by public policy. The whole idea of the the whole rule set in terms of what you do and don't have to declare preemptively is, I think, completely berserk. There's a secondary thing, which is that the whole thing presupposes the world that you will basically be honest and that you're not going to be on the make. I think one of the things that is one of the sort of sad things at parliament is there are a lot of people who enter parliament possibly very young, who think they're definitely gonna be prime minister, and they quite quickly realize that they're actually pretty bad at politics. And they stay for the rest of their careers, and they are the people that turn up in the Me Too investigations and the bullying investigations, that stuff. They're also the people I suspect are the ones who think, you know what? I can make some money out doing some of this stuff. And there are carve outs for lots of people to take money from, basically, for lobbying. So, I mean, lawyers are the ones that I think are the most egregious. So if you're a lawyer in the House of Commons, which a lot of them are, you don't have to tell anyone who your clients are. You just have to declare roughly how much money you've made and when. And the consequence of that is there's just a sort of enormous carve out. Actually, dentists are the same. We have one dentist in the House of Commons, but I'm not actually that worried about a dentistry cabal taking over the country. The it's odd to me that, for example, people who ran lobbying operations, like, I mean, Steven McPartland, the former MP for Stevenage, was a lobbyist for the furniture industry when he was an MP. He was paid, I think, about £36,000 a year to advocate for, high fire safety standards, for British furniture makers, which coincidentally stop foreign furniture makers from being able to sell them to The UK. Shockingly, you know, what a happy coincidence that was. He had to declare it because he was paid directly. If he'd been paid as a lawyer, he wouldn't have to tell anyone who his client was. We would never know. He would just he could genuinely just have an interest in the chemical composition of furniture. One of the other things that comes up a lot as a reporter is that the data is abs an absolute nightmare. So I say this not to gloat, but one of our rival publications had to issue a correction for getting an MP's private earnings wrong by £600,000. It's not their fault fundamentally because the the filings are so difficult to pass. They are unbelievably complicated. They you end up with these peculiar declarations where people say, I was paid £36,000 a year for twelve month hours of work a month, and the I am paid on a weekly basis. And the, you end up having to do sort of block like, logic puzzles to work out what's going on. And that one case, the, they you end up with these problems where, Jeffrey Cox is prone to doing this. He'll say, I was paid £10,000 for by the solicitor for this work. He will then later register, I received £10,000. And when he went provide a key, so you know, it's the same £10,000. It looks like it's probably £20,000, but we don't know. They, there are other people like, John Fanucan, the Sinn Fein MP, who accidentally said that he worked forty eight hours a week, I think it was, for his law firm, and then had to correct his, you know, forty hours a month. But he didn't withdraw the old record. So it looked like in consecutive records, he just he was just declaring extra income. People just put in effectively the same record with the corrected date, the corrected numbers. And you don't know whether it's new money or old money or how do these things relate? Is this a change in circumstances or is this correction? There's all these sorts of problems with actually just reconciling this data. And, fundamentally, there's no, way as an outsider without ringing them and asking them. There's no way to find out from the from the from the records what the actual numbers are. So it's very striking that when you look, you never see you very rarely see people try and work out how much an individual MP is actually brought in from any course. We did a big project at DFT looking at earnings, and we decided at the end what we would do is look at the the industries of the businesses of that had supported MPs because we knew that data was safe. Right? It didn't matter if they double count it. Once you've received money from a lawyer, you've received money from a lawyer. Like, tick. Done. Because we couldn't work out the numbers. We're safely at scale. People that only ever look at the top two or three, and it was in fact, you know, Jeffrey Cox's earnings have caught out one of our another publication. Even when you look at one person's earnings, you can be caught out because the data is so bad. So, yeah, I think that's the I think that was my sort of big points. Data is absolutely terrible. The system is carved out with holes. Some of those holes relate to the fact that the rules do not do what we want them to do, which to say stop opportunities for self dealing. They relate to an idea that what happens in the chamber is the is the central ambition, of of these rules, when in fact they should take a broader view. And I think the I think it's always, I just know your reports will, you know, leans in this direction. The the American it's as extraordinary for British people, I think, to discover that American rules on money and politics are actually stricter than ours when it comes to actual legislators. Lawyers are not allowed to practice while they belong to the, US Congress. You are forbidden from having a client as a lawyer because it's understood that you can't be a faithful advocate for that person and a faithful advocate for the public at the same time. They they have to declare shareholdings. They have to declare basically not everything, not enough, but a lot. And they they have to declare moments of trades, which is very important and a potential source of, self dealing and insider trading. So, yeah, I think that the the that is the direction we should move. I confess that when I see people writing in law rules for themselves and say things like we can hold £70,000 worth of shares without having to tell anyone, my sort of spider sense starts tingling about why they came up with this rule, and such an obnoxiously high number. I think I'll leave that there.
Terrific. Thanks, Chris. Really illuminating. At this point, I'm gonna turn the conversation over to Rose to talk about her experience of the register and Transparency International's
work in this area. Thank you so much. Good afternoon everyone and just firstly to say a big congratulations to mySociety for undertaking this very ambitious project and I can't wait to, in my own research use some of the work and information that they've uncovered. So firstly just an introduction to Transparents International UK, for those who are not familiar. We are an anti corruption, NGO, and we operate globally with more than a 100 organizations around the world. So for, this presentation, I was asked, two particular questions. How do we use the register of members financial interests and what problems have we identified? So as an anti corruption organization we have a definition of corruption which is the abuse of intrusted power for private gain And where the register of members financial interest comes into this is that private gain, is that financial interest part, of what parliamentarians have. And the mitigation, is the code of conduct for parliamentarians, which tries to regulate these financial interests and in particular, they require that MPs across 10 different categories of financial interest register them. And we use that data, for our investigations and for our policy and monitoring of issues. And I would also, you know, echo, Chris's remarks in terms of when we're doing our investigations, not all parliamentarians are, you know, bad apple. They're not all on the mark. You know, the majority of public servants are trying to serve their constituents, but there are a few who we have seen in the past do breach the code of conduct and those the examples that we're looking for. So for our investigations, we are looking for financial interests that are unduly influencing the behavior of the parliamentarian. Just the fact that they've received a financial interest, you know, maybe it's extremely high but, in terms of the amount they receive. But just the fact they, receive a financial interest would not be enough for us to sort of flag it as a corruption issue. They they have to have then partaken in some type of behavior as a result of the financial interest. So the types of things that we normally look at is their employment, have do they have any secondary employment aside from their MP role? Have they gone on any overseas trips? Have they received particular donations? Any shareholdings that they have and also the hospitality that they have received, the tickets to gigs and things like that. So that's the financial interest we're looking at. That's the sort of private gain part of our definition.
But then we're looking to see how parliamentarians
behaviors might have been shaped as a result of this financial interest. So we're looking for things like their contributions in parliament, the questions that they put down, and maybe, any letters that they might have written to ministers that would be obtained through FOI which we saw in a particular egregious case of lobbying by an MP. So those are that's the sort of patterns that we're looking for in our investigations and we use the register of members financial interests to identify these different financial interests, and then to see how that shaped the MPs behaviors. So I just wanted to give one example, of an investigation that we did. I used the register to identify that several MPs were undertaking overseas trips to Northern Cyprus and I felt like why that was interesting was it's quite a niche area to go to, and I wondered about where the funding was coming from and I started to see that several MPs had, undertaken these trips. So that's the first thing, that was the financial interest that I identified and then I wanted to see how a parliamentarians behavior had changed potentially as a result of that and if they had followed the rules of declaring their interests and registering their interests. So I found that several parliamentarians had submitted written questions about Northern Cyprus. So I found that there were several and working with, OCCRP, OCC, and Democracy for Sale, we identified a number of these parliamentary questions. And we realized that many of them in in this instance were not declaring their interests. So part of the rules is not only that you register them in a a public place that the everyone can see, it's also that when you have a contribution in parliament, whether that be in the house, in a debate, or whether that be when you write a written question, you have to declare your interest, if there is a relevant one. But in this circumstance there was no, interest flagged as answered by Dartmouth Business and Trade. We would normally see a little image of a flag there if there was a declaration but we saw that there was none and this then led to an investigation into the MP Sammy Wilson, where he eventually apologized, for not declaring his interest and that was investigated by the standards commissioner. So not only do we use the register of members financial interest for our investigations, we also use it for our policy development through the monitoring of issues. So we try and identify trends and patterns, what types of conflicts of interest, what types of companies could be unduly influencing MPs. And so for example, this was one instance of where we did that. So we identified several MPs who were being paid for advisory roles which we deemed to be sort of high risk corruption roles where they could embark in corruption And we, then formulated a recommendation by identifying that pattern, which has now been implemented. But, yeah, there's still room for improvement. And we will be continuing to use the member's financial interest for policy and monitoring with the upcoming there's a an inquiry into outside employments and interests. So we use the data within the register to flag some more trends and patterns. So what problems have we identified with the register? This is gonna sound very similar to Chris, but probably is the same for anyone that's tried to, wrangle this data is, yeah, just accessibility and usability of the register. It really is a jigsaw puzzle that you have to put together yourself. And it's really difficult to search across time periods and historical interest, which is why, yeah, the MySociety do a great job in I always use the feature that displays the historical interests of MPs. And it's also they have recently updated, how they present this information, how, parliament present this information. And you now, can download it in a CSV, format. And as I mentioned earlier, parliamentarians have to register across 10 categories. So what they've done is they've released the interests based on the 10 categories. So that can be useful if you're looking at just one category in particular e. G. Shareholdings. But if you want to look for if you want to do analysis of MPs across all 10 categories, you'll see that you would have to download each of these individual CSV files to do that. So yeah, it's it's quite a challenging, dataset to use. And also we see issues with the rules. I mean, there's there's sort of almost too many to mention here. And Chris is like, you know, sometimes these quite arbitrary thresholds, for example, the £70,000 threshold for registering shareholdings. But I would also say this an interesting one when it comes to, hospitality in in the houses of parliament, which is, £300. And there was a recent case, of an MP in a sting operation, by the media who were trying to hire him as a as a lobbyist for a gambling company. And he says, you know, there's lots of ways to keep corporate hospitality secret. You'd be amazed at the number of times I've gone to the races and the tickets come up to $2.95. So that's just below the £300, threshold for registration. So, I mean, that's a bit anecdotal, but it does, flag an issue with this sort of quite arbitrary threshold. And even ministers have to register £140 their gifts. So you can see that there's sometimes a bit of an overlap with what ministers have to declare and this can sometimes create loopholes for registration and sort of picking, like shopping which rules to adhere to. So yeah those are the main problems I would say accessibility of the register and the data and also the rules of themselves mean that we miss quite a lot of the interests.
Thanks so much, Rose. And thanks for your work putting that jigsaw together. I'm gonna pass now to Julia who's gonna talk about how we carried out the who funds them project,
what we learned, and where the surprises were. Thank you so much, Louise, and thank you so much to our brilliant speakers for setting the scene there for us and all of the problems with the register, which we obviously hope we are now going to suggest solutions for. Mostly the solutions are, I'll leave to Alex who's talking about recommendations. But I want to talk everyone through how we run this project. It's worth just, saying briefly before we get into it that mySociety is a, obviously, a registered charity. You might know us from some of our other websites, but this who funds them project sits within our democracy strand. You'll see a lot of the results on they work for you, which I'll be talking about in a second. When we set out, on this project, She Fund STEM, it was about this time last year actually, and it got a little bit delayed because of the general election. But, the kind of the key aims that we're carrying through the project are these. We're trying to improve the information environment for everyone interested in, money flowing in and out of parliament. And so I think we've had already today great examples of how of journalists and NGO use of that. But hopefully, I'm gonna talk to you today a bit more as well about how we want ordinary everyday people to be able to access this information better. Encourage parliament to improve their reporting to make the information environment better upstream. So that's really important to us. We think that we can kind of model by example and show that, yes, it took us a lot of time and a lot of volunteers, but better information is possible in this area if we ask better questions. And, ultimately, we don't just want better, data about bad interests. We want to promote better behavior from MPs resulting in increased public trust. And to put that in a nice way, we really do believe here that we don't have to wait for a better politics to be given to us. We can work together to make it happen now. And that is what I told our volunteers at the start of the, process. And thankfully, many of them, took that on board and, worked really hard with us, and we're very, very grateful. So, it's worth thinking about why we use volunteers as part of this. And we've been republishing the registered members financial interest data for quite a long time now, and we were aware with of the problems with it. Many of them have been covered in you know, already today by our great speakers. And there have been some machine learning approaches. And, you know, we've used elements of machine learning too. But on the whole, we found that the original data is so poor, so full of gaps, so, differently filled out by different MPs that we needed human beings to help us go through that data and work it out. And, yes, we recruited 50 wonderful volunteers for our original plan to start in May, but then that was pushed back to the autumn. And so volunteers helped us go through every single MPs registered interest across all categories line by line, answering questions about them all. And then as the MySociety team, we reviewed those. And it's taken us a bit of time, but we're really, really pleased with what we've come out with. And, yeah, we had about 30 active volunteers, and some really, really active ones who went above and beyond to do their fair share. So I want to say a huge thank you. And, it is a long report that we've written, but if you get to the end, all of the volunteers' names are listed, and we want to say a big thank you to them. So, yes, as we were setting out on this project, we wanted to have a think about the questions that we were gonna ask about all of the MPs. And we actually published this back back in August. We have got a literature review, which we link on the website that you can go and have a look at where we were considering what we wanted to find out. And it's worth just noting here some polling we were looking at in terms of the industries of low public support, and that I'll come back to you because we have highlighted those industries and then also some polling on second jobs. So there was a kind of, research background to this that we then took forward in our questions. Mostly, we wanted to prioritize given that we were taking this human centered approach where we could add value to the register by getting people to look through it, do Google searches, add extra information. And one of the primary ways that we've done that and we're really excited to launch today is the work that the volunteers did researching and categorizing the businesses and individuals that appear in the register. Because at the moment, you go on to the register and it will say j.smith or ABC Limited, and you don't know what those organizations do. So line by line, MP by MP, our amazing volunteers helped us research those individuals and organizations, and that is now on they work for you in a special tab called twenty twenty four election donations. And we've then been able to, group those by category so you can see which industries might be particularly dominant in donating to your MP. And these are across all of the, 10 categories that Rose showed us earlier as well. We've gone through, line by line. It's worth saying here, although I'm mostly leaving recommendations to Alex in the latter section, that this was really hard because there are no unique identifiers for individual donors. And a lot of the time, even companies, you don't they don't have to give their company's house registration number. That's really, applied differently across the register. So identifying these weren't weren't easy. And we do have recommendations to try and make sure that in future, if this exercise were to be repeated, it'd be a lot easier to identify both the organizations and individuals involved. Next up, as we've mentioned, we were looking for specific, industries with low public support across the register, and we now have a dedicated web page on they work for you where you can look at these industries that we highlighted. They were oil and gas, gambling, and not free countries. We also gave MPs the opportunity to add a comment to this to explain their interest. And we, talk about it a bit later, but we didn't have very many responses from this. But you can go and have a look at all of this data here. Another two sets of data that we kind of uncovered with the help of our brilliant volunteers but actually aren't stand alone pages. Instead, they've become part of our report. Firstly, Companies House. We had an amazing tool that was built by our friends at anyone's thing, and they're cited in the report, which went through and they identified all of the Companies House, pages for all of the different MPs. And that's a really hard job because you need MPs' birth dates to be able to do that, and parliament doesn't publish those anymore. So that's another of our small recommendations. And so we were going through and checking if there were any companies that were declared to company's house that weren't in the registered members' financial interests. And interestingly here on the whole, we found that actually there was good levels of declaration. We only found 37 entries that we thought merited passing back to MPs. There were quite a lot of dormant companies still hanging around that weren't declared, but those we weren't investigating. The The ones that we did look at were things like this, charity trustee positions, LLP memberships. And, we got some interesting responses from that, which I'll share in a bit. But this isn't Soundblowing data just because it is quite a small group, and we want to focus on other things. And then next, another question that our volunteers answered was, we were looking specifically at staff members paid for by other organizations that were being declared in the register. And as you can see, there was quite a lot of money at play here, and quite a lot of MPs were receiving considerable donations to fund multiple members of staff in their office from business interests. And that's an area where we have recommendations in the report because at the moment, it's being declared alongside other donations of just £2,000. We very rarely know what any donation goes towards because the description element is entirely, optional. But in this case, we didn't feel like we were getting enough information given the size of these donations and the amount of work these people were doing. So this was as much as we could kind of pull out from this area, but it is somewhere that we have recommendations in the report. This time, we did ask some questions where we couldn't actually extract all the data that we wanted to, and there's good reasons for that that have kind of already been covered. The sort of second jobs additional employment area is the data is so poor that we even with our additional research, we couldn't fill in the gaps. In many cases, MPs didn't tell us the kind of work that they were doing. We couldn't identify the companies. There was a lot of cases of, MPs declaring that they were still a councillor and then not updating the register even though in our research, we found that they weren't. So it was really, really hard to kind of build an accurate dataset for this. So we need better source data to work with in that case. And then, yeah, interestingly, that both our speakers have talked about declaring interest in parliament. We have a tool that we've built where we can search Hansard, using a vector search for this so that we can look for whether MPs are or are not declaring relevant interests. But in our window of looking at this project, it was September 2023 to September 2024. And so many of the new MPs hadn't had enough chance to speak for us to make, a full dataset. But we're going to be going back to that and doing some more live analysis, so do stay tuned. And then very quickly, I just wanted to show you that because my society is a data and technology charity, that the way that we delivered this project was with our in house crowdsourcing software that our amazing developer, Struan, has made. It was originally made for the council climate action scorecards project that we do with Climate Emergency UK, and we have, repurposed it for this. And so just to say, we have a blog out about how we did this, the technicalities of it, and we're really proud and, you know, really pleased we could use this brilliant software. And you can see there's different views for us as such as, the kind of admin seeing the progress and also for the volunteers getting to go through and answer their questions. These links here that you can see on this page are what become the links on our twenty twenty four elections tab. Summary, it's one of the things we're most proud of that you can now see company name, click it, and go straight to their website. But, also, these additional notes helped us understand what was going on. Was it a tentative identification? Were they really confident on it? That sort of thing. Finally, just to say as part of this process the highlighted industries and missing companies, we gave MPs a right of reply. We got more responses about missing companies and really useful responses. We asked them, our understanding of the rules is that these should have been declared. They haven't been. What, you know, what do you think is going on? We had a few people say they're nonfinancial. Therefore, they don't need to be declared. That isn't our understanding of the rules. A couple more said, oh, thank you for flagging this. I need to follow-up with Companies House. But the majority that go back to us said, okay. Yes. I have checked the rules, and you're right. This should be declared, and they are now going to go and declare it. And so that's a really positive outcome for us. And then, yes, we have emailed MPs about the highlighted industries. We had a couple of comments for publication, but we'll be keeping an eye on that and publishing more if MPs get back to us. Very quickly then, just on the crowdsourcing bit itself before I hand over to Alex, who's gonna talk about the report recommendations. We're so grateful to our volunteers, and we think loads of interesting information has come out of this even though we did identify a lot of data gaps. We overall think it shouldn't have been this hard to do this project. The data quality was worse than we expected. And, also, I think it's worth noting that the range of responses and the different ways that new MPs approached the register and their declarations varied quite dramatically, which suggests parliament needs to do some, thinking about its kind of onboarding and induction of new MPs. Despite the quality problems, where we could double check, for example, this company's house, checking that we did, there was good disclosure. However, there were still some big gray areas where the rules aren't clear. Finally, yeah, a big reflection is we've just seen a lot of out of date information. MPs aren't updating their registers regularly. We've seen lots of MPs declare at the start of a new parliament and then not for a long time. So it's hard to trust the information that's there and that's what a lot of our recommendations are about. And we do have a fear that lots lots of information isn't being declared. And there's more on that in the report, which is a good time for me to hand over to Alex. Thanks, everyone. So I am now gonna talk through the big groups of recommendations we've got coming out of this massive project. So these break down into four groups. We have,
better data collection, stronger checks, tighter parliamentary rules, and systematic reforms. I'm gonna quickly talk to the broad themes in those areas and then what we can do from the outside for continued change. So, first area, better data. So as Julian and our other speakers have described, one of the key lessons we've had is trouble working with the data. Aside from data quality issues, there's a sense that the register is not structured to collect information that can answer the sign of questions we want to ask about. So we recommend there should be an overall review of the registered categories. The goal is to distinguish better between different kinds of interest, both in terms of similar data collection needs, but also be in response to the different democratic problems co posed by different kinds of interest. So, for instance, a common kind of second job is being a counsellor. Now if this is a good or a bad thing is, you know, a democratic question sort of beyond this, but it's also something that we could collect much clearer data on than is currently in the register. And one of the frustrating and surprising things was how difficult it was to have someone stop being a counsellor or not. Similarly, media appearances are a fairly common source for MPs, and this is a different kind of disclosure to sustained employment in the second job. So separating these out would make the register clearer and sort of collect more relevant information on both sides. Similar to you talked about to conman to sponsor specific staff, The staff register needs an overhaul anyway, and better cross linking between the two would be useful. On the general second jobs question, we sort of recommend moving from rules, look at the see sort of the role to asking if the organization itself has a plausible conflict of interest. Sort of could they as the as rules have increasingly sort of specify what is and isn't permissible activity, it's helpful as a evaluation of risk to understand is this if we assume this role isn't quite honest, like, is there an essential risk from the organization itself? Does this organization do lobbying of parliament? Does it get government contracts? Because even if that doesn't show what we're doing one way or the other, it helps evaluate if it's something that requires a closer look. From the outside, we can't create information from thin air, but we can rework and expand on what's published to make it more useful. Our enhanced selection summary is an example of how we can use this data to expand it through other datasets and add volunteer crowdsourcing. And there's also value of making messy data more easily available. So we can sort of scale our existing spreadsheet approaches, treasures of interest beyond the House of Commons, looking at devolved parliament soon, but also potentially local governments in the sense that given the data is messy, being able to explore and search large amounts of data earlier help inform what the next questions are. The second set of recommendations is around better audit enforcement. And so what we've noticed in a few areas is where in principle parliament has a reasonable rule, but in practice it isn't being followed and it isn't being enforced by anyone. This lets parliament allow us new stronger rules, but little actually changes. So we want to encourage Parliament to better enforce its rules by highlighting why this isn't happening and putting more pressure on. One of our key recommendations here is that Parliament should adopt systematic measures to improve data quality. So the data Parliament publishes is now great at dividing things into more fields but this has made it easier to see where contradictory or incomplete information has been published. And what we've seen in a few areas is a sort of complying with the rules as an MP's problem attitude, but what's actually needed is an institutional focus on good data quality. So poor compliance with the rules contributes to this negative spire of lower standards and lower public trust. So the collective parliament should feel empowered by the collective support of MPs, most of whom want the system to work and not put in the bad records, to assist support them to make good declarations and have clearer clearer reject and improve standards for poor quality declarations. Along those lines, we recommend regular prompts to update, especially on updates to ongoing interests, and the option of no update responses to help gauge that the information is up to date. Similarly, all auditing a limited sample of MPs returns can help improve compliance with the rules and shape wider guidance they give. So for instance, our experience with the company's house data was not really active noncompliance, but it issued non awareness that picking on a few examples can then create guidance that has a greater impact. The other major issue we found was around rules around declaring interest in the chamber and when asking parliamentary questions. By the rules, declaration should always be clear about what the interest and potential conflict is, but it remains common for MPs to say things along the line of, I refer to my entry in the register of interests. By the rules, this should just sort of happen. It's sort of explicitly what they're not supposed to step say. But that the chair never ever corrects this is a sort of an example of parliament's own rules just not being enforced by parliament. On written questions, we found that while MPs do as Rose was talking about, when they're asking written questions, they have to declare if they have an interest. On their form, they can say what the what that interest is. That information is never made public. So they're currently the table office receives the information of what their interest is, but that's never published in parliamentary records. So we asked this information from the, from the speaker's office. They now say they're reviewing publication policy. We don't know the current progress of this, but we'll keep an eye on it. And because in principle, we feel that if MPs are telling, parliament what the interest is, that should also be made public to be clear about what's happening. So we recommend that, you know, in parliamentary debates, the chair should take more of an interest in enforcing this rule. And in general, the nature of an interest declared not should be published as well as if just if there was an interest. From the outside, well, we can't compel fixes. We can do more flagging of where information needs to improve and use our position to create better correction pipelines. So for instances, in some of these, things, it's obvious just looking at one piece of information that it's incomplete or incoherent. And so we can produce automated validation approaches to flag entries with missing or conflicting information back to the MP or the parliamentary commissioner. Similarly, when disclosure and debates aren't being followed, we can use our new automated approach to pass this back to the MP in question. But more importantly, we sort of feel to the chair in debate because most MPs will this will happen infrequently. But in principle, it should be seen as the job of the chair to make sure this rule is being followed. It feels like a a standard that can be shifted in parliament. The third set of recommendations is around these better rules, and this is sort of the issue is that more transparency is not necessarily the same as more trust if the transparency keeps showing things the public don't approve of. So we focus on gifts and shares here because there are clear examples of other regimes that are more functional, but also more restricted and release more information. So, as previous speakers talked about in the case of gifts, currently, MPs have declared gifts over £300 in a year from the same source. This is a really high bar. And putting aside all the gifts we know about, there's a possibility of a lot we don't. And in general, we also know from wider gifts and hospitality policies across the public sector that also apply to counselors, that there are, you know, much, much lower standards for both disclosure and recording. So the public sector has these rules because parliament passed the bribery act, but it hasn't internalized this in its own rules of how MPs must declare. So we have sort of paired recommendations here that, the registration limit should be brought well down somewhere between 20 and £40 will be in line with wider practice. And, also, there should be guidance, which just does currently exist about the kind of gifts that MP shouldn't accept. Even broad principles in line with the civil service code would be an improvement. So as Chris talked about, shareholding is another one with the threshold out of sync with the rest of register. There's a massive inconsistency in needing to clear, you know, nonfinancial company directorships, while shareholders up to 70 k don't need to be declared. Lowering the threshold here would be a massive win, and, similarly, drawing on The US disclosure system to, look more transactional data would also help understand what is happening and reduce potential for conflict of interest. So from the outside, what we can't do is create the missing data, but we can create more focus versions of the register that highlight where the rules and public sentiment are out of step. So that's what we're trying to do with this highlighted interest page where we brought together as relatively small number of interest as hard as the registry goes, but focused on gambling and oil and gas companies where there's low public spot for those industries and payments made by governments and not free countries. In general, an obstacle we found into this approach is only having broad ideas of misaligned based on polling. And one of the things that would improve this is better and more focused information on what the rules would be if the public could set them, which brings us to the final set of recommendations around systematic reform. So where things get fiddly is this sort of connection. We start looking at, like, donations made by large donors. As sort of Chris brought up, there is a question like the system depends on large donations at the moment. The UK is, you know, it is an outlier in this respect, but parties are dependent on large donors for election administrative work. And this shifts the incentives of parties. And there's a fundamental problem that as long as UK political parties are overwhelmingly reliant on donors, conflicts of interest are sort of an inherent part of that that either have to be accepted or the basic, something needs to be changed. So we've gone back through previous reform attempts, and while there is often general agreement on restrictions on large donors, that's also publicly popular. This is often paired with arguments to replace the money made with some form of public funding, which is less popular. We fundamentally still agree with this in the sense that if you want the public to a policy to benefit the public, you don't want it to be published by someone else, and it's a false saving to let wealthy people and companies pick up the bill if the access they get in return is to our collective disadvantage. So in our report, we sum up some of the options or how public funding could work, but it's not the mechanism that's the problem. It's that this reform is frustrated for a lack of cross party agreement and is gridlocked sort of rather locked in by evidence of public opposition to public funding. So looking at the evidence of this, public fund polling does show opposition, but it also shows lack of knowledge and lots of don't know responses and lack of structures to consider trade off. So for instance, the current donor fund status quo is also pretty unpopular. As such, our recommendation is that either parliament or civil society groups should convene a citizen's assembly on money and politics to try and unblock some of these wider arguments about reform and inform civic action. And so by this, we mean recruiting a representative group to learn to liberate on the question as a way to push past the knowledge problems and get a better sense of trade off priorities, which can help your movement with civic and parliamentary action. Citizens assemblies are a useful anti corruption device that can enhance electoral democracy because it lacks the conflict of interest from partition setting their own rules and creates processes to better develop public views. So in general, it's a mistake to advocate for citizens' assembly because you believe the public specifically agree with you, if only they knew better. I think there's genuinely question marks about what a representative group of people would support, but any of the things they might come back with would progress the debate. If it really is true, we're locked in a situation where, you know, don't don't know if funding is the only way to go, then transparency is the right way forward. But unlocking this, understanding if the opposition is on principle or if you can put together a series of individual measures as is the case in, say, Canada, that will be interesting in trying to unlock the next stage in that discussion. So, those are our sort of recommendations going from the please adjust this field to completely change how everything is funded. And at any point, you can sort of step in and sort of, you know, find a practical thing to try. Now we I think we move into the question the q and a. Brilliant. Thanks so so much, Alex, and thank you everybody at home who is submitting questions. This one is perhaps less of a question, but maybe people would like to respond.
Anonymous says, it sounds like parliament may need help designing a form which is easy to complete to generate the register and the system which keeps it up to date. We are saying yes. We think that that form should be looked at, and so agree with you there. Another person has asked, are there any plans to cross reference the data from the register on members' interests to APPGs, which if you don't know, are all party parliamentary groups. And they're saying both past and present. That is something that we are looking at. And in fact, there's a really interesting example in the report where we look at a trip to China that has been declared by two MPs, and they both cite APPG for China as part of that trip. But they declare very different information about the trip. And also the declarations were three months apart. They also in total, I think more than £5,000 was spent on this trip to China that's funded by the APPG. But when you look at the APPG page for China, no declarations are made. So we don't actually know the true source of funding for that trip. So it's a really, really interesting and good point about cross referencing these different registers, and we are looking at APPGs next as part of the project. So we'll be going through and asking for more information than is currently made available. We have another question here from Kevin Keith from the UK Open Government Network. How do we change the culture related to transparency so politicians celebrate scrutiny and accountability as a sign of a strong democracy and a tool to foster trust. Nice question there about celebrating transparency.
So I think that this question was very pertinent in the aforementioned own partisan case. So he was an MP who had two outside jobs, with two companies and was found to be lobbying on behalf of these companies. And at the time, a question that we were asking ourselves is even if he thought that at the time he wasn't breaking any rules, was there no one else in parliament who maybe thought he was and were aware of, you know, his roles and what he was doing? And was there no one there to say to him, may maybe you should not be employed by these people, and maybe you should, not be undertaking, you know, writing letters, to different departments. And we would want to, like, foster more, checking from MPs of each other and more sort of peer accountability. And I think that probably ties into some of the recommendations that we've heard today about reminding MPs of the rules and more training. And also I think that, we have a system that's overseen by the registrar, of the register. Sorry. It's a bit, repetitive there. But I think that their role is really key in being very open to giving advice, and there's a particular, provision within the MPs code of conduct called the safe harbor position provision whereby if they ask, the registrar about a particular interest that they have, when they get clarification on those rules, they can't be investigated for wrongdoing. So So I think that's a way to create positive behavior instead of only using the stick. I think that's a way of, trying to, yeah, create more of a a culture of good behavior. The Owen Patent guy is interesting partly because he thought
he was just I mean, in his own head, he convinced himself at least that he was just sticking out for a business he believed in and all this, you know, that he was trying to just do the right thing. There's another interesting case in that universe, which I think well, I think the MP is an otherwise difficult character. But Andrew Bridgen, who, latterly, espousing some extremely strange views. But before that, he was actually brought up by a pair of bookmakers. So he actually is from a gambling family. His family business was his track side bookmaking, I think. And he has a long standing very, you know, totally legitimate view that bookies are good employers, that he is a fan of the gambling industry, and they identified him as someone who didn't need really very much persuading to be on their side. But he is it's a funny thing where I think if he had done what Owen Patterson had done, but for bookies, it would have been in I would have been in two minds about it because that is genuinely his view. Like, we know this of it's like a long standing thing, and he has a sort of long biographical reason for why he believes in this stuff. The challenge of this stuff is always going to be identifying the Pattersons. And a part of that, I think, as Rose says, has got to be about cultural norm and about building expectations about what what should follow if you take money from people. In a funny way, the you should what the bookie should wanna stay away from Andrew Bridgen because Andrew Bridgen was always gonna stick up for them and leave him sort of a clean hand to express his views sort of firmly. Yeah. It's very difficult to sort of make a rule set that accounts for these different sort of sets of norms and biographical beliefs. I mean, we don't have the one legislators with a variety of interests. Some of them will like gambling. Some of them will think it's poisonous. I don't know what the Stoke MPs, currently their position on it is. You know, it's very, very large local employers and the sort of the main beneficiaries to some of the town's, civil society coming from gambling at the moment.
But, yeah, it's it is not it is not a straightforward thing. Just from our side, I think it's maybe worth thinking saying that we are also trying to think about both the carrot and the stick side. And in the report, we do try to mention when we see examples of good practice. And so, for example, there's a new MP called Blair MacDougall who does really, really detailed and, you know, excellent declarations of their, previous employment before they came into parliament, from well before the election happened, in the twelve months before. So the next question is, is it possible or beneficial to have a traffic light rating system for each MP based on their transparency, etcetera? Maybe there are few, if any, green. So this was one of the things we absolutely asked the volunteers to do so that we had a, like, overall rating and transparency,
which from our point of view, we use to sort of identify ones that we wanted to take a closer look at, which were, like, mostly speaking, we had paid attention to the grate and the poor to try and understand, like, what was very good and what was very bad. But the trouble is, like, it can all be very well declared, but we don't know what's not there. So, like, it can all be good data, but something is not declared or the rules don't require to declare it in the first place. And, similarly, in some cases, what you're what you're trying to encourage is not having interests, and, similarly, that would get an NA rather than a good. So the answer is, I think we can do traffic light systems around data quality. It's difficult to understand if that is a traffic light to transparency because we don't have all the information we need, only they do. So I think if we revisit that, we'd want to be sort of very clear about what we are and aren't saying with it. A lot of the issues are
the way that, the data is collected. So especially the issue about if you have an employment and how you declare your earnings based on how much you get a month, a week, a year. Problem is more in the data collection. So MPs might be unnecessarily penalized for actually how the data is collected rather than how they've declared it. I think the data collection method, like, giving them give them a form with a validated
sets of replies they have to give,
is the is the the long term answer to all of this. Just to say, yeah, encourage everybody watching to go and have a look at TheyWorkForYou where we have uploaded all this data that you can look at by MP or download as raw data.
If you go to TheyWorkForYou, click the register of interest button, scroll towards the bottom, there's their spreadsheets, and there's links to the other data and APIs we have, as well as in some of our other blog posts about parliament's new APIs. We would like to do loads more of this work on devolved registers, devolved members, and all of the other interest registers. There's actually a staff interest register that we talk about briefly in the report, which is really interesting. Does not line up with the staff that we've seen get declared in the registered members' financial interest, so there's work to be done there. Thanks, Julia. All I'm gonna say at this point is thank you all, Pula and Alex and all the volunteers who worked on the project for this last nine months of work, Chris and Rose, for a a lifetime of work on these kinds of issues. A super interesting hour from all of you, and thank you all for joining us to delve into the world of the register.
So that's it. Thanks very much for listening and thanks to our guests Rose Wiffin of Transparency International and Chris Cook from the Financial Times. And if you value this type of work, we would love to do lots more of it, and your donations make that possible. So please check out the show notes and you'll find a link to our donations page. It really helps. Thank you very much.
