As part of our WhoFundsThem project - we want to make information about MPs' financial interests more accessible and understandable.
We want to amplify public views on MPs standards through our work. As such, we want to focus our work on aspects of financial interests that are especially important to public perspectives of the work MPs do.
This document brings together our best current knowledge on where people care about some issues more than others - and how we can use our lens to shift MP behaviour. This will form the basis of how we select and prioritise questions for crowdsourcing.
Corruption in high trust societies
Democracy means a lot of things, but one of the key ideas is that people should be seen as equal to each other, and should have power equally distributed among them. If some voices are heard louder than others, it is because they have a crowd behind them who agree.
But in practice, money talks. People and organisations with more money have more power and voice. Sometimes it is clear that one voice in an argument speaks for money, while another speaks for a crowd. But money can also be used to infiltrate, warp and subvert democratic institutions - so you don't know who someone is speaking for. This kind of corruption of the democratic process is one we are especially interested in in this work.
The UK is, relatively, not an especially corrupt country. In Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions index - it scores as the 20th lowest score in the world. Not the best, but far from the worst. You do not pay bribes in everyday life, but through regular reports of scandals, there is also an understanding that at the top, money is shaping how things are run in significant ways.
A 2011 study found a "substantial majority of respondents believe that large party donations are motivated by hopes for access and influence or special favours from the political party". 2024 polling by Survation and the UK Anti-Corruption found that "two thirds of voters believe UK politics is becoming more corrupt, while just one third had faith in their elected officials to put the public interest ahead of their own. And 80% of respondents said they think "some or all" of the main political parties are corrupt and untrustworthy.".
The way that money shapes how things are done can be hard to nail down. As Alan Doig put it:
British political and administrative life has pragmatically so ordered its affairs that the need for corruption has been widely minimised. Thus members of the executive and senior civil servants are unlikely even to be offered, let alone accept, bribes from government contractors while in office - while many will be offered, and accept, financially-rewarding appointments on resignation or retirement from public life.
For instance, it is obvious that it is possible to buy a seat in the House of Lords. No one makes the mistake any more of printing a pricing structure and making it transactional - but there is a clear sense that giving lots of money to a party is a possible way to get a seat. David Cameron even made the argument that big donations were civic minded and vital for democracy, and what should the honours service reward if not service to democracy?
This is what corruption looks like in a high trust society - where the pay-off may be deferred for years, or decades, but is coming all the same. MPs and officials don't need to be explicitly told about job prospects and the kind of actions that would make them less eligible for those job prospects, but understand the system as it has been modelled to then. There are few brown paper bags (but not none) - in general there is more of a series of ambiguous events where money changes hands for individually semi-defendable reasons.
This project is part of extending the system of surveillance to make the brown paper bags even rarer - and highlighting potential conflicts of interest to raise the cost to politicians of entering the more ambiguous space.
You can't *beat* corruption forever, you can just raise the costs in an arms race. Our crowdsourced volunteer model has the potential to significantly and sustainable increase the amount of resources available on the democracy side of the fight.
Transparency as hedge against substantial reform
The Register of Members' Financial Interests contains a list of disclosures MPs are required to make of financial interests or benefits which "others might reasonably consider to influence his or her actions or words as a Member of Parliament".
Both its initial creation (and the current wave of improvement) have been after scandals that brought specific MPs and Parliament more widely into disrepute. Transparency was a big concession, but was also consciously something that was being done to avoid more restrictive rules, and especially enforcement through new laws and outside agencies. Some more rules have now been implemented, but the hope was that greater transparency led to greater self-regulation that would reduce the problem.
Our view is that the core problem with the current standards regime is not just that it is not transparent enough, but that the overall approach does not reflect how the public as a whole wants it to work. Rules that make misalignment between the public's views of acceptable behaviour and the reality more transparent will naturally lead to continued scandal and mistrust of politicians.
Improved transparency has value, but there is also a problem of success. Conflicts of interest become "disclosed" and so are argued to be implicitly approved. As their financial interest information has been publically available, some MPs use their election as a blanket endorsement of all their actions. The idea of "the electorate" is used as an enabler of unethical activity, through the argument that any MPs who were elected with the information in the open have had their ethics and outside interests endorsed by the voters.
For instance, Sajid Javid MP argued in defence of an advisory job he took that "it's for my constituents to judge, and I'm happy with that". Speaking more generally, Dominic Rabb argued that: "It is for the voters of any MP, myself included, to decide whether the people representing them have got the right priorities. I don't think it's for me to start making or prejudicing or second guessing the judgement they make". This is an approach that can also be found in the reports of the Standards Committee, which in arguing against rules on time spent on outside work argued that the Standards Commissioner should not be able to make a judgement "about whether a Member is sufficiently diligent, a judgement which ought to be reserved only to a Member's constituents".
But the problem with this approach is it treats the electorate as a group that can only be consulted in elections - and argues that elections perfectly express the electorates opinions on a huge range of issues. At a very basic level, this is obviously not true. As the Institute for Government's Hannah White has argued:
[T]he argument frequently advanced by politicians – that the ballot box is the only mechanism by which elected office-holders should be held to account – is often disingenuous. [...] MPs have sometimes stretched the principle of democratic accountability beyond its true purpose– using it to justify exempting themselves from their proper financial and employment responsibilities, which are distinct from their democratic role.
Electoral decisions require voters to weigh up many different factors (often focused more on the national level than the individual candidates), and boil that down to a tick in a box. Legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg, argued that if constituents didn't want MPs to have second jobs, they wouldn't elect them. The implication of this being, given that they do elect MPs with second jobs, the electorate is fine with this. But in reality, we can, and do, ask the electorate if they have opinions about ethical standards for MPs, and they come back with nuanced opinions about what those standards should be, and support for processes outside elections (like enforced codes of conduct with independent regulators) that ensure the standards are met.
In general, it is also unclear how much voters are aware of interests - or how prominently they have been displayed. The Committee on Standards in Public Life (2018) recommended that:
All candidates at Parliamentary elections must publish, at nomination, whether they intend to continue to hold any existing interests if elected. The Cabinet Office should issue guidance on the registration of these outside interests in time for the next general election.
To date, this has not been adopted. (Notes)
Question notes
If crowdsourcing following an election, we could ask volunteers to gather any evidence of interests being declared as part of the election campaign to answer a "was this preexisting interest made clear to voters?"
More generally - is a second job/employment something that developed after they became an MP or was it preexisting?
What are the problems with outside interests?
There are two general problems with MPs having outside interests:
- Interests interfere with being an MP - it means a worse service to constituents because rather than being a full-time MP, they are doing work elsewhere.
- Interests intersect with being an MP - it's not a disconnected second job, but outside interests trying to leverage (and MPs willing to sell) the special access or rights they have access to as legislators that have been given to them by their constituents.
Generally a lot of the discussion on this has focused on the first - and the idea that the worst case is MPs getting a bit too busy. In 2024, Leader of the House Lucy Powell talked of risks of a "conflict of attention" in the current rules. The problem is that this lens moves the discussion away from more fiddly questions of how MPs might exploit their position for current or future gain.
There has been a shift over time towards more professional full time MPs. In the early 90s, Parliament started in the afternoon and worked late, allowing for other work in the morning. There are still some defences made of the idea of part time MPs - with the argument made that maintaining outside connections helped keep people in touch. However, as Matthew Flinders and Alexandra Meakin argued in a submission to the CSPL:
The notion of a ‘professional MP' somehow being disconnected or isolated from the broader society is therefore highly questionable but even if it were true it is possible to ask whether being, for example, a highly paid member of an elite profession is really the best route to social understanding.
Generally the role has changed to the idea that being an MP is a full time job - and a key part of this job is being connected to broader society. Here we have the idea of MPs as mediators and bridges, rather than representing in themselves sectoral knowledge. Delta Poll's 2018 focus group on the register of interests concluded that for most people "the simple truth was that the role of MP should be full time, but … outside interests might come into play outside of parliamentary hours. [...] It did not seem to occur that MPs could be working on non-parliamentary work within parliamentary hours, possibly because of an assumption that MPs' time is regulated or managed like that of most other working people."
As such, significant second employment is viewed by the public as bad. A 2018 analysis of the British Election Study found two-thirds of respondents supported the idea MPs should not have outside employment, and certainly not those that yield considerable income - this also concluded that 7/10 were accepting of interests where this helped MPs stay in touch (but that yielded no significant income). Cees van de Eijk and Esmeralda V. Bon (report authors) concluded:
Although the existence of (income earning) outside interests is not prohibited, their existence does generate moral offence amongst substantial majorities of the British public, and most strongly so amongst those groups who feel marginalised and disempowered, which undermines their support for the way in which the political system works, and, as a consequence thereof, their involvement in that system via elections and other forms of political participation
However, there is evidence that some second jobs are viewed more sympathetically than others. Rosie Campbell and Phillip Cowley did a survey experiment asking people to compare different composite stories of MPs to understand which elements were viewed more or less favourably. This found:
They do not respond negatively to all second incomes; they are more sympathetic to the entrepreneur who continues to draw an income than medical doctors or lawyers who continue to practise. They are most hostile to politicians who take on part-time company directorships
In the case of both law and medicine, there was a hefty penalty for continuing to practise. The scale of that penalty increased as the extent to which the MP was still involved increased. The same was not true in the case of the businessman experiment. We suspect—although we cannot be sure—that this is because respondents feel (perhaps wrongly) that medicine or law are professions which it is acceptable to ask someone to give up temporarily when they become an MP but to which they can then later return; they perhaps feel differently about an on-going business someone has set up
Earning even £10,000 from a non-executive directorship was more harmful than earning £50,000 from the law or medicine.
MPs are significantly less popular the more they are paid for their outside interests. In general, a candidate who earns £30,000 from an outside interest is 3.7 times less popular than a candidate who earns nothing from an outside interest.
In general this shows that some kinds of second jobs might be understood (if not actively encouraged) and a key point is the scale of the income. YouGov polling in 2021 reinforced this idea that there were very few widely accepted jobs (mostly just doctors, nurses, and writing), a few where people are more split (other elected positions, after dinner speeches, work as a lawyer), and then a clear set of majority disapproval - including for company directors.
Question notes
This suggests a key question of the scale of income that comes through a second job (e.g. did they have a second job that derived a significant wage?)
And then a second question: was there a second job that fits into a category a majority of the public disapproves of?
As Benny Geys and Karsten Mause put it: "Lobbyists intend to influence public policy decisions in their favour". An important perspective is not to see outside jobs in competition with MPs' roles, but an attempt to corrupt and subvert their role as representatives of the people. In this view, MPs are not being given jobs and money because they're incredibly talented - they're being paid (now or later) for access to decision makers, and changed decisions. For this perspective, what we're looking at with the Register of Interest is evidence of the network of ties and obligations that helps make this happen.
With this thinking, we should look closely at the company directorships - where well paid jobs for MPs can sometimes be found with low time requirements (allowing a "I still have time for constituents" answer) - but raising questions about exactly what they're doing and why. Matthew Smith and Jack Newman created a broader social network of company directors to understand how MPs at the margins and centre of the network deferred - finding that "MP participation increases when they have high numbers of directorships or high levels of corporate opportunity, but it decreases for those who are deeply embedded in the corporate system, sitting on the boards of well-connected firms". This latter set could be considered to be more "professional" (and being more of a part time MP as a result) - but those more peripheral had greater participation in Parliament.
The explanation for this can be found in research by Simon Weschle which explored this idea that some MPs with private sector jobs increased their time spent in Westminster. There were a few different mechanisms for this. One was that many corporate jobs are in London, and this keeps MPs in Westminster more (notable this was mostly looking at a group of Conservative MPs, who were more likely to hold these corporate jobs). This is seen in increased participation in votes - but with very little difference as a group in how they vote. This makes sense given the strong party cohesion in votes - although it's worth noting that MPs' other interests may be influential in shaping what is put to a vote at all (if harder to directly trace).
However, Weschle also found this group of MPs was asking significantly more parliamentary questions. The average Conservative MP asks a median of two questions a year, but this rises to nineteen when holding a second job. The largest increase was with those working in the for-profit "knowledge sector" (12 to 26 questions).
Looking at the content of these extra questions, he found these MPs asked more questions about internal department policies and projects. He uses the example of an MP, who:
Two months after starting the job, the MP submitted a question to the Secretary of State for Health, asking him "what plans he has for the future role of private healthcare providers in the NHS following implementation of his proposed structural reforms" Thus, shortly after taking up a job in the finance industry, this MP asked for specific information about ministerial plans in a sector that their employer had a financial stake in.
While Weschle is careful to avoid suggesting impropretry by any single MP highlighted - this suggests a slightly less immediately transactional version of cash for questions. Companies that can hire MPs have the ability to extract more information about government work, that may enrich the company, even if the MP's formal role is tangential to this work. In general, MPs should strive to avoid even the *appearance* that this is what is happening. (Notes)
Question notes
Has an MP submitted written questions that are plausible related to their area of work?
In general, reinforces that "impact on votes is not the metric here" - and that a focus even on attendance would miss activity that's definitely worth noting.
Declaring interests
When MPs speak in debates, they are supposed to declare any interests. Where this happens, it tends to be of the form "I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members' Financial Interests" - which does not actually say what the interest was.
The 2019 Committee on Standards in Public Life report was critical of this:
The Guide to the Rules for MPs states that declarations must be informative but succinct. This can lead to some confusion for MPs, as some who have registered an interest may in their declaration just refer to their register entry without stating what that interest is. Such a reference is unlikely to suffice on its own, as the declaration must provide enough information to convey the nature of the interest without having to check the register.
This relates to an older debate about if MPs with interests should participate at all. In 2002, the rules of the House were amended to allow MPs with outside business interests to initiate proceedings on issues related to their interests. Colin Green and Swarnodeep Homroy argue this led to a reduction in donations to political parties, and an increase in MPs with corporate affiliations - with money being redirected to more direct access to legislators . The implication being that this rule was discouraging MPs accepting corporate affiliations prior to the change as it would have a (public) impact on their ability to participate.
The Committee on Standards in Public Life (2018) argued against MPs recusing themselves altogether from debates as "[d]ue to the representative role of MPs, if MPs were required to recuse themselves from some votes their constituents would not be represented in the decision-making process. This would be particularly problematic where MPs may hold pecuniary interests in their constituency, such as rental income. Therefore, it would be more likely that voters are not represented in issues in their local community". But the counter-argument is that pretending these conflicts of interest do not exist does not mean they're not present - and may cause more harm to their constituents than their MPs not being able to participate in a debate.
This report did also however recommend that:
The Parliamentary Digital Service should develop and implement a digital tool to identify where MPs have declared interests during Parliamentary proceedings.
This has not yet happened. But it is the kind of value-add feature we might consider in TheyWorkForYou. (Notes)
Question notes
Has an MP declared an interest in a debate? If so, was that declaration clear on what their interest was?
[harder] Has an MP spoken in debates where they should have declared interests, but did not?
Donations, Gifts and freebies
The new 2024 reforms do not substantially ban second jobs - but further restrict MPs giving advice on public policy or how Parliament works as part of paid employment. The concern is that this was not actually what the exchange was for, just one of the more plausible reasons to have them on the payroll - and that other semi-plausible ways to extend credit to MPs remain.
One of the more common forms of declarations is for "Gifts, benefits and hospitality from UK sources", otherwise known as "freebies". The Survation/ UK Anti-Corruption Coalition polling asked "respondents how MPs' acceptance of £180,000 worth of ‘freebies' from corporations in the summer of 2023 affected their confidence that policymakers will make impartial decisions". This found that "An overwhelming majority (70%) says it gives them less confidence that policymakers will make impartial decisions". This has been raised as an issue with the now Prime Minister Keir Starmer receiving lots of free gifts.
The key question to ask is: if the point isn't to corrupt people, is there a plausible explanation for why this is happening? Even small gifts can be attempts to put people inside a web of mutual obligation. It may not be a direct bribe, but an opening to further contact and relationships that may benefit both parties - but potentially to the disadvantage of the public (who pay MPs a salary to discourage this kind of thing).
What a gift means is culturally and situationally sensitive - but a general consensus is that cash money is always a bribe, whereas non-monetary gifts are more vague. That said, while the Code of Conduct for MPs only talks about disclosing gifts, guidance for civil servants is much more rooted in offences under the Bribery Act. The Civil Service Code more directly says that civil servants should not "accept gifts or hospitality or receive other benefits from anyone which might reasonably be seen to compromise your personal judgement or integrity".
2009 Cabinet Office Guidance breaks this down further with points around purpose, proportionality and conflicts of interest. Individual departments give more precise guidance, for example from the Single Source Regulations Office (loosely influential because they publish it online) - talks about gifts being of a nominal/notional value, for an appropriate reason, not at an inappropriate time, and being one-off or irregular. In that case they also talk about a nominal amount of £50 for a single gift - and no more than £200 from the same source.
In terms of creating narrower "have they received gifts/support from the [x] industry questions?" We don't have direct polling people treat different kinds of gifts differently - but we do have YouGov tracker polling of perceptions of a wide range of industries. The table below works out the mean net favorability for tracker polls in 2023/24. This feels like a reasonable enough leap to justify focusing more on specific kinds of donations. This would be a candidate for polling to validate a direct connection. (Notes)
Question notes
Have they received any freebies in general in the last year?
Do these exceed (what would be arbitrary but could consult - or base on data analysis) a threshold of individual or serial value from the same source?
There is good support here for "have they received donations or support from the Gambling industry?" type questions. We could do versions of this for the top five, ten, anything with a negative approval (top 12).
| Industry | Net favourable |
|---|---|
The Tobacco Industry | -60% |
The Gambling Industry | -56% |
Utility Companies | -55% |
The Oil Gas Mining And Extraction Industries | -40% |
Media Companies | -37% |
The Insurance Industry | -29% |
The Luxury Fashion Industry | -21% |
The Banking Industry | -14% |
The Military Industry | -13% |
Fast Food Chains | -11% |
The Clothing And Fashion Industry | -4% |
Car Manufacturing Industry | -3% |
The Professional Services Industry Law Accounting Consulting | 0% |
The Construction Industry | 2% |
The Soft Drinks Industry | 4% |
Alcoholic Drink Makers | 4% |
The Pharmaceutical Industry | 7% |
Clothing Retailers | 11% |
Technology Manufacturers | 11% |
The Supermarket Industry | 12% |
Building Societies | 18% |
The Travel Industry | 20% |
The Agriculture Forestry And Fisheries Industries | 25% |
The Groceries Sector | 26% |
The Hotel Cinema Restaurant And Leisure Sector | 30% |
In-kind support
There's a set of registered interests where donors are offering in-kind support rather than gifts.
The argument made here is that rather than a private benefit to individuals, donors are providing a public benefit to society. They are stepping up to provide support to parties and legislators that they need to fulfil their democratic functions, but that the public is stingy about funding properly.
This argument is used to justify general large donations to parties to fight elections but also that donations of high end clothes support Britain's role on the world stage. An approach that's become more apparent in the last few years is outside funding of MPs staff - especially noticeable for members of the (then) Shadow Cabinet - many of whom have moved onto Cabinet positions.
In principle, opposition parties have "short money" (parliamentary funding depending on MP numbers and vote share) to fund their opposition functions - but there's obviously always room for more, and this can have a practical impact on how effective the opposition is.
But what we need to watch is how this is used as a way of sanitising a donation. An MP has not been given money or a donation personally, but has been given staff to help them with their real work. But with the "web of obligations" view, this could also be read as an organisation or donor giving politicians what they need now, that creates relationships that are useful later when they're in government. Already, secondments to Shadow Cabinet members have led to hires in government. While individual appointments may be defendable, systematically, it shows the role money plays in helping connections and networks form (and conversely, that potential hires less to the approval of outside funders are at a disadvantage). We need to have a healthy scepticism of public spirited defences of big money in politics, where there are clear mechanisms for this having private benefits to donors.
Throughout all these questions, what the money is spent on is less important than where it comes from. We don't know a lot about the perception of people funding MP staff. But could apply similar logic that some sectors are more worth highlighting than others - given the follow the money idea - and especially when we're highlighting relationships for government ministers. (Notes)
Question notes:
Have they had staff paid for by other organisations/donors? From what sector?
General question about levels of intermediaries - e.g. Labour Together funding staff - some knowledge about their funding, but how far down the rabbit hole to go?
What do we know about the contents of the register?
The following table shows the number of interests declared, and the number of MPs who declared that range in three different time spans: the last year, the last two years, and the full parliament. Over time, more are declared in aggregate: but in a year, over half of MPs declare less than 20 things (and this might be an overcount because of formatting). Very few MPs declare more than 50 items.
| Number of interests declared | full_parliament | last_two_years | last_one_year |
|---|---|---|---|
a. 1-10 | 116 | 199 | 251 |
b. 10-20 | 138 | 161 | 172 |
c. 20-50 | 232 | 194 | 147 |
d. 50-100 | 129 | 57 | 33 |
e. 100-200 | 44 | 18 | 8 |
f. 200+ | 9 | 0 | 0 |
total | 668 | 629 | 611 |
The register contains nine categories of reporting, some of which are broken down further for reporting.
| Category | Financial threshold for registration |
|---|---|
| Over £300 for the total of payments of whatever size from the same source in a calendar year |
| Over £1,500, either as individual payment, or for the total of multiple donations of more than £500 from the same source in the course of a calendar year |
| Over £300 for the total of benefits of whatever size from the same source in a calendar year |
| Over £300 if not wholly borne by Member or public funds. Threshold also applies to the total of benefits of whatever size from the same source in a calendar year |
| Over £300 for the total of benefits of whatever size from the same source in a calendar year |
| Total value of property held: over £100,000 Income derived from property: over £10,000 in a calendar year |
| Greater than 15% of issued share capital (on preceding 5 April), or if 15% or less of issued share capital (on preceding 5 April), greater in value than £70,000 |
| No threshold |
| Remuneration of over £700 in a calendar year |
| No threshold |
Again, looking over the three periods, some categories get reports from a large set of MPs - while others are much rarer.
| Category | MPs with at least one item in last year | MPs with at least one item in two years | MPs with at least one item in current Parliament |
|---|---|---|---|
| 381 | 397 | 449 |
| 285 | 354 | 429 |
| 237 | 320 | 380 |
| 174 | 174 | 174 |
| 173 | 287 | 461 |
| 144 | 174 | 423 |
| 127 | 150 | 256 |
| 107 | 115 | 140 |
| 75 | 75 | 93 |
| 21 | 21 | 24 |
| 20 | 45 | 225 |
| 15 | 24 | 51 |
| 12 | 12 | 14 |
Question note:
For some of the rarer categories - "is there anything in this category" could be a source of some easy to fill in categories - e.,g. "Do they have family members employed in their office?"
Competency questions
Various organisations (including Parliament) have done work to list the kind of questions that can be answered depending on the answers to the RMFI. We don't necessarily want to do many of these - and may want to focus our attention on questions that cannot be answered by the RMFI alone.
A partial list below. Bolded questions are those highlighted as being especially important from research above, or from a cross-dataset perspective.
Compliance questions
- How often do members report interests late
- Are there interests a member has declared but not reported to the RMFI (or vice versa)
- Are there any directorships or shareholdings reported to Companies House that members haven't reported to the RMFI
Outside employment
- How many / which members have outside employment
- How much has a member earned from outside employment in a calendar year / parliament / time in parliament
- How much time has a member spent on outside jobs in a calendar year / parliament / time in parliament
- How much has a member received in benefits in a calendar year / parliament / time in parliament
- How much has a member received in donations in a calendar year / parliament / time in parliament
- How many members still employ their spouse, and in what role
Linkage of members to organisations e.g. as shareholders, directors, providing services to clients, unpaid roles etc.
- Which members have a connection to organization x
- Which members have a connection to an organization with SIC code x
- Which members have a connection to a topic / theme x e.g. energy, transport, defence etc.
- Which members have a connection with an oligarch/corrupt individual/regime x
- How many members have unpaid outside roles
Linkage of members to property
- Which members own a property in a particular geographical area i.e. country/region/county/metropolitan area/constituency/city/town
- Which members own property and earn income in rent that meet rule thresholds
Overseas visits
- Where are the most popular destinations e.g. by country for overseas visits
- What dates (from and to) did members fly overseas
- Who has paid the most for overseas visits
- How many sponsors of overseas visitors are foreign governments
Oral / written question interests
- Which members have declared an interest on a written question & for what interest
- Which members have declared an interest on a tabled oral question & for what interest
- Which members have declared an interest before an oral contribution & for what interest
- What interests has a member declared
- What members have declared an interest in subject x