Who pays MPs?

MP Interests Tracker helps journalists understand who pays MPs and who gives them gifts.

It’s a Python library – a toolkit that programmers can use to more easily analyse the UK’s Register of Members’ Financial Interests – which will be shared with select newsrooms. We have no immediate plans to make it publicly available, but we hope other journalists can learn from our experimental process.

How MP Interests Tracker works

The data

MPs must declare anything that might influence their words, actions or votes.

This information is published fortnightly as the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. It’s available in HTML and PDF format.

The register includes second jobs, earnings, donations, gifts, hospitality, trips, land, property, shareholdings and relatives employed through parliamentary expenses.

MPs can declare their financial interests in free text format. This means the data is inconsistent from one MP to another, and very hard to interrogate in a systematic way.

For example, in its current form, the register can't be used to answer questions like "how much has my MP earned through a second job?" or "which industries donate the most to my MP?"

The team

About

This project is part of the 2023 JournalismAI Fellowship Programme. The Fellowship brought together 32 journalists and technologists from across the world to collaboratively explore innovative solutions to improve journalism via the use of AI technologies.

MP Interests Tracker was developed as a collaboration between journalists and data scientists from the BBC and The Times. The fellows who contributed to the project are: BBC News senior data scientist Maryam Ahmed, BBC News Labs R&D producer Clare Spencer, The Times’ product manager George Lindsay-Watson and The Times’ principal data scientist Juan Ginzo, who also wrote a blog post about the project part way through.