The Parliamentary Digital Service has been part of ongoing efforts to improve Parliament’s transparency registers. Back in April, we published the first of a series of blog posts about this work, beginning with our work to improve the Register of Members’ Financial Interests for the House of Commons.
As a quick recap, Members of the House of Commons must submit to this Register the details of any financial interest or benefit that might be considered to influence them in their role, as required by Parliament’s Code of Conduct. This includes things like gifts, hospitality, shares and employment outside of Parliament. This information is then made available to the public. Transparency is a hugely important element of our work in Parliament so it’s crucial that the data available is high quality and accessible.
To improve the quality of the data in this Register, it was important for us to focus our initial efforts on the point at which the data is collected. So we developed and released a portal for Members to submit their interests, which now collects the information they need to register in a more structured and consistent way. We also launched an administration portal to support Parliament’s Registrar’s Office, who manage and publish the data.
In this blog post, we’re providing an update on that work.
Notably, since our previous blog post, we also have a new Parliament. Following a General Election announcement, Parliament was dissolved on 30th May 2024 and the new Parliament assembled for the first time on 9th July 2024.
Initial feedback and continuous improvement
Feedback from Members and their staff has been positive. There was immediate engagement with the online portal, with take-up growing steadily. Following a successful trial period, all Members are now required to submit their interests through this portal.
Between the launch of the new online portals and the dissolution of the previous Parliament, following the announcement of the General Election, Members have submitted over 5,000 interests using the online portal.
The Registrar’s Office has reported a reduction in the number of communications from MPs requesting assistance completing interest registrations – a great sign that the portal is intuitive and meeting user needs.
So, we are confident the new entry portal is improving Members’ ability to register their interests in line with the requirements of the Code of Conduct, but we’re always looking to iterate and improve.
We had feedback, for example, that some Members were finding the process for detailing payments for work or employment outside of Parliament unclear. We knew this issue had the potential to affect a number of Members and create additional work for the Registrar’s Office, so we made fixing this a priority.
We had, of course, undertaken user testing when developing the portal, but we could now build on this with the feedback of Members as they became familiar with the new process. We mapped user journeys, analysed pain points and created and tested a new design with our users. This design simplified the method for attaching a payment to a payer, making it more straightforward for to users
This approach reflects our ongoing commitment to responding to user feedback and continually improving the portals. We’ve had strong positive feedback from Members and their staff following these changes, confirming the value of spending this time on further iteration.
Improving transparency through how we share the Register
Now confident that the new online portals had improved the data, our next challenge was to improve how we share and present this information to those most interested in it (for example researchers, journalists and data scientists).
We knew from our research that these audiences all wanted access to data in formats which allowed them to more easily explore and interrogate Parliament’s data, and/or to import that data into their own tools for further analysis and sharing.
To achieve this, we worked on and released improvements to the first Register of the new Parliament. MPs must register their interests within 28 days of being elected, and the Register is then published approximately every two weeks when Parliament is sitting, and we wanted to have two key changes in place for the start of this parliamentary session:
- Introduced a CSV version of each published Register in addition to a PDF document. This format provides the Register as a downloadable dataset to support analysis.
- Launched a new API (Application Programming Interface), which allows users to query the Register data by parameters like Member, date range, or interests category (for example ‘employment and earnings’, ‘shareholdings’ or ‘visits outside the UK’).
The API will also support future improvements on how interests data is used and displayed on Parliament’s website. As a starting point, we have launched a new space to view Register publications.
These changes will allow our data users to focus their efforts and resources on producing timely, accurate and meaningful analyses, all of which contribute to greater transparency of Parliament’s work.
Next steps
The team are now working on further improvements to how the Register can be accessed and understood, enabled by the new API, with a particular focus on enhancing how interest data is displayed on Parliament’s own website.
The Register of Members’ Financial interests is one of six transparency Registers at Parliament. Our ambition is to have all Registers supported by the digital model we’ve described here. The team will now begin a discovery phase – a period where we will focus on understanding requirements – for the Register Interests of Members’ Secretaries and Research Assistants.
Contact the team
Our work will continue to be led by users and their needs, so if you have any insights or feedback please share your thoughts with us.
For those wishing to keep up to date on our progress, a public version of our Register of Interests roadmap is available. The roadmap provides regularly updated information about the team’s current and upcoming work.
We’ll also update you with any significant developments here on our blog.