Barely a week after Ed Miliband attacked the Tories’ “dodgy donors” named in leaked HSBC Swiss bank files, Jack Straw and Malcom Rifkind have been exposed in a “cash-for-access” scandal.
Sadly we can’t all expect to be inundated by offers of cash, directorships, free flights and favours on top of our salaried jobs. But what we can do is explore MPs’ interests with a new widget.
Emma and Rob Tyers hope their new website and browser extension membersinterests.org.uk will make it a lot simpler to explore the murky merry-go-round of lobbyists, donors, conflicts of interests and “cash for questions”.
“We started working on it in November,” explains Emma. “I am a member of 999 Call For The NHS, campaigning against cuts and privatisation. There was a big news story about the hundreds of MPs with interests in private health companies. The House of Commons Register of Members’ Financial Interests is in the public domain, but not in a format that is easy to research. So as me and my husband Rob both work in IT, we decided to index it and create three easy ways to query the data.”
Membersinterests.org.uk has a downloadable desktop browser extension, which you can switch on while reading a news story, allowing you to click on underlined MPs’ names to find out if they have conflicting interests.
On the website itself, you can search MPs’ names, or keywords.
A search for “tobacco” reveals among others, details for Nicholas Brown: “Name of donor (1) Japan Tobacco International; (2) Glyndebourne. Amount of donation or nature and value if donation in kind: for myself and a guest, afternoon insight tour and evening performance; value under £2,000”; “Wimbledon” reveals that John Bercow has declared “seats in the Royal box at (1) the Aegon Championship, 15 June 2014, estimated value £1,300; at Wimbledon on (2) 27 June 2014, estimated value £1,895 and (3) 6 July 2014, estimated value £4,315; £7,510 in total” and Chris Bryant “one ticket for the Centre Court to watch Wimbledon, plus lunch and afternoon tea; total value £1,795”; or “golf club” finds David Cameron has “honorary membership of Ellesborough Golf Club; value £1,142 pa”.
“The rules around outside financial interests don’t seem to align with what the general public feel comfortable with,” says Emma. “I would encourage people to have a look and see what they think.”
“£” is a good search to get an idea of who gets paid what – for example, William Hague earned £140.84 from secondary royalty earnings in relation to a biography (no additional hours worked) – or what donations they have accepted – Danny Alexander declared £10,000 from Ministry of Sound Ltd. And you can even search TV shows – Diane Abbott gets paid £700 for the three hours it takes to record each episode of This Week, while Sadiq Khan donated his £1,500 fee for Have I got News For You to charity.
