Have sleazebusters gone soft on MPs?

It was just 12 weeks ago that a sleaze scandal threatened to rock the Commons to its core. Owen Paterson’s efforts to overturn the findings of a probe into his lobbying activities triggered weeks of revelations, controversy and bad headlines about MPs’ outside earnings and second jobs. But three months on, are things going back to the bad old ways already?

Take the register of members’ interests, on which our elected masters detail their consultancies, part-time gigs and share dealings. This list – supposedly designed to encourage transparency and enable scrutiny – is already difficult to scrutinise. Data scientists complain that it lists information in a highly variable free text format and is both not machine readable or available via bulk download. This makes it very difficult to ‘scrape’ and analyse the data to find overall patterns e.g which outside interest has lavished the most hospitality on MPs.

Now though, the Commons has made the register even harder to navigate. Every page of the register is now protected by a ‘captcha’. This makes it even harder for researchers and journalists to report on it in any meaningful way to answer questions such as which companies, individuals and industries are donating the most to MPs, the kinds of gifts MPs are receiving and the total sum of an MP’s additional earnings. Parliament’s excuse is that it is part of bot management software to protect its websites from undesired or malicious bot traffic.

The Commons isn’t the only institution using ‘security’ as a justification for changes that make information harder to access. The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) ‘paused’ publication of individual claims in November, following the murder of Sir David Amess at a surgery in his constituency. Five months on, there is still no sign of this information being released, despite IPSA being founded in the wake of the 2009 expenses row to hold MPs to account. The last publication of expenses was May 2021. Mr S is all for details relating to security alarms being exempt but isn’t this excuse a little spurious for purchases like Angela Rayner’s AirPods or Zarah Sultana’s ring light?

Nearly half-a-year-on, IPSA is now refusing to say when details of expense claims will be released, only claiming that it will be in the ‘new financial year’ i.e anywhere between April 2022 and April 2023. All this at the same time as IPSA has quietly pulled its Freedom of Information log from its website, meaning that users can no longer see which FOI replies have been published on there since the 2019 general election. 

So much for the disinfectant of sunlight!