Explore donations & gifts to MPs

The latest Register of Financial Interests has just been published — the first for this Parliament.

That means, if you want to, you can explore gifts and donations given to your own MP (or any other), including during their election campaigns.

To make that easier, we've added the information to MPs' pages on TheyWorkForYou and also provided it in a spreadsheet format — read more here.

For the even more data-inclined, we've knocked up a quick analysis site that allows you, for example, to see which MPs have property abroad, or which have received donations above a specified amount. Find out about that here.

Why are there so few APPGs all of a sudden?

As well as financial interests, our WhoFundsThem project will be keeping an eye on APPGs (All Party Parliamentary Groups), so we were initially startled to see that more than 90% of these civil society/Parliament policy groups had disappeared.

On further examination, we think the causes are more admin-based...which, because we're tracking them (and, let's face it, because we're nerds), we still find interesting. Julia explains here.

Showcase your FOI accomplishments

& win a trip to Madrid

Have you used Freedom of Information to have a positive impact on society in the last three years — or perhaps you know someone who has?

Our friends Access Info over in Spain have announced a new award. The winner will be invited to Madrid to present their work in front of an international audience at the Open Government Partnership Summit next year. Find out more here.

FOI is essential at the local level

When we saw a council criticising Freedom of Information requests as 'burdensome', stating that many requests are from "people looking for business, journalistic requests and other government departments", we had to comment.

Read why FOI at the local authority level is so essential, and why actually, we're all for these types of request, in our LinkedIn article — or if you prefer your thought pieces in smaller chunks, in this Bluesky thread.

Help us work towards a more resilient, transparent democracy

At mySociety we're very busy all the time, making democracy more accessible to everyone, and providing the tools to help people play an active part in society.

If you can help us out, please do head to our secure donate page. Every contribution helps us to work harder and faster towards a better, more inclusive society. Thank you.

Find us wherever you like to be

We won't stop blogging, but if you'd like to catch up with mySociety's news in other places:

Got thoughts about any of this? Hit 'reply' to this email and let us know.

What we're reading, watching... and humming

• More than 55 countries lack Access to Information laws [Eye on Global Transparency]
• Unfollow everything: a novel approach to social media from a previous TICTeC speaker [New York Times, paywalled]
• If you think WhoFundsThem is interesting, wait til you see this Danish version [TikTok]
• We released our strategy as a PDF, but we're beginning to realise that rapping is a lot more fun [YouTube]

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