The Westminster Accounts is an experiment in transparency and public accountability that aims to shine a light on how money influences UK politics. It’s time to check who is paying our politicians and to ask why.

For all the claims of transparency, it’s been very hard to see what’s going on. Whether through default or design, records of financial transactions from donors and companies to politicians are spread across different websites, platforms, registers, disclosures, databases; some online, some in print.

We believe this must change. We are helping every voter in the country to answer a series of simple questions: how much do MPs earn outside of their taxpayer-funded salary and from where, which businesses and individuals are donating to MPs and parties to further their political causes and by how much, and how do businesses and other interest groups use Parliament to further their agendas.

To be able to reveal figures such as these, we have collected more than 650,000 entries from multiple official websites, bringing them all into a single database. Scouring various parts of the internet where political earnings and donations have been reported, picking up things like who the MP involved was, which organisation was paying them, and for how long.

There is nothing neat about this data; records of financial transactions from donors and companies to politicians are spread across different websites, platforms, registers, disclosures, databases; some online, some in print. It’s often in a tangle, too, with c-type datasets, duplicates and typos to contend with.

We update the dataset every 2 weeks.

To be able to reveal figures such as these, we have collected more than 650,000 entries from multiple official websites, bringing them all into a single database. Scouring various parts of the internet where political earnings and donations have been reported, picking up things like who the MP involved was, which organisation was paying them, and for how long.

There is nothing neat about this data; records of financial transactions from donors and companies to politicians are spread across different websites, platforms, registers, disclosures, databases; some online, some in print. It’s often in a tangle, too, with c-type datasets, duplicates and typos to contend with.

We update the dataset every 2 weeks.

So far we have been able to reveal that MP’s have collectively earnt more than £22M since the last general election, on top of their annual salaries and in this year alone, Boris Johnson MP has earned a staggering £4.8M. That equates to 85% of all the outside pay generated by MPs this year. We have shown that the vast majority of additional earnings have gone to the Conservative Party, but not exclusively. David Lammy MP has earnt £200k despite Labour’s ban on second jobs. This has prompted key figures such as Sir Kier Starmer, Leader of the Labour Party, to urge the House of Commons to agree new rules around extra earnings. He said “The more transparency, the better, so that everybody can see exactly what has been declared and ask whatever they want about it.”