Westminster Accounts: How to explore the database for yourself
The Westminster Accounts interactive database lets you search for information about the earnings and donations declared by any MP, political party, an all-party parliamentary group, or donor since the last election.
Sky News and Tortoise Media have programmatically collected and analysed thousands of public records to create this extensive record of financial interests in Westminster from December 2019 onwards.
It means that for the first time, you can easily see the total sums of donations and earnings for individual MPs – something which was previously very difficult to collate and compare due to the way the registers are published.
Read more:
MPs earn £17.1m on top of their salaries since the last election – with Tories taking £15.4m
Search for your MP using the Westminster Accounts tool
Transparency in politics often feels like it falls short – we want to shine a light on that
Westminster Accounts: Following the money
So how can you explore the database for yourself?
Find an MP
When you open the Westminster Accounts interactive database, you are presented with a search box.
Here you can search for any MP or find your own by entering your postcode. Alternatively, you could select the random MP suggested above the text entry box.
Earnings and donations outlined
Once you have made your selection, you will be taken through an explanation of the project and then the information about your chosen MP will be revealed.
The tool will tell you how many financial interests the MP has declared since the last general election.
Each declaration is represented as a circle in the party colours of the MP. If you click on the circle, you will see the value of the declaration, who it came from and when it was registered.
APPG membership
After the information about the MP’s declared financial interests, you will be taken to a section which shows whether they have been an officer of an all-party parliamentary group.
These are informal groups of cross-party MPs who come together to focus on a particular subject area. There are many APPGs, but they do not receive direct financial support from parliament. This means they often rely on outside organisations or donors to fund their operations.
In this section, you will see which donors have provided funding, either in cash or as benefits in kind, to the APPGs of which your chosen MP is a member.
Party donations
The next part of the picture revealed is the donations received by your MP’s political party.
The tool will show you how many sources of funding the party has declared and the total amount.
Finally, you will see how the donations made to the party in question compare to the other political parties and how your MP’s interests compare to others in the House of Commons.
Explore further
After your journey through the declared interests of your MP and where they sit in the wider universe of money in parliament, you may feel you want to go further.
The final page of the interactive tool enables you to do just that.
In the top right corner, you will find a search box, and above it four buttons – party, MP, APPG and Source of £.
By clicking into the search box you will reveal a list ordered by the highest values, letting you click through to explore each entry further.
You can also search directly in any of the categories for further information.
We hope you will want to come back the Westminster Accounts again and again. If you do, and you don’t want to go through the introductory story or explanation of the MP you have selected, a button in the bottom left corner lets you “skip intro slides” and “skip to explore” – returning you to the searchable database page.
More information
The database brings together the following sources:
• The register of members’ financial interests, which records MPs’ secondary employment, donations, gifts and other benefits.
• The register of all-party parliamentary groups, which records the donations, gifts and other benefits for all APPGs.
• The Electoral Commission register, which records donations, gifts and other benefits received by political parties represented in the House of Commons.
Importantly, the database does not cover the expenses MPs claim to run their offices or their annual base salary of £84,144.
Additional compensation for serving as a minister is also outside the scope of the database. The focus is on what they have earned on top of their MP salaries and what they have received in donations.
Outgoing funds are also not captured in the database – so if your MP gives money they have received to charity, that will not be visible.
You can find more detail on how and why we made decisions like this in our publicly-accessible methodology.
The crash involving a cargo ship and oil tanker off the East Yorkshire coast is bad news for the sea, fish and air in the area. What we don’t know yet is quite how bad it will be.
That depends on a few things – but the speed of the collision, clouds of filthy black smoke from the fires and the leaked fuel are certainly worrying.
Firstly, it matters what was on board those two massive vessels.
Follow live: Jet fuel spilling into sea after tanker collision
Analytics firm Vortexa estimates the 183m-long tanker was carrying about 130,000 barrels of jet fuel (kerosene), which is now leaking into the sea.
Jet fuel is not as sticky or viscous as heavier types of oil, thankfully, so it’s less likely to clog the feathers and fur of birds and seals. It can also be broken down by natural bacteria.
But it can still poison fish and kill animals and plants on the shoreline if it makes its way into the soil there.
The Marine Conservation Society has pointed out the site in the Humber estuary is close to some protected areas and is important for seabirds and harbour porpoises.
And both ships will have been powered by a dirtier, heavier kind of oil – likely marine gas oil or heavy fuel oil, though we don’t know the details yet.
Heavy fuel oil is nasty stuff.
Pic: Bartek Smialek/PA
Cheap, thick and tar-like, it can smother animals and is very dangerous if they consume it, and is extremely difficult to clean up. Let’s hope this isn’t creeping around the North Sea already.
We don’t know how much of either the jet fuel or the oil powering the ships has leaked, or how much will be burned off in the violent fires – which themselves are ploughing black smoke and filthy air pollution into the surrounding atmosphere.
And we don’t know for sure what was on the Solong cargo ship and if, or what, will go into the sea.
Cargo ship ‘had sodium cyanide on board’
It was carrying 15 containers of sodium cyanide among other cargo, according to a report from maritime data provider Lloyd’s List Intelligence.
The container vessel was also transporting an unknown quantity of alcohol, said the casualty report – an assessment of incidents at sea – citing a message from the local coastguard.
Plastic takes hundreds of years to break down, and potentially can choke or trap animals.
Many of us have seen that uncomfortable viral video of a turtle having a straw yanked out of its nose. Previous accidents on cargo ships have seen plastic Lego pieces wash up in Cornwall 25 years later.
Read more:
How UK North Sea platforms dump gas
Secondly, the impact depends on the sea and weather conditions around it.
Things like the wind and currents affect how an oil spill spreads in the sea. Scientists can draw up computer models to simulate how the oil could behave.
Thirdly, it matters how quickly this is all tackled and then cleaned up, if necessary, and if it can be.
Usually the slower the response, the worse the impact.
The coastguard has said the incident “remains ongoing” and it has started assessing the “likely counter pollution response” that will be required.
Such a response might need the help of numerous public bodies: the government environment department, the transport department, the Environment Agency and the Maritime and Coastguard Agency.
So for now the best we can hope for – aside from the welfare of the people involved – is that not all the oil is spilled or burnt, that conditions are calm and that rescuers and those cleaning up can work swiftly.
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