Sleaze will be hard to clean up while the data remains so opaque

Sometimes there is a difference between transparency and openness. It is possible to have the facts visible, but in ways that obfuscate the truth. Take the case of Geoffrey Cox. Commons rules ensure MPs’ earnings are publicly declared, but those rules also dictate that in the case of legal work only the firms need be named — not the clients, the people actually paying the bill.

MPs must declare “any financial interest or other material benefit which a Member receives which might reasonably be thought by others to influence his or her actions, speeches or votes in Parliament.” And, by and large, they do.

The register was the basis of much of the reporting on MP’s second jobs. But the format in which it is published generates a fog that makes it enormously difficult to pick out the answers to many basic questions.

For example, no one has been able to work out how much money MPs made from these outside earnings since the last general election. Similarly, no one has, so far, worked out how much MPs made from, say, banking. Or law.

The register is constructed as a riddle. Each MP’s entry is published as a series of documents. They cover overlapping time periods, so the same interests will be declared time and again.

Worse, the data is presented in prose — not a table. For example, Andrew Mitchell’s record includes this entry: “Remuneration of £9,000 plus VAT a quarter with an expected time commitment of two days a quarter from 1 May 2018.” Each entry can be written differently. Sometimes they are one-off payments rather than a regular fee. They might be recorded per year, per week, or at any other arbitrary interval. Sometimes, MPs make errors — and correct them by redeclaring the same income with the correct details.

These statements are a challenge to decipher: that is perhaps why another newspaper got one MP’s income wrong by £600,000 per year. The data is unwieldy, unintuitive and full of traps. There is — so far — no clever algorithm that can precisely and consistently turn these sometimes enigmatic statements into numbers. To get the figures required for accurate analysis, you would need to manually go through every entry.

The latest edition of the register shows MPs made close to 4,000 separate declarations of gifts, hospitality and other outside interests. Since the last election it has been published 46 times. Like a painter on the Forth Bridge, by the time you finished your work, you would need to start again.

The result is pseudo-transparency. Every MP has declared their second jobs. The information is published and accessible. But using that information is too time-consuming. The result? Less accountability and less scrutiny than if it were collected and presented in a modern, structured format. We need a spreadsheet with all the earnings declared in the same way.

The pandemic has highlighted other areas afflicted by pseudo-transparency, including contracts with government suppliers. These are published online, but in many cases after a substantial lag.

A National Audit Office report into procurement during the early stages of the pandemic found that only 25 per cent of contracts were published within the 90-day target. The names of companies who supplied PPE during that time have only recently been published, some 20 months after being awarded.

In many cases, crucial details like the amount a supplier was paid for a surgical gown is redacted — ostensibly to protect the company’s commercial interests. Why? Information on pricing at the height of 2020s PPE panic is not commercially useful now, without access to a time machine.

“It’s a mind shift between something being public and something being transparent,” says Anna Powell-Smith, director of the Centre for Public Data. “Data is still seen as a boring nerdy issue for people that work in the basement.”

Transparency is essential to a democracy. This is no longer the age of deference: you need to prove integrity to earn public confidence. Transparency also deters corruption. But the details, and the format of what you publish, matters. Leaders who want to be credible on transparency should start by making accountability data actually countable.

max.harlow@ft.com

Letter in response to this article:

Politicians must back procurement reforms to clean up sleaze / From Gavin Hayman, Executive Director, Open Contracting Partnership, Washington, DC, US