Post: 2 April 2016
Back in 2013 I submitted an unlocking request for open data release of the Parliamentary Registers of MPs’ Interests, Lords’ Interests and All-Party Groups. These registers have been available for some years on the Parliament website, but not in an easily accessible or re-usable format.
The Data.Parliament project opened up API access to the Lords’ Register of Interests in late 2014. (I blogged about this at the time.)
In January 2015 the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy published a report in which it said the Register of MPs’ Interests should be released as open data by the end of 2015.
That didn’t happen. In January 2016 Data.Parliament published a blog post indicating they were having technical difficulties but would have “correctly categorised” data by the end of March this year.
As of today the Register of MPs’ Interests does not appear on the Data.Parliament’s list of datasets, but there is now an (unpublicised?) linked data API online that provides access to the data.
Data access via APIs is not the same as bulk release (a minimum criteria for open data according to the Open Definition). Data.Parliament’s decision to prioritise the interests of developers over those of the wider community of public data users, by focusing on APIs instead of more accessible bulk downloads, remains a weakness in Parliament’s digital strategy.
However Data.Parliament has provided some guidance on extracting full datasets from its APIs. It is now possible to compile a full copy of the latest MPs’ Register of Interests relatively easily, by submitting a series of queries to the API and combining the CSV output files:
http://lda.data.parliament.uk/commonsregisteredinterests?_page=0&_pageSize=500
http://lda.data.parliament.uk/commonsregisteredinterests?_page=1&_pageSize=500
Here is a copy of the MPs’ Register of Interests dataset extracted today, on Google Drive:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ke1LmLh3lTSpssdNTAD4VS58M6awtAhnskpKadhzP7I
or you can download it as a zipped CSV:
http://www.owenboswarva.com/opendata/commonsregisteredinterests_20160402.zip
The MPs’ Register of Interests dataset is re-usable under the Open Parliament Licence.
I have not made any changes to the dataset or checked for errors. The raw CSV outputs include some duplication of columns. Users familiar with the Data.Parliament APIs may be able to enhance this dataset by linking in fields from other datasets.
Much of the useful information in the MPs’ Register of Interests has not been explicated and is held in free-format text fields. The dataset is searchable, but no more so than the PDFs previously available.
Clearly there are underlying barriers arising from the systems and methods used to capture the data at source. However API access to this register does represent progress, and should support better public scrutiny and analysis of MPs’ financial interests.
Update: 8 October 2016
As tested today, the above method does not produce the latest version of the MPs’ Register of Interests. The queries produce data from the Register as at the end of the last Parliament. It’s unclear whether the API has been abandoned or whether Data.Parliament are continuing work on it.
Image credit: Palace of Westminster, London - Feb 2007 by Diliff (CC BY-SA 2.5)
The above article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) licence. Attribution statement: © Owen Boswarva 2016.