Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

1852 Followers 1006 Following

Democracy Programme Lead / Senior Researcher - mySociety/TheyWorkForYou. Also for some reason Postman Pat reviews.

In practice, they might develop separately, and an LPAC/MAAC might work as a good host organisation for a journalism (or broader civic infrastructure) fund designed by a local citizens assembly. A wing of the LPAC could directly take the role of commissioner of the scrutiny budget, supporting journalists or other institutions that lead to an increase of local civil activity and achieve the LPAC's wider goal of making the system work effectively. But more generally, LPACs themselves could adopt this sponsoring and funding model as their source of funding and legitimacy. In this model, a Scrutiny and Civic Development Fund, with priorities and goals set by a citizens assembly1, would commission and sponsor a range of institutions both in the civic and expert-led space that complement the broader mission of the combined authority, through both scrutiny and placemaking. In both cases, this would provide a level of insulation from the government bodies they may end up critiquing, while making the people of an area as a whole (and a selection in the Assembly specifically) key stakeholders in the work.
14/03/2026 - Speaker at Alliance Party Conference offered by The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland; Mayor Burnham's travel and accomodation costs for speaking at the Conference were covered by the Alliance Party - totalling £431 ; Value £431 28/02/2026 - BRIT Awards 2026 offered by Sony Music Entertainment UK; Ticket for Andy and his wife to attend the BRITS - The cost of the ticket is £1,900 which is a table ticket and includes a meal, drinks and the Award show. ; Value £3800 31/10/2025 - Speaker fee for the keynote speech the Mayor provided at the annual Theos lecture on the 9th October offered by The British and Foreign Bible Society; The Mayor donated his speaker fee to The GM Mayor’s Charity ; Value £1000 22/10/2025 - Hamper basket and wedgewood tea set offered by Ambassador of Qatar to Court of St James; To be raffled for the Mayors Charity ; Value £340 20/09/2025 - 1 ticket to the Liverpool vs Everton Premier League Match at Anfield with Hospitality offered by The Sovini Group; Accepted ; Value £228 04/08/2025 - 2 tickets to Hundred Manchester Originals v London Spirit cricket match offered by Old Trafford Cricket; Accepted ; Value £458 28/06/2025 - Accomodation for two at Glastonbury Festival offered by PRS for Music LTD; Accepted ; Value £1000 28/06/2025 - 4 tickets to Glastonbury Festival offered by Leftfield, Glastonbury; Accepted as the Mayor was speaking at the event ; Value £1520 05/06/2025 - 2 Tickets for Massive Attack offered by SJM Concerts; Accepted ; Value £105
18/06/2026 - Mayoral campaigning donation offered by David Blunkett ; Value £2000 18/06/2026 - Mayoral campaigning donation offered by Shalina Arora ; Value £10000 18/06/2026 - Mayoral campaigning donation offered by Fire Brigades Union (National) ; Value £5000 18/06/2026 - Mayoral campaigning donation offered by Fire Brigades Union (Regional) ; Value £5000 18/06/2026 - Mayoral campaigning donation offered by Communication Workers Union ; Value £5000
If you have a very efficient good-from-bad-spotting algorithm, then you can do a lot; particularly, you can make use of the “regulation by veto” method to use any external source of variety as a potential solution generating machine. And in this way, Ashby makes the case (in 1956!) that it’s obviously possible for human beings to make a machine that can solve problems that its designer couldn’t, as long as they’re able to recognise a solution when they see one. The problem is not really one of devising an algorithm to solve problems, but one that explores the space of solutions in an efficient way when it presents them to the evaluator.
British Grand Prix 2026 (12 MPs, £34,040) Joshua Reynolds (£7,380) Priti Patel (£6,450) Emily Darlington (£4,300) Sarah Bool (£3,140) Jeff Smith (£2,200) Peter Fortune (£1,860) Sarah Gibson (£1,860) Alec Shelbrooke (£1,860) Sarah Champion (£1,860) James Wild (£1,100) Andrew Bowie (£1,100) Rebecca Smith (£930) Royal Ascot 2026 (5 MPs, £4,200) John Whittingdale (£1,920) Victoria Atkins (£590) James Wild (£590) Nick Timothy (£590) Oliver Dowden (£510) Wimbledon Championships 2026 (5 MPs, £4,250) Kemi Badenoch (£1,360) Rishi Sunak (£1,010) Paul Kohler (£930) Laura Trott (£510) Kim Leadbeater (£440) Ivor Novello Awards 2026 (3 MPs, £3,448) Louise Haigh (£1,314) Caroline Dinenage (£1,314) Chris Curtis (£820)
The secondary finding is, to me, more interesting. Holding responses came from 63 per cent of MPs, but a substantive response came from just 46 per cent of those contacted. This was lower than I was expecting. Perhaps the policy-related nature of the questions lowered the extent to which MPs felt a response was required (would casework get a higher response?); perhaps the relatively short nature of the emails made some MPs treat them as campaign group generated? Having just been writing to MPs myself for something else, I’m at least confident the holding replies these days would be close to 100 per cent.
One of the distinctive features of digital tech is the ability to scale. While each new user is not costless, it is much cheaper than in non-digital approaches, and it is possible to reach a mass audience more cheaply and easily than it would be through non-digital methods. Civic tech can still scale — but the routes to mass reach have shifted over time. A historically successful approach of publishing useful resources and accumulating a search footprint has become less reliable as attention shifts into closed social platforms and as search itself is reshaped by AI summaries and chatbot interfaces. The idea of "build it and they will come" was never good advice, but did sometimes work. Now positive discovery feedback loops are weaker, and more duplication and explicit effort is needed in distribution. Mass reach matters for three reasons. First, it has direct public benefit: more people can be informed, supported, and empowered. Second, it can be system-shaping: widely used services become part of the democratic ecosystem, opening doors to influence institutions and reforms. Third, reach underpins sustainability: it supports fundraising, partnerships, and the ability to demonstrate impact. But having mass reach is not just a matter of producing good work: it means understanding the nature of the digital ecosystem in different contexts, and how this has changed over time.
I would be 100x more motivated and productive as a human being if I had the Chief Designer regularly calling me "my eagle". He puts so much warmth into his belief in his people.
But the problem with this approach is it treats the electorate as a group that can only be consulted in elections - and argues that elections perfectly express the electorates opinions on a huge range of issues. At a very basic level, this is obviously not true. As the Institute for Government's Hannah White has argued: [T]he argument frequently advanced by politicians – that the ballot box is the only mechanism by which elected office-holders should be held to account – is often disingenuous. [...] MPs have sometimes stretched the principle of democratic accountability beyond its true purpose– using it to justify exempting themselves from their proper financial and employment responsibilities, which are distinct from their democratic role. Electoral decisions require voters to weigh up many different factors (often focused more on the national level than the individual candidates), and boil that down to a tick in a box. Legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg, argued that if constituents didn't want MPs to have second jobs, they wouldn't elect them. The implication of this being, given that they do elect MPs with second jobs, the electorate is fine with this. But in reality, we can, and do, ask the electorate if they have opinions about ethical standards for MPs, and they come back with nuanced opinions about what those standards should be, and support for processes outside elections (like enforced codes of conduct with independent regulators) that ensure the standards are met.
Recommendations for improvement 35. Our review of the current system for declaration and publication of financial interests for ministers and senior government officials found that, for financial disclosure to be meaningful and effective, simply making information available is insufficient. Meaningful disclosure requires that disclosed information is presented clearly, concisely and accessibly, rather than dispersed across complex or fragmented datasets. 36. The evidence we heard suggests that the principal challenge facing the current financial disclosure framework is not the quantity or quality of the information disclosed but rather its fragmented alignment, poor signposting and lack of ease of navigation for those seeking to understand and interpret the information. 37. When information is presented clearly and is genuinely accessible, transparency serves its core purpose: enabling informed public discourse, facilitating accountability and strengthening trust between government and the public it serves. Our review found that disclosures of financial interests should be made easier to locate, navigate and understand
We have tried to categorise shareholdings that fit into our highlighted interests categories, but due to the insufficiently strict rules in this category, we have a strong belief that relevant shareholdings are not being disclosed. The UK rule sets a high threshold on shares,- which can have a value of £70,000 before they are declared. The Financial Times' Chris Cook complains, "MPs have to declare tickets to a football match, but can have up to £70,000 in stock in one company without needing to tell anyone." He contrasts this with the equivalent US House of Representative rule: "The Financial Disclosure Statement must include a brief description, the date, and category of value of any purchase, sale, or exchange of real property, stocks, bonds, commodities, futures, or other forms of securities (including trust assets) that exceeds $1,000. The category of value to be reported is the total purchase or sale price (or the fair market value in the case of an exchange), regardless of any capital gain or loss on the transaction." In the UK, when interests appear and disappear we have no idea if they were sold in full, or sold in part/lost value so they fell below the threshold. While in principle, interests would need to be declared if they became relevant to how an MP spoke in a debate, this is at the MP's discretion as there is no independent way to check whether this has happened. Further to this, Cook points out a gap around insider trading, as the rules "are designed to catch an MP whose vote or position may be intended to make money — but not one who trades on information they have gathered from their public office." This rule currently represents a significant hole in our understanding of MPs' financial interests — and means we cannot with confidence say MPs who make no declarations have no financial interests. Either adopting the US rule in full, or significantly lowering the disclosure threshold to £1,000, would be a significant improvement.
Publish the whip If parties are going to instruct MPs how to vote, they should tell us they’re doing that. Obviously we know in the abstract that most votes are whipped, but in the public record only the votes of individuals are visible. It’s not that knowing the party instructions would excuse a bad result (MPs are ultimately responsible for how they vote), but it would play an important public education role in both how Parliament works and the quality of the decision making process. One of the long running effects of TheyWorkForYou has been to encourage MPs to make more public justifications of how they vote. Publishing the whip would be an extension of that, encouraging parties to make full descriptions of their reasons for votes. This would be a good incentive to move towards a more co-produced process, where the work of producing recommendations has public as well as internal outputs. We think greater transparency is the friend of better processes — helping draw power away from centralised and secretive processes towards those that need to explain and justify themselves in public. It’s also popular: 62% of the public agreed that parties should be public with how they instruct their MPs to vote. Committing to publish the whipping information would represent a public commitment to a new way of working, that helps encourage and entrench better practice
The “free mandate” of German MPs to vote in accordance with their conscience is constitutionally protected. However, in practice, this ends up in a very similar place to the UK Parliament, where MPs almost always vote along party lines. The big difference between these systems is that in Germany the “party line” is not purely dictated by the leadership, but emerges from processes involving party MPs. In the German system, MPs in each party form working groups that shadow parliamentary committees. These are substantial policy-making bodies for the party, provided with parliamentary resources and researchers to support their work. If we shifted towards a similar system, MPs would develop deeper policy expertise and be more directly involved in shaping the party position on that area or piece of legislation, while MPs not part of that area defer to the process and wisdom of their more engaged colleagues. This reflects the party discipline that is important to clear lines of accountability to voters, while addressing the complaint that centralisation of decision-making throws away the intelligence and moral sense of MPs. Aspects of this happen already, and a step a new government could take is to take more formal notice of working groups, encouraging them to form through expectations that the whips office and ministers will engage with them. In time, more parliamentary resources could be made available to parties to support these groups. Another intermediate approach would be to allow the parliamentary party to select its membership on public bill committees, which in theory review legislation but in practice the whips select against members with specialisms in the area to maintain central control of the process.
Define the whip A simple first step would be to write down what the expected “bounds” of party management are. This would be a statement that itemises political consequences the whip may impose (e.g. an ongoing pattern making it less likely that an MP will be chosen for government roles), versus approaches to party discipline on voting that would not be acceptable (such as denying absence slips, suspension from the party, losing funding for constituency projects, or intimidation). This could also set the scope for when the party has the clearest legitimate interest in whipping (votes related to manifesto issues), and confirm rules that there are certain votes (conscience votes, votes on house matters) where either the party might not take a position, or where there are no sanctions attached to not following that position. This should be an easy win, and is mostly restating what should already be good practice, or returning to an earlier set of norms. As Philip Cowley notes there’s been a substantial increase in MPs being suspended from the party for voting against the whip, with none in ten years of the Blair government compared to eleven in the first year of the Starmer government. A statement returning to that Blair-era norm would be a substantial reset in relations between the leadership and the parliamentary party.
The final caveat is more recent in origin. It is now much more common to see MPs have the whip removed – temporarily or permanently – than it used to be. In ten years, the Blair government did not remove the whip from a single MP because of their voting; by contrast, seven Labour MPs had the whip removed after just the third vote of the 2024 parliament, following a rebellion over the King’s Speech; another group of four lost it in July 2025. Yet others lost it because of other votes and/or other behaviour. Most regained it eventually, but for periods of the session they were sitting as independents.
Parliamentary Democracy accounts of UK politics say that people elect MPs, but do not elect the prime minister. But this doesn't fit well with how parties present themselves, or in how voters make decisions. MPs themselves have weak personal votes, and (generally) rise and fall with the fortunes of the party. Voters themselves use evaluations of the leaders in decision making, and this shows up in correlations between feelings towards the party leader and voting for the party. If people are not “voting for Boris Johnson to be Prime Minister”, they are “voting for the Conservative-Party-with-Boris-Johnson in charge” to be in control of the country. This is also just really clear in how parties talk about themselves and their leaders. “We elect MPs not the PM” is technically true, but so obviously not a description of our democracy that it raises far more questions than it answers.
AI and complaints processes This also interacts with our thinking about AI and demand on public services, and especially complaints mechanisms. We did not use AI to write complaints (which has clear risks in hallucinating specific rules or connections) but did use AI technologies in the data matching — which has dramatically lowered the costs and time of a complicated fuzzy match between the questions and interests datasets. Our view is that this makes it easier for us to make legitimate complaints. An exercise of systematically detecting (and complaining about) questions without relevant declarations is much more viable than it would have been a few years ago. But resourcing at the other end has not changed, and engaging the standards system requires going through the Commissioner. Alongside that, the Commissioner (alongside other complaints mechanisms) might be seeing an increase in complaint volume from more direct use of AI complaints. An increase in volume of reports from us (or AI-driven reports in general) might result in the kind of rationing of time where only the most direct examples proceed — which is not what we want: many of the examples that concern us most require a lens that operates with a slightly broader view than that. As such, we need to think about when complaints are the right mechanism, versus where we want to be building broader cases about the intersection of public roles and private interests.
Seddon’s evidence brought up that the ICO’s FOI budget for the year (which is set by the government) was, in real terms, a decrease on last year, which with an increased case load can only lead to more delays. There isn’t a clever solution to this one — but there is a boring one. Our information commissioners, ombudsman and complaints systems need more money to process an increase in complaints. In the absence of this, the wider public systems they maintain will not have the anchoring of an effective complaint system. There are costs and benefits to AI, and sometimes we’re going to need to pay more as a society to maintain and improve these chokepoints in our redress systems.
This also saw the first public comment from ICO on this floated change, with the view that the current limit is broadly working fine: Warren Seddon: The cost limit has not changed. There has been a bit of debate about it in the past, but it broadly works as it stands. It is well used; if you look at the central Government statistics, around a quarter of refusals are due to the cost limit, so it is in play a lot, and we see it a lot in the complaints that we get. Interestingly the Cabinet Office witnesses, when given the chance, did not talk a lot about AI-induced demand as a reason to lock down: Chair: In your incoming FOI requests, do you see a lot of evidence that AI is playing a role in the input? Clare Brunton: I do not think so. I asked that question of Eirian before this session. Obviously it is hard to tell because you cannot always tell what is being written by AI, but when you look at the trends of FOIs, there has not been a huge uptick as AI comes in. It has been quite a steady growth. I am sure some of that is AI, but actually it has been a fairly steady growth over the last 20 years or so anyway. We have not noticed any spikes. Eirian Walsh Atkins: As the earlier panel said, where people are using AI is at the more complex end of FOI, in the complaint stages and in litigation to help them with those slightly trickier processes. I do not think that AI is being used significantly in initial requests to the Cabinet Office. So this panel provided no strong evidence or opinions that cost limits would solve current problems of FOI, while focusing in on the issue of the complaints system, where a key issue is under-funding of the ICO (and equivalent ombudsman processes).
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am an honorary member of the Jockey Club Rooms, which provides accommodation and function rooms in Newmarket. It is an offshoot of the Jockey Club, and I accepted the membership to support a valued local institution. I declared this in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, but did not repeat the declaration when I tabled four written parliamentary questions regarding the taxation of training yards and racecourses. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards accepted that I tabled the questions because of their relevance to the local economy, and understands that my error was inadvertent. None the less, I accept his advice that I should have declared this interest a second time when I tabled the questions, and I apologise to the House.
Payment Type: In kind Payment Description: Two tickets to football match on 11 May 2026. I did not my ticket but my guest did. Value: 1598.00 Received Date: 2026-05-11 Accepted Date: 2026-05-11 Donor Name: Tottenham Hotspur Limited Donor Public Address: Lilywhite House, 782 High Road, London N17 0BX Donor Status: Company Donor Company Name: Tottenham Hotspur Limited Donor Company Identifier: 01706358 Donor Company Identifier Source: Companies House Registration Date: 2026-06-08 Published Date: 2026-06-08
Wes Streeting Fran Perrin - £50,000.00 Kevin McKeever - £5,000.00 Mike Craven - £5,000.00 Fiona MacTaggart - £5,000.00
The strongest validation of the importance of oversight bodies comes from a 2022 study looking at aid transparency. Dan Honig, Ranjjit Lall and Bradley Parks6 used transparency regimes implemented by funders of aid projects as a way of testing whether the features of those regimes had an impact on the success of the final project. Looking across 20,000 aid projects supported by 12 donor agencies across 183 countries, their main conclusion was that the oversight and enforcement mechanism was very important, and that "the adoption of ATI policies by agencies is associated with better project outcomes when these policies include independent appeal processes for denied information requests but no improvement when they don't". This dataset presents a rare opportunity to understand the impact of effective transparency not just on general measures of perceived corruption, but on the good running and success of projects. Honig and colleagues suggest that this effect happens through a "shadow of the future" mechanism (supported by interviews), where the possibility of future disclosure means that more work is done earlier to avoid design and implementation problems, leading to better results. This study provides key support for the value of ATI policies while providing a substantial caution: in the absence of a real enforcement mechanism, they make no difference.
In a 2014 study, Adriana Cordis and Patrick Warren5 examined different ATI regimes across the United States, and found both that switching from a weak to a strong FOI law immediately increased conviction rates for corruption, and that this rate declined in the long run. They argue this showed an initial increased detection of corruption, followed by a reduction in actual corruption. The most significant component of their measurement of "weak" and "strong" was a change in the civil and criminal penalties for violating the ATI law. This validates a relatively common sense view of ATI laws: if they have strong sanctions they are more effective.
Are you mad at something I said?
A £50 bet provided by the betting and gaming council (which is under the threshold for registration under Category 3). Winnings of £355 were donated to a charity by me.
Abtisam mohamed - sheffield city council
Another change could be to increase the constructive overlap of different parts of the process, rather than highlight divisions that may be artificial. The problem with the current process is not that the membership imposed a winner on MPs, but that the two groups pointed in different directions at all. For instance, this assembly could use an approval voting system (where each candidate can be rated, and there’s a threshold to advance) rather than a head-to-head competition. This avoids the situation where two different parts of the process are pointing in different directions (some candidates may have greater support, but they’re all good enough) - while guaranteeing MPs are choosing from approaches that have real grounding in the groups they need to win an election. (For the reverse version of this, if Conservative MPs had used approval voting to flush out which candidates could have majority support, it could have been much clearer if members were really imposing an unpopular choice or not, without there being a “winner” for the members to reject).
There is a mix of private and public motivation in this, and deals making between complimentary wings of the party is part making a compelling offer to the party as a whole. But the private motivations are there. Maybe the idea that there are MPs who backed Truss just for career reasons is just an unfair slur by their opponents, but it can’t just be glossed over. Whether you take it at face value or not, Rory Stewart tells similar stories of MPs telling him they had to back Johnson rather than him in the 2019 election because of the potential impact on their advancement.
DS9: all's Morn that ends morn
DS9: midsummer night's morn
Boris Johnson's former chief of staff defends MPs drinking before votes: "The vote is whipped in advance... so as long as you can stand..."
The House of Commons holds information relevant to your questions but is currently considering the public interest test for exceptions under Section 24 (National Security), 31 (law enforcement) and 38 (Health and safety) of the Freedom of information Act. Owing to the complexity of the issues involved, we will be extending our deadline to provide your response.
Jonathan Reynolds 🆕New entry or subentry Sunderland Association Football Club - £630.00 More details Sunderland Association Football Club – £630.00 Payment Type: In kind Payment Description: Two Tickets including hospitality to the Sunderland v Tottenham football match. A donation for the value of the tickets has been made to the Foundation of Light - the official charity of Sunderland AFC Value: 630.00 Received Date: 2026-04-12 Accepted Date: 2026-04-12 Donor Name: Sunderland Association Football Club Donor Public Address: The Sunderland Stadium of Light, Sunderland, Tyne and Wear SR5 1SU Donor Status: Company Donor Company Name: Sunderland Association Football Club Donor Company Identifier: 00049116 Donor Company Identifier Source: Companies House Registration Date: 2026-05-06 Published Date: 2026-05-06