The Parliamentary Digital Service and its Transforming Digital team has released improvements to the way members of the House of Commons and House of Lords register their interests.
The revised Register of Members' Financial Interests has two new portals, one for members to register their financial interests and another for the Registry Office. A new API will enable the new register to interoperate with applications used across the parliamentary estate. The Registry Office portal enables the publication of the register, alongside its management.
MPs and Lords sitting in the second chamber are required to provide full details of any benefits and interests they receive which others might reasonably consider to influence their actions. The general public can access these registers at any time.
In a statement, the Parliamentary Digital Service said its initial work had focused on improving how members register their financial interest in the House of Commons.
The work was carried out in response to recommendations from the House of Commons Committee on Standards, which found that the public needed improved search functionality of the Register. In addition, along with the House of Lords Conduct Committee, it backed the need for a searchable Register of Members' Financial Interests and Register of Lords' Interests.
Responding to feedback
"We have renewed our focus on managing and improving our products based on user feedback," the Parliamentary Digital Service said on its blog. "We have also been investing in Parliament's approach to data and how we use it."
The portals were developed in partnership with the Product Directorate to ensure user focus was embedded into the development of the register improvements.
"This multi-disciplinary team includes back and front-end development expertise, testers, DevOps, content design and interaction design skills, user research, delivery and product management capability, as well as key involvement from the House of Commons Registry Office," the post said. A more consistent data structure that would improve the search was a central part of their work.
The technological improvements have not changed the rules on registration and publication of MPs and Lords interests.
The first tranche of work created APIs for internal usage. A second phase will create an external facing API and a series of different download formats for the dataset.
"The team will be starting to look at repeating the process to develop other parliamentary registers, including those for members' staff within the House of Commons and members of the House of Lords," the blogpost said.
