Political Interest exists to make publicly available UK political data easier to access, understand, and scrutinise.
The platform brings together open data from the Commons Register of Members' Financial Interests, Companies House, IPSA, government contract registers, nationally significant planning records, and other official public sources.
Its purpose is not simply to republish these datasets, but to connect them. Political Interest helps users explore relationships between MPs, individuals, companies, declared interests, shareholdings, public contracts, planning applications, and other public records. By linking these sources together, the platform makes it easier to see how people, organisations, financial interests, and public decisions may be connected over time.
All information displayed on this site is already publicly available. The objective is to improve transparency by making relevant relationships easier to search, compare, and review in both context and time.
Political Interest is politically neutral. It does not endorse any party, candidate, organisation, or individual. The purpose of the platform is to present public data clearly so users can review the information, draw their own conclusions, and make their own informed decisions about who they choose to support, trust, or vote for.
Political Interest is a personal project operated on low-power infrastructure. Data may lag by up to 24 hours and is dependent on the availability, quality, and reliability of upstream government sources and APIs. The site is under continual development as time permits and as new ideas, datasets, and features become available.
Some relationships and entity matches are produced using best-effort matching and should not be treated as authoritative. Where appropriate, these links are marked as assumed. Public register data can be inconsistent, incomplete, misspelt, misleading, or simply difficult to match reliably against Companies House and other government datasets. This is particularly true given the computing resources currently available to this project.
That said, even with these constraints, the platform can still reveal useful patterns and connections. It also illustrates the wider potential of data analysis when larger datasets, stronger infrastructure, and more advanced analytical methods are available. Consider what is available to blue-chip companies and states.
As with any public-data tool, users should verify important findings independently and refer back to the original source material before reaching conclusions.
Please use the contact form to submit ideas, bug reports, corrections, or general enquiries.