How OpenRealm works

A note on what this site is doing, why, and — just as importantly — what it is not claiming to do.

The gap this site fills

Four streams of data about every UK parliamentarian are already public: what they have declared as a financial interest, how they have voted, what they have said on the record, and what they have formally asked of government. These four streams live in four different systems, each with its own search tools and limitations. Reading one in isolation answers almost no useful question.

OpenRealm exists to bring them into one view, for one member at a time, so that anyone — a voter, a journalist, a researcher, or the member themselves — can see the whole picture in a few seconds rather than spending an afternoon hopping between five websites. This is the site's entire job. Everything else is in service of that.

The layers we show

For every current Member of the Commons or Lords we pull together:

1. Declared financial interests — drawn directly from the official Register of Members' Financial Interests. This is self-reported data, published under the House's own rules. The act of declaration is lawful and is the rules-compliant thing to do.
2. Recorded votes — every division the member has taken part in, with direction, margin, and whether they acted as a teller. Parties whip their members heavily, so a single vote rarely tells you much about an individual's views; a pattern across dozens of votes tells you a little more.
3. Spoken contributions (Hansard) — what the member has actually said in the Chamber and in committees. Unlike votes, speeches are usually a member's own words, which means they're a more honest signal of personal engagement with a topic.
4. Written parliamentary questions — formal questions tabled to ministers, and the answers they received. These are often the best evidence of what a member is actively pursuing in government.
5. Signed Early Day Motions — motions the member has put their name to. Ministers and some frontbenchers conventionally do not sign EDMs, so an empty list often reflects a role rather than inactivity.
6. Pay & allowances — the IPSA MP base salary (£93,904 for 2025-26), the London Area Living Payment (£5,373 for London-constituency MPs, paid via salary), any currently-held ministerial or opposition uplift, plus IPSA-published Accommodation and Miscellaneous claims for the member's own household. Lords show the per-sitting-day attendance allowance in place of salary.
7. Constituency context — for Commons members, the 2021 Census demographics, 2024 general election result, labour market and crime figures for the seat they represent, pulled from the constituency Data hub.
8. Contracts and donations — Contracts Finder awards to suppliers whose names match a declared interest, and Electoral Commission donation records against the member's name.

Wherever we can enrich these with a matching record from Companies House (for a corporate payer) we do. All of this information is already public. We do not hold any private database, and we do not hide or alter the source record.

How MP pay is calculated on this site

The figure shown in the Pay cell on every profile, and on the Pay directory, is the member's publicly-disclosed salary for the current financial year — not an estimate of total compensation. The components are all individually sourced:

• Base salary — £93,904 (IPSA MP Pay Review 2025-26). The same figure applies to every sitting MP.
• London Area Living Payment (LALP) — £5,373, paid via salary (not expenses) to the 73 MPs whose constituencies are in Greater London. Non-London MPs do not receive it.
• Ministerial and opposition uplifts — additional salary bands set by the Ministerial and other Salaries Order (e.g. Prime Minister +£75,440, Cabinet-level +£71,090, Minister of State +£31,680, Leader of the Opposition +£76,300). Current posts are pulled nightly from each member's Biography on the Parliament Members API; the uplift is applied to whoever currently holds the post, so a reshuffle appears on the next run.
• Take-home estimate — 2025-26 PAYE bands (20 / 40 / 45%) plus Class 1 NI (8% mid-band, 2% above), with the standard £12,570 personal allowance and the £100k+ taper. Pension contributions, student loans, and marriage allowance are not modelled.
• UK income percentile — where the member's gross salary sits in the UK individual-income distribution, bracketed from HMRC Personal Incomes Statistics 2022-23 Table 3.1a uplifted to a 2025-26 estimate. We show bands ("Top 3%"), not precise rankings, because the underlying data is estimates.
• IPSA Accommodation and Miscellaneous — the member's own household claims (second home, utilities, insurance, travel-to-home) for the latest complete financial year, net of anything later repaid. Office Costs and Staffing are excluded because they run the constituency office, not the member's own household. London MPs typically show £0 here because they receive LALP instead.

Lords are unsalaried. The per-sitting-day attendance allowance is shown instead, at the full daily rate (reduced rate available if the peer elects for it).

The cross-reference principle

The single most important thing this site does is cross-reference the four layers against each other. A declaration on its own is just a name and a number. A spoken contribution on its own is just a quote. But a declaration in a particular industry alongside a pattern of spoken contributions on that same industry is a factual observation worth surfacing — and it's the kind of observation that journalists already do by hand, slowly, one member at a time.

The AI layer — what it is and isn't

On financial interests in certain categories, users may trigger an AI-assisted review. This sends the structured fields of that single declared interest, any matching Companies House record, and the member's recent voting history to a large language model, which returns a structured response.

We chose this posture deliberately. UK defamation law treats a statement of opinion very differently from a statement of fact, provided the opinion is clearly labelled as such, the basis for the opinion is stated, and the opinion is honestly held on those facts. Everything about the way AI results are framed on this site is designed to stay inside that distinction.

What the AI can and cannot see

The AI review is working from a deliberately narrow evidential base. It sees the structured fields of one interest, any Companies House match for the payer, and a short slice of the member's recent voting record. That is all. It has no access to Hansard speeches in the prompt itself, no committee transcripts, no bill text, no lobbying meetings, no private correspondence, no media appearances, and no undisclosed activity of any kind.

This matters because the meaning of the verdict depends on it. A verdict of "nothing apparent" means nothing was detectable from that narrow slice of data. It does not mean nothing exists anywhere. A verdict of "may warrant review" is an invitation to look further, not a finding of fact. Readers who want to draw conclusions about a named member should go to the source records — we link to them on every entry — and read them for themselves.

Why we hedge everything

The site talks about "potential overlap", "interests the model flagged", "votes whose titles appear to relate to", and never about "conflicts", "corruption", "breaches", or "failures". This is not cowardice. It is the only responsible thing to do when the analytical base is this narrow and the subjects are individuals whose reputations matter.

A useful mental model: think of OpenRealm as a search tool that saves you an afternoon, not as an investigator that hands you a conclusion. The conclusions are your own.

Editorial principles

A note on the contracts dataset

Public procurement data comes from Contracts Finder under the Open Government Licence. Each award record carries a descriptive paragraph we store locally for display on the individual contract page.

Those descriptions are truncated to the first 500 characters on import, cut at a sentence boundary where possible, with a trailing ellipsis. In practice this preserves the substantive summary (what was bought, from whom, for what purpose) and drops the long tail of boilerplate terms and conditions that often runs to several thousand characters. Readers wanting the full description can follow the "View original notice" link on the detail page, which goes straight to the primary source. Searches on our contracts page only match the kept portion — so keywords that only ever appear deep in contract T&Cs (e.g. "force majeure", "indemnification") will now return no hits. Searches against what the contract is for — services, suppliers, subject areas — are unaffected.

How current is the data?

OpenRealm keeps a local copy of each source and refreshes it on a schedule, so what you see can lag the primary record by up to the interval below. Refreshes are checked automatically every day, and we are alerted if any dataset falls behind.

• Members, Register of Interests, ministerial posts, party leaders — daily.
• Each member's profile, voting record, speeches and written questions — refreshed every 3 days, so these panels can be up to 3 days behind Parliament's own site. This keeps the load on our hosting and on Parliament's servers modest. The official record is always one click away.
• Bills, divisions browser, petitions, Hansard browser, What's On — fetched live, cached for up to a few hours.
• Public contracts — daily from Contracts Finder.
• Commons votes and party cohesion — daily.
• Political donations — checked weekly. The Electoral Commission publishes party donations quarterly, around two months after each quarter ends, so recent donations will not appear anywhere until then. Party pages show the date the register was last checked.
• MP expenses (IPSA) — checked weekly; IPSA publishes new claims periodically through the year.
• Senior civil servants — weekly.
• Crime, economic and national statistics — weekly to monthly, following the publishers' own release cycles. Census 2021 figures are fixed.

What this site deliberately does not do

• We do not draw conclusions of fact about named individuals.
• We do not publish accusations. Every observation is framed as something a reader may wish to check.
• We do not claim causation between a declared interest and a vote or a speech. Declaration and behaviour are two separate observations; the relationship between them is for the reader to judge.
• We do not moralise. A declared interest does not imply an opinion about whether the member should or should not hold it. That is a democratic question, not a technical one.
• We do not track members' private lives, family, health, sexuality, or any protected characteristic.
• We do not publish a "worst offenders" list. The site does contain sorted views — the Pay directory ranks MPs by public-record compensation, the Donations tab sums Electoral Commission disclosures — but these are arithmetic orderings of figures that are already on the public record, not editorial judgements about which members are "worst". The order the figures fall in is what it is; we do not add a moral gloss on top.

How to read what the site shows you

If you are a member of the public: treat what you see here as a convenient entry point into the primary public record. If something looks interesting, click through to the source on Parliament's website and read the original. Our job is to save you time, not to tell you what to think.

If you are a journalist or researcher: treat every observation here as a lead worth pursuing, not as a story in itself. The underlying records we surface are suitable for citation; our analytical layer is not. If you want to cite an overlap or an AI opinion, verify it against the primary sources first and attribute the claim to your own reporting, not to us.

If you are a named member or their representative: every entry on this site links to the source from which it was drawn. If you believe the automated analysis has represented your declared interest unfairly, the takedown process described on the About page disables the AI output for that entry in two clicks, pending review. The underlying declaration itself remains visible exactly as you filed it with the Register.

Further reading

• The Register of Members' Financial Interests — primary source
• Hansard — the official record of Parliament
• TheyWorkForYou — mySociety's twenty-year-old transparency project
• The Code of Conduct for Members
• Defamation Act 2013 — the legal framework we work within

Corrections, feature requests and data-quality reports go through the corrections form. General questions about the methodology: info@openrealm.co.uk.