A project that web-scrapes publicly available 'Financial Interest' information about UK MPs and provides some insights into that data.
- The project initialy scrapes all the necisarry links from this contents page, matching it with party and constituancy data from TheyWorkForYou.
- Each MP page is then webscraped using Selenium and BeautifulSoup. Data is then applied to MP objects held in a dictionary.
- MatPlotLib and general data analysis can then be used to see broader trends across this dataset.
In the 2021 to 2022 tax year, almost 10 million pounds were accepted across the UK House of Commons in MP financial interests. Of this, nearly three quarters (75%) went to Conservative MP's, despite them only holding just over half (54%) of the House of Commons seats.
On average, an MP in this tax year received £15,400 in financial interests. However, the average MP for both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties recived over 30% more than that (£20,887 and £20,302 respectively).
The four MP's with the highest financial interests were all members of the conservative party. Combined, these MPs recieved over three million pounds. Among them are former PM Theresa May who had stepped down shortly before the tax year began, and Sir Geoffrey Cox.
