• Transparency International

• Transparency International UK

• Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI)

• Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards

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Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I’m Ruth Fox.

Mark D’Arcy: And I’m Mark D’Arcy. Now, Parliament’s not sitting this week, but at a time when there’s so much discussion about the money, gifts, and hospitality received by politicians from Sir Keir Starmer to Nigel Farage, we thought it was a good moment to look at the transparency rules for MPs. And who better to talk to than the former Lib Dem MP Duncan Hames, now Director of UK Policy at Transparency International.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, this is a very live issue in British politics at the moment, because the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards is investigating the £5 million gift that Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has received from the [00:01:00] cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne, who lives in Thailand. Now, this case raises all kinds of questions about whether the gift should have been made public so that the voters knew about it, and whether it should have been declared on Parliament’s register of financial interests.

Mark D’Arcy: So what are the rules MPs are expected to follow? Under the House of Commons’ code of conduct, MPs must register all their current financial interests, as well as any registerable benefits received in the 12 months before their election, within a month of being elected. After that, any new interests or changes must be registered within 28 days. Gifts or benefits worth more than £300 from sources outside the UK must also be registered. Crucially, the code says MPs must declare any financial interest or material benefit that might reasonably be thought by others to influence their actions, speeches, or votes in Parliament, or their wider conduct as an MP.

Ruth Fox: And separately, the Political Parties, Elections, and Referendums Act requires donations made to [00:02:00] members of a political party to be declared to the Electoral Commission. And there’s also talk in Philip Rycroft’s recent review into foreign financial influence in UK politics of capping foreign donations at £100,000.

Mark D’Arcy: But before we get to all that, we began by asking Duncan Hames the most fundamental question: Why does transparency about money in public life matter at all?

Duncan Hames: Our elected politicians are there to serve the public, and it’s really important if they’re making rules, laws that affect all of us, that we can have confidence that they’re doing so objectively and with independence. So, to protect against situations where politicians might be serving the interests of their close associates, parliaments around the world have rules which require some transparency to expose who is giving them money, whether they are becoming enriched in the course of holding public office. And these [00:03:00] are important safeguards against corruption, and that’s why we ask members of parliament to complete declarations for a register of their financial interests.

Mark D’Arcy: And what we’ve had in recent years are all sorts of instances where people have looked at the gifts or benefits that politicians have received and thought, “Hang on a minute.” Whether it was Sir Keir Starmer being provided with suits and spectacles during the general election by a Labour peer, whether it was Nigel Farage receiving this £5 million gift, people start to look at those and wonder. Private Eye, almost every issue, has a little section where it draws a link between politicians asking particular questions and registered benefits that they have been seen to receive by interests that might be interested in the answers to those parliamentary questions. So there’s a lot of this going on. Is it effectively regulated in your view in the Westminster Parliament?

Duncan Hames: No, we don’t think so, and there may have been a time when people believed that transparency alone would be [00:04:00] enough to incentivise people to take more care over these matters and to make sure that they didn’t get caught, and that that would deal with this problem. But, over the years, we’ve, you, as you’ve made very clear, there have been more and more cases where it’s as if this has become normalised, whether it’s MPs’ second jobs or the increasing reliance on ultra wealthy people to fund political campaigns. We published some research recently. In 2015, 1% of donations in the run-up to that general election campaign were of a £1 million or more, and at the last general election, that figure had risen to over a third of donations. And that illustrates quite how much has changed in recent years and the need to be transparent about where this money is coming from doesn’t deal with that underlying issue, that politicians are becoming very reliant on a small group of very wealthy patrons.

Mark D’Arcy: Does it almost make it worse if you know that politician [00:05:00] X is getting a large sum of money from a particular person or business? Does that actually intensify public suspicion rather than diffusing it?

Duncan Hames: Well, that’s a very good question. I think when IPSA was introduced and we had a lot more transparency about how Members of Parliament spent the funds that were available to them under expenses, it actually took the heat out of the issue. And I think perhaps the experience of the MPs’ expenses scandal also improved the behaviour, right? The decisions that were being made about what is and isn’t an appropriate expense. So I think transparency can help, but it’s a means to accountability. In an environment in which people are not experiencing any accountability, it’s insufficient. I thought it was quite frustrating watching Prime Minister’s Questions this week, where asked about the £5 million gift that Nigel Farage had received, that the Prime Minister was asking questions about why it had been kept secret. For most of the public following this story, whether [00:06:00] it’s declared or not is by the by. They want to know why it’s allowed. Why is it allowed for a politician to be given £5 million personally by a supporter? And there, there’s no amount of transparency rules that addresses that underlying question.

Ruth Fox: One of the things that the regulators in this area, Duncan, are increasingly moving to is rather than a sort of a rules-based system of, you can do this, you can’t do that, they’re moving to a sort of more principles-based system where the onus is on the individual to exercise their judgment. So things like in terms of the MPs’ code of conduct, members are required to keep in mind the purpose of the register of interests, which is to provide information about financial interests and other material benefits which a member receives, which might reasonably be thought by others to influence his or her actions, speeches, activities and so on. So the onus is on the individual member to consider that. I just wonder whether you think that’s the [00:07:00] right approach, first of all.

Duncan Hames: I don’t think so. we’ve got principles in the standards in public life, selflessness, honesty, transparency, and we have a cadre of politicians who have supposedly signed up to this in the code of conduct, but then hide behind, was this within the rules or outwith the rules.

Principles are a good basis for writing your rules, but I don’t think they’re a substitute for them. And in our view, we need to end a situation where big money filters through to our politicians and commands access, influence, in recent cases, seats in the House of Lords in our Parliament for the rest of their lives.

It’s all out there. There is enough transparency to tell us that this is happening. But there is not a will amongst our MPs, who are clearly all conflicted in this matter, to call time on it. There is legislation before MPs at the moment which could be [00:08:00] used to do that. The Labour Party manifesto committed them to tightening controls on political donations.

Other countries have introduced caps on how much anyone can give a politician or political party for their campaigns. There’s an equivalent of £50,000 cap that’s due to come into effect in Australia this summer. There’s much tighter caps in Canada. We have no cap at the moment. No limit whatsoever.

You can give a politician as much money as you have, and then we wonder why the public don’t actually think politics is serving ordinary people.

Ruth Fox: So what kind of caps would you then, looking at it from Transparency International’s perspective, and looking what’s happened around the world, what caps, what rules do you think we ought to have on what a member can accept in terms of a gift or a benefit?

Duncan Hames: We have called for a cap on donations of £10,000 annually, but the [00:09:00] government itself has recently accepted a recommendation from Philip Rycroft for a cap of £100,000 from overseas donors who are otherwise eligible to make donations in politics. And if you heard what Steve Reed, the cabinet minister responsible, said, when he was accepting that proposal, he accepts this argument that money does buy influence, that very large amounts of money can be game-changing and distorting of our politics. And Rycroft’s review worked within a remit that was specifically about foreign financial interference. But the argument is as applicable to donations from sources within the UK as from overseas. And given that the government has accepted that argument from Philip Rycroft, I think the logical thing to do would be to apply it whether it’s from the UK or abroad.

Ruth Fox: Okay. But thinking about the situation as it is now [00:10:00] rather than what we might like in the future, specifically let’s take the Nigel Farage case where he’s accepted this £5 million gift. His explanation for why it’s been given and what it may or may not have been spent on has changed a bit over the days, so we’ve not quite got clarity on that. But let’s assume at the start of the parliament when he became an MP, he’s got the code of conduct, he has to register his interests. He has to essentially make this judgment call about whether or not that gift is declarable, is registrable, is covered by the rules and principles in the code of conduct.

Now, you’ve been an MP. You’ve been in that situation of having to sit there with these forms and figure out what it is that you need to register and what you don’t. And like many of us, when you get a form, sometimes it’s not entirely clear what you have to do, and you have to sit there and think about it.

And MPs are in exactly the same position. They’re human beings who’ve got to make difficult calls, [00:11:00] but in circumstances the rest of us don’t face, where if they get it wrong, they’re going to face the opprobrium of the House and also the press and the public. So do you have any sympathy for the MPs in these situations? Do they require more guidance and support, or have they already got it and they’re not using it?

Duncan Hames: They need to take up the guidance that’s available to them. And they’re not going to be stuck on the end of a phone for hours on end, like if you call an HMRC call centre. The registrar’s office, I know from, as you say, from my time, from my own experience, will provide face-to-face private advice on any questions you might have about what you should or shouldn’t be declaring.

And, you know, they were just across the road on the parliamentary estate in my day. The month after I was elected, I declared things that I’d received prior to my election including a figure of a few thousand pounds from someone who’d provided me with a rather large volume of stamps prior to the election. And, you might think, “Oh, [00:12:00] that’s a bit ambiguous,” all the rest of it, but it was pretty straightforward to me that I ought to declare that. You can still find it online on the register, if you’re interested. So he doesn’t need to struggle over this question. You can get advice from the parliamentary authorities.

Ruth Fox: Why was it straightforward to you that, I don’t know how large a book of stamps were, but why was that obviously registrable? You were using it for campaign –

Duncan Hames: Because it relates to my political activities. Just as having a security detail wandering around the streets of Clacton or wherever else you might be is clearly related to his political activities.

Mark D’Arcy: Now, we may have a bit of a special case coming up in terms of transparency in a little while. If, for example, just speaking entirely hypothetically, someone were to set up a campaign to get an individual elected as the leader of their political party and were to attract funding so they had a snazzy backdrop and a social media campaign and all the other accoutrements that you need when you’re running for a party leadership, is [00:13:00] that something that’s already adequately covered by the rules? Because I could imagine most politicians would be fairly grateful to people who provided a large amount of dosh to help them become prime minister.

Ruth Fox: I can’t think who you think you’re talking of, Mark.

Duncan Hames: There is an irony here that those politicians who might become leaders or deputy leaders of their party are particularly exposed because of their fundraising, independently of their party, for their own personal campaigns for these positions. It’s been a problem for the Labour Party in the past, in former deputy leader elections of the Labour Party, but also in Wales. They lost a leader in Wales who had been generously supported in his political activities in the context of his leadership campaign. And, not that long ago in the Conservative Party, the way their leadership campaign was run, there was a requirement for candidates to pay quite a substantial amount of money to party HQ towards the cost of running the leadership election.

So we kind of bake in this [00:14:00] need for politicians to have patrons, to have financial backers. And as I’ve explained, that comes with a corruption risk. Perhaps the smarter approach is for the political parties to try and rein in the amount of money that gets spent on their own internal elections, to make it possible to fund them through a broader base of small donations that wouldn’t be a cause of concern for anyone.

Mark D’Arcy: So funded by widow’s mites, so to speak, rather than mega-donors.

Duncan Hames: If everyone’s donation was tiny and there were large numbers of them, we wouldn’t really care where the money was coming from on any given donation. Why would we need to? The reason why we care about large amounts of money being handed over to politicians or to their political parties is because everyone really knows that it builds a dependency relationship.

And even if nothing is explicitly asked for one way or the other, it creates a very uncomfortable [00:15:00] position where politicians know that they could lose the favour of someone they’ve become dependent upon because of decisions they’re making.

Mark D’Arcy: Let’s talk about the punishment side of this now. Every now and then, a politician is found to have broken the rules, and it’s not just an inadvertent breach, “Whoops, my administrative assistant slipped up”, it’s someone’s quite clearly driven a coach and horses through the rules. Are the penalties for that tough enough? I mean, there’s the humiliation, of having to make a statement apologising to the House. There’s the prospect of being suspended from the Commons for a period. It only really becomes existential if they’re suspended for long enough to trigger the recall mechanism in their constituencies, where they might have to face a by-election.

Duncan Hames: Yes, so there is an inequality here because it becomes a political process once people are gathering signatures for a petition. I recall Ian Paisley Jnr narrowly missed out on a recall vote in his constituency because the petition was just shy [00:16:00] of the threshold required, and so he didn’t experience a sanction that other MPs have feared, and there are other MPs who have resigned at that point. So what we end up with is quite a political process, and so your political weight starts to carry in your favour.

We also have a problem in the House of Lords where you don’t have recall. You can be suspended from the House of Lords, but when your suspension finishes, you go back in and it’s all as it was before. So I think there are some issues, and I think in light of the Mandelson saga, the government is looking afresh at whether there are lasting enough penalties available for misconduct in the House of Lords as well.

Mark D’Arcy: But is there a disparity between what the public expects and the level of sanction they actually see? The public wants a head on a spike and it gets a slap on the wrist.

Duncan Hames: Yes, I think there’s been a tendency to have a kind of multiple strikes approach. [00:17:00] the first time you get it wrong, maybe you know, you’re given a bit of benefit of the doubt. You know, one of Boris Johnson’s problems was that he had messed up what he was meant to be declaring previously, and eventually it was not his first encounter with the standards process when he eventually ran out of road. And of course, Nigel Farage has previously made errors for which the rectification process has been offered to him and he’s taken up. But one has to wonder whether the cumulative effect of multiple breaches of the code of conduct will catch up with him.

Mark D’Arcy: To mistake it once is unfortunate. To constantly get your declaration wrong begins to look like a bit more than carelessness, is the logic there.

Duncan Hames: Yeah. But mean, ultimately, for the most serious offending, there are some very serious sanctions. Nathan Gill discovered that last year when, he went to prison for, what he admitted were several counts of, bribery. The sums of money involved there, [00:18:00] according to the police, were, not more than £50,000 in total, and yet he had a at least 10-year prison sentence, for what he did in the European Parliament, having received those funds from those with sympathies for the Kremlin. One of the things people often observe in this situation is that sometimes it can be relatively small amounts of money that are enough to get our politicians into a lot of trouble.

Mark D’Arcy: Just a final thought, really. do you get the impression that the tide is running against you, that politics is becoming more rather than less corrupt, despite all the attempts to build up transparency? And where on the kind of Richter scale of corrupt politics does Britain come?

Duncan Hames: Transparency International publishes a corruption perceptions index of countries, and the UK over the last decade or so has been slipping down that index, albeit from a very clean, high position. I think we’re [00:19:00] now 20th equal amongst countries in that index. I’m sure we are fortunate to have many honourable public servants and politicians who are not corrupt and don’t intend to engage in any kind of corrupt activity, and we also have some politicians who do the wrong thing and who perhaps didn’t think they were being corrupt at the time, right? Owen Paterson was found at fault for paid advocacy in the Parliament, but, to the very end, he was defending that he believed that what he was doing, even though it was paid advocacy, was in the public interest.

So I try to think of it less in terms of individual politicians and more about the way the system works. Do we have norms which allow things to happen which are contrary to the public interest? Does the way we fund our politics cause our politicians to be captured even unintentionally? Does the way lobbying [00:20:00] happens in our Parliament mean that, without public scrutiny, arguments are made which are not in the public interest?

So yes, things have been slipping away from us in a number of places around the world of late. But every so often, the public turn around and say, “We’ve had enough of this,” and that’s what happened in Hungary just a few weeks ago. People thought that the Orbánisation of Orbán, the then Prime Minister of Hungary, was irreversible. And then eventually, at the ballot box, the electorate said, “No, we’ve had enough.” my warning to our current cohort of MPs is they don’t want to be on the receiving end of that. They ought to be on the charge to clean up our politics.

Mark D’Arcy: Duncan Hames, thanks very much indeed for joining Ruth and myself on the pod today.

Ruth Fox: Thanks, Duncan.

Duncan Hames: My pleasure.

Ruth Fox: Well, Mark, all eyes are going to be on the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Daniel Greenberg, as he, conducts his investigation into this [00:21:00] £5 million gift that Nigel Farage has received. I suspect it’s probably going to take quite a while for him to get to the bottom of it. And there’ll be no doubt a lot of back and forth with Mr Farage about the detail of it, so we’ll wait to see what happens and what he decides.

Mark D’Arcy: And meanwhile, Parliament will be back next week, and so will we, looking at all the latest parliamentary issues to have broken over this half-term interval and beyond.

Ruth Fox: See you next week.

Mark D’Arcy: See you then.

Outro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm, or find us on social media @HansardSociety.