Accessing Government by Paying Politicians: Evidence from the UK House of Commons

Legal payments made by interest groups and businesses to British Members of Parliament (MPs) are commonly reported, but weak disclosure rules have prevented this information from being properly evaluated. This paper seeks to remedy this blind spot about the influence of money in Westminster. We process the unstructured UK Register of Members’ Financial Interests into a novel dataset (2008-2024) using large language models, achieving an estimated accuracy of 97.4%. In so doing, we generate the most comprehensive record of money given by organizations to British MPs that have ever existed, including pay per hour metrics. We find that MPs’ pay for outside employment averages £207 per hour, which is more than 5 times the official hourly compensation for MPs. In a Difference-in-Differences design, employing a Fixed Effects Counterfactual Estimator (FEct), we find that organisations that pay MPs gain a 46% increase in meetings with government, raising the question of whether moonlighting politicians are acting as door-openers. We also find temporal heterogeneity, with an effect spike during the COVID pandemic, potentially indicative that firms with pre-existing connections were even better able to lobby under such turbulent times. In a polity that prohibits paid advocacy and in which contributions to political parties are reputed to have little effect, these relationships have clear implications for the role that money plays in accessing important decisionmakers inside government.