Sky News Profile picture
Jan 8 11 tweets 5 min read
🟣 📣 The Westminster Accounts are live.

Sky News and Tortoise Media have created the first database showing the scale of money entering UK politics.

Use our tool to search for your MP and find out who has given them money 👇

#westminsteraccounts
❓ So how was this done? In this thread we’ll break down the key elements 🧵

But first, @SamCoatesSky explains why the #westminsteraccounts matter ⬇️
🟣 The Register

This is where MPs record how much money is being donated to them and who is paying them for their second jobs.

This information is all in the public domain online, but not in a form that lets you easily collate or compare entries

#westminsteraccounts
👀 It's like having everything recorded in different files rather than a single spreadsheet - but the Westminster Accounts changes that.

Over many months, Sky News and Tortoise have put that information into a single searchable database

#westminsteraccounts
The data comes from the Register of Members' Financial Interests, party political donation data from the Electoral Commission, and the Register of All Party Parliamentary Groups

#westminsteraccounts
🟣 650,000 entries

To do that we needed to write code to 'scrape' more than 650,000 entries from official websites and classify them

#westminsteraccounts

news.sky.com/story/inside-t…
🟣 Checking the data

Each entry can be broken into around five or six pieces of data - 175,000 data points. With a data set that large, even a small percentage of errors could be significant

#westminsteraccounts
👓 That meant we had to have a team check each line of data manually several times.

And once that was done, doing it all again for good measure

#westminsteraccounts
🟣 Long live the spreadsheet

Wherever possible, we have stuck with whatever is in the public domain, so changes to the official reporting need to be updated before the Westminster Accounts will be.

And the system will be updated on an ongoing basis…

#westminsteraccounts
Every time a new register or version is published, the data will be collected, cleaned, tested and then added to the database

#westminsteraccounts
The Westminster Accounts database is just one click away ⏬

#westminsteraccounts

news.sky.com/westminsteracc…

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More from @SkyNews

Jan 8
💰 Ever wondered how much money MPs make outside their parliamentary salary❓

A joint investigation by Sky News and Tortoise Media found that the top 20 MP earners made close to two thirds of all of the outside earnings since December 2019

#westminsteraccounts
The #westminsteraccounts show that the majority of the money went to Tory politicians - a total of £15.2m - while Labour MPs earned an additional £1.2m above the £84,144 salary for the day job.

🧵 Here we reveal the top earners in Westminster 👇
🔵The top earner is Theresa May who received the most money, earning £2,550,876 since December 2019.

Her biggest pay cheque came from Cambridge Speaker Series, who gave her £408,200 for six talks in California, as well as flights and accommodation

#westminsteraccounts
Read 16 tweets
Dec 5, 2022
The UK is facing a wave of strikes this winter as workers from different industries are set to walk out over pay and conditions.

Here's a list of who is striking, when and why 👇 news.sky.com/story/which-in…
🚄 Rail

The RMT is asking for a 7% pay rise, job security and working conditions to be protected. The union representing train drivers, Aslef, is asking for a "proper" pay rise

📅 Dec 11-12 (just Avanti West Coast), 13-14, 16-17
📅 Jan 3-4, 6-7

Eurostar
📅 Dec 16, 18, 22-23
🚌 Bus

Unite members working on Abellio-run buses in south and west London, and on Metroline buses in north and west London, are striking over a pay dispute.

Abellio
📅 Dec 9-10, 16-17

Metroline
📅 Dec 8-9, 15-16

Stagecoach (Sunderland)
📅 Dec 23-24, 26-27
Read 17 tweets
Dec 2, 2022
A number of children have been confirmed to have died from Strep A in the UK.

Here are some key questions answered around the bacterial infection
🔴 What is Strep A and how does it spread?

Strep A - or Group A streptococcus (GAS) - is a type of bacterium found in the throat and on the skin.

It can cause a range of different illnesses of the nose, throat and lungs.

But, in most people it does not cause any symptoms
🔴 How does it spread?

It can be spread through coughs, sneezes and skin-to-skin contact
Read 11 tweets
Nov 25, 2022
🏘️ An extra £118 million pounds will be spent this year on temporary accommodation, such as hotels and B&Bs by councils, a Sky News investigation has found.

@SkyNewsAdele breaks down what she has discovered 🔽
Sally and her son Ollie lived in a hotel, then a B&B, after they were made homeless through a ‘no fault’ section 21 eviction.

They were told they would not be eligible for help from authorities until they became homeless - which Sally described as “traumatising”
Sally is now in rented accommodation paid for partly with her housing allowance but the rest is topped up by the local council.

She's one of thousands going through a cycle of eviction, homelessness, temporary accommodation and then back into an expensive private rental sector
Read 11 tweets
Nov 24, 2022
🔴Who killed this man?

@SkyNews investigates a killing in Iran, a country where violence is escalating as protests against the regime surge
🇮🇷 His name is Motaleb Saeed-Pirou and he was a married father-of-two living in Baneh, a city in the Kurdish region of Iran
After stopping by to catch up with friends, Motaleb was getting back into his car parked in a side street in a quiet part of town.

What happened next was captured on CCTV – something his attackers were apparently not aware of
Read 14 tweets
Nov 24, 2022
David looks like any normal healthy, happy five-year-old boy.

But he was rushed to St Mary’s Hospital two weeks ago and admitted to the hospital’s paediatric intensive care unit during what his mother describes as a “terrifying” ordeal.

@ashishskynews spoke to his mother 👇
🦠David has sickle cell disease.

His mother Bola monitors him very closely and when he told her he was in excruciating pain, saying his ‘bones were broken’ she knew his little body was under attack
She took him to her local hospital where doctors diagnosed him with the flu.

That meant with his underlying health conditions David was in excruciating pain and his health was under serious threat
Read 13 tweets

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