Thread by @SkyNews

🟣 📣 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…