Open Access UK is a free-to-use transparency tool. It allows you to understand who is meeting with UK Government ministers, Scottish Government ministers, and Members of the Scottish Parliament, when and for what purpose.

We source this data from UK Government transparency disclosures and the Scottish statutory register of lobbyists. We collect, harmonise and make this data readily available so it is easier for you to search and analyse.

Open Access UK includes a range of functions, allowing users to:

search, rank and filter the data

download the data in Comma Separated Value (CSV) format

share links to specific meetings on social media

submit pre-populated freedom of information requests via WhatDoTheyKnow.com

We use cutting-edge AI based large language models to automatically categorise lobbying meetings. These models are great at categorising lobbying descriptions because they are trained on two key things: understanding language like humans do and processing vast amounts of information across many fields. They combine their language skills with their broad knowledge to make connections, helping them spot the real topic of a meeting even when it's not clearly stated. Our system analyses the meeting descriptions, hosts, and lobbyists to determine what each meeting is about. We currently use four categories: Health, Housing, Defence and Climate. To make this work, we first taught our models using 2,000 real lobbying meetings that were manually labeled by our team. This training helps the AI understand the nuances of lobbying language and topics. Now, whenever new meeting data is released, our AI can quickly sort through it and categorise each meeting. This approach is highly accurate, but like any AI system, it might occasionally misclassify a meeting.

Politicians and public officials are expected to observe the Seven Principles of Public Life and their relevant codes of conduct:

• UK ministers
• UK Parliament (Commons and Lords)
• Scottish ministers
• Scottish Parliament

When the letter and spirit of these rules are not followed, it can give rise to the perception that those entrusted with public office are abusing it for private gain. This can include:

• using their position to solicit donations in return for political access whilst they are acting in their capacity as a senior member of a political party
• bringing friends or close associates along to official meetings, which could provide them with preferential business opportunities
• using their time in office to secure future employment with those they interact with in their official duties

There are also concerns that disproportionate access to decision-makers is secured by powerful private interests, which can distort government policy to the detriment of the public interest.

This tool can help enable citizens, journalists, and civil society to identify and investigate potential wrongdoing, and seek action when politicians, public officials, or those they meet have acted improperly.

We have included a link to WhatDoTheyKnow to help users make Freedom of Information requests on any meetings they want to interrogate in more detail.

UK

The Ministerial Code requires UK Government departments to publish the details of ministers’ meetings with external organisations quarterly. This should cover all external meetings ministers have while on official business. It does not include meetings ministers have in their capacity as a member of a political party. Government Digital Service provides departments with guidance on how to publish this data.

Compliance with the code is overseen by the Propriety and Ethics Team in the Cabinet Office.

All data on Ministers’ meetings with external organisations is published on UK Government departments’ websites..

Scotland

The Lobbying (Scotland) Act 2016 requires lobbyists to report information about face-to-face and video conference calls with Scottish Ministers and Members of the Scottish Parliament within six months of it taking place. Lobbyists must submit details about these engagements to the Scottish Parliament, who publishes these returns on the Lobbying Register. You can access the Lobbying Register. Lobbying via phone call, messaging, letter, email or other forms of communication that are not face-to-face or video conference are not currently regulated, and therefore not on the register.

Currently the tool includes UK Government data from 2012. We aim to publish updates to UK ministerial meetings data within a month of their publication on departments' websites. Data on meetings between 2010 to 2017 were collected using scripts developed by the University of Oxford. The GitHub repository for these scripts can be found here. There are many inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the original data that we have sought to address through manual checks and, where necessary, manual data entry.

CHANGES WE HAVE MADE

Corrected dates where this is an obvious error, for example, if a meeting is reported to have been published in 2104.

Completed incomplete date values, for example, if a meeting is reported to have taken place in June and no specific day has been given. As a default we have set these dates to the first day of the relevant month, for example, "June 2017" is corrected to "01/06/2017".

Standardised the names of ministers so it is easier for users to search.

Used data from data.parliament.uk to categorise the seniority of UK Government ministers.

Included the unique identifier data.parliament.uk assigns to Parliamentarians in our data to allow users to link this dataset with other data published by the UK Parliament and third parties, like mySociety's TheyWorkForYou tool.

CHANGES WE HAVE NOT MADE

We have not tried to standardise the names of organisations meeting with UK Government ministers.

DISCLAIMER

Although we have taken all reasonable measures to ensure the data we publish is as accurate as possible, we recommend you always check any findings from the tool against the source data on UK Government departments' websites and the Scottish Register of Lobbyists.

LICENCE

The tool contains public sector information licenced under the Open Government Licence v3.0 and UK Parliamentary information licenced under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0. The data is published under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL).