RESEARCH / VERSION 1.1 / 16 OCTOBER 2026
Political donations, registered interests and disclosed meetings
Which disclosed records can be linked—and which cannot?
Coverage: 9 selected organisation profiles and 14 events: six verified donor-to-parliamentary-interest identity links and three meeting-only profiles. No verified donation-to-ministerial-meeting match. The complete DESNZ quarterly return is a separate companion dataset.
Findings and their limits
Six supported donor-to-parliamentary-interest identity links; no verified donation-to-ministerial-meeting match. The nine-profile pilot contains seven parliamentary-interest events and seven meeting events. These are selected examples, not a cross-party or cross-government census.
The new companion reproduces every row of the DESNZ April–June 2026 ministerial-meetings return: 166 disclosure rows, 163 dates within the stated quarter and three source dates printed as April 2016. The latter remain flagged, not repaired. A row can cover several organisations or meetings, so 166 is not a count of unique meetings.
Inspect the complete return and its date anomalies. No donor joins are inferred from these source labels.
Cite and reuse
Civil Liberties Action (2026). Political donations, registered interests and disclosed meetings [Dataset]. Version 1.1, 2026-10-16. https://cla-political-finance.copperchime4.chatgpt.site/databases/releases/2026-10-16-v1.1/access-research.html
BibTeX RIS Full CSV Full JSON Reproducibility package
For an individual observation, cite its fixed-version record and the original source. Credit original publishers for their figures; CLA supplies the compilation, coding and stated analysis. Reuse terms.
Methods and selection
Unit of analysis
The original pilot has one organisation profile with selected events. The DESNZ companion cohort has one published return row; a row may list multiple organisations and is not one unique person or donor.
Inclusion and coverage
The nine-profile pilot is purposive: six verified legal-entity links to parliamentary interests and three meeting-only profiles. It is not party-balanced or representative. The companion cohort preserves every row of the DESNZ April–June 2026 ministerial-meetings CSV, including source anomalies.
Coding and checks
- Corporate joins require supported legal identity and a company-number allowlist to the existing Electoral Commission references. Names and brands alone are insufficient. Owners, subsidiaries, parents and individual donors are not automatically merged.
- Parliamentary interests and ministerial meetings are different event types. Organisation-level identity does not prove matching transactions. Do not add registered-interest amounts to donation income.
- All companion source rows are retained under one rule, regardless of affiliation or connections. Raw labels and dates stay available. Dates outside the declared quarter are flagged and excluded from in-period counts until resolved, not silently repaired.
- No verified donation-to-ministerial-meeting match is asserted in this release. Unmatched means identity not established here, not no donations or no relationship.
Selection-history limitation
The first pilots were assembled through purposive discovery and source checking. Their complete original search-engine query/results history was not retained, so the first selection cannot be replayed exactly. This limitation is not repaired by writing a retrospective systematic-search claim. Published records and transformations can be reproduced from the supplied files; prospective expansion protocols below define the next collection work.
Prospective expansion protocol
Extend a declared department-quarter frame completely, preserving original files, checksums, row numbers and all anomalies. Reconcile legal identities separately and publish each decision's evidence. Record departmental exclusions and publication lags. Do not interpret disclosed meeting frequency as influence or use politically selected subsets as a ranking.
Interpretation limits
Disclosed returns are not all access. The pilot cannot establish improper influence, causation, transaction equivalence or a complete cross-government comparison.
Dates and accountability
Release date is the date of this publication. reviewed_at records a stated evidence check, not proof that every fact remains current. Publication date, event date, reference period, document version and source-check date are separate fields.
Published by Civil Liberties Action. Compilation, source retrieval and drafting used AI assistance. Automated integrity checks and additional source checks are described below; no independent external or specialist review is claimed.
Download the protocol and dictionary
Data dictionary
| Field | Definition |
|---|---|
| id / record_id | Stable record identifier; retained across releases where the unit remains the same. |
| release / version | Publication date and release version, separate from the date of underlying evidence. |
| record_url / citation | Fixed-version record link and suggested citation. |
| category / geography / period | Display group, actual coverage and source reference period; not a harmonised statistical panel. |
| reviewed_at | Date of the recorded source check, subject to its stated scope. |
| details / sources | Labelled observations and original URLs, titles and locators. |
| limitations | Record-specific boundary on interpretation. |
| raw | Underlying typed source/coding fields; null remains missing, not zero. |
| donation_record_ids / company_number | Explicit allowlist of existing EC records supported by legal identity. |
| events.type | Registered parliamentary interest or disclosed ministerial meeting. |
| source_record_ordinal | Companion cohort row position in the retained source file. |
| date_within_stated_quarter / quality_flags | Exact parsed source date and anomaly flags; no year correction is inferred. |
Fixed-version records
| Record | Reference period | Status |
|---|---|---|
| IPGL Limited | 2024-09-12 | Verified legal-entity link |
| Bestway Wholesale Limited | 2024-09-25 | Verified legal-entity link |
| Labour Together Limited (now ThinkLabour Limited) | 2024-10-18 | Verified legal-entity link |
| Public Digital Limited | 2024-04-09 | Verified legal-entity link |
| Faculty Science Limited | 2024-05-01 | Verified legal-entity link |
| J.C. Bamford Excavators Limited | 2024-09-19 | Verified legal-entity link |
| Ecotricity — meeting label | 2026-03-12 | Meeting record; donor link unverified |
| Unite the Union — meeting label | 2024-10-30 | Meeting record; donor link unverified |
| GMB — meeting label | 2026-02-23 | Meeting record; donor link unverified |
Corrections, funding and interests
Send the record identifier, proposed correction and supporting primary source to policy@civillibertiesaction.org.uk. Corrections are assessed against the same evidence rules for all subjects. Responses, reversals and corrected outcomes receive the same factual prominence as initial decisions. Substantive changes require a dated new release and a change-log entry; the old files remain available.
CLA's existing funding and interests statement applies. Its founder has disclosed Labour Party membership. The same inclusion, identity and correction rules apply regardless of political affiliation. Read the declaration.