Promise vs practice: Why Britain's new ministerial gift register misses the mark

When Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer released his first ministerial code in November 2024, it was his chance to deliver a new focus on standards and integrity in government. 

At the time, Labour’s frontbench was under the spotlight for accepting generous gifts and hospitality, such as gig tickets and items of expensive clothing. In the new code, the Prime Minister promised to introduce a new register of gifts and hospitality; increase the publication frequency from quarterly to monthly; and expand the detail of disclosures.

At the end of January this year, the Government released its first set of departmental transparency records under these new rules, including details of ministerial meetings with lobbyists and what appears to be the new so-called “Register” of gifts and hospitality. Given the Prime Minister cited the latter as a solution to his first ethics scandal since entering Number 10, it’s worth checking how it delivers (or not).

The ‘register’ is several webpages each containing 50 files disclosing ministers’ gifts and hospitality received during each month. As promised, the value of the hospitality is now also included – a welcome improvement.

But now let’s look at where it falls short.

Whilst hosting the files on one page instead of spreading them across departmental websites (all 20+ of them) is an improvement, this is not quite what we’d anticipated. This approach still requires researchers and journalists to download and analyse dozens of files per month, making it difficult to track patterns or identify trends. It also begs the question why the Government can’t just publish them as one file, as the House of Commons does monthly.

Additionally, the previous Government had pledged to introduce a “single database” for collating and publishing departments’ transparency returns covering gifts, hospitality, travel and meetings. We envisaged that this would be more akin to the Electoral Commission’s donations database, allowing users to search across all departments simultaneously, filtering by donor, recipient, or type of gift. It seems for now we’re in no such luck. Comparatively, what’s been delivered falls well short of this functionality.

The limitations of the Government’s new approach to disclosure become more obvious when we look at what hasn’t been included in this update. Despite several reviews also calling for the ministerial meetings data to be published monthly (including the Committee on Standards in Public Life's "Upholding Standards in Public Life" report, the Boardman Review into Supply Chain Finance, and the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee's report into lobbying and influence), it's to remain on the slower, quarterly schedule for now and spread across 20+ different files. This difference in transparency standards remains a frustrating and unnecessary inconsistency.

When the Labour got into hot water last year and committed to being more candid about ministerial gifts and hospitality, we were hopeful as to what form this may take. For years, parliamentary and government reviews have proposed improving departmental transparency returns, and this was an opportunity to do so. Unfortunately, what we’ve seen so far is more like a tinkering at the edges rather than substantive change.

As the UK’s latest CPI score shows, the UK is in a rut when it comes to its reputation for good governance. Ministers should not be complacent that perceptions will change on their own without action. If they want to dig Britain out of this hole, then they need to think bigger and bolder than what we’ve seen so far.