Update - Data removed for review
The data that was added to the Who’s Lobbying site yesterday, 25 February, related to public affairs firms on the APPC register, their clients and staff has been removed from the site today for review.
The existing data on ministerial meetings with outside interests remains on the site.
Who’s Lobbying is an experiment to use software to automate the combination of publicly available information on lobbying activity to make it easier for the public to explore and access. The goal was to improve transparency.
Unfortunately the lack of unique identifiers for organisations and people, combined with possibly conflicting information in different locations, makes it difficult to accurately automate the connection of different datasets. Regrettable mistakes were made yesterday, which we apologise for.
There is promising potential for the approach of joining data from different sources. However we really need public disclosure publications to include unique identifiers for organisations, such as company and charity registration numbers, to allow better identification of the entities being referred to.
