How to use transparenC
transparenC pulls live data from Parliament, the Electoral Commission, NHS England, the Environment Agency, ONS and more — and puts it in one place, free of spin. This guide walks you through every tool.
Set your constituency
The first thing to do is enter your postcode in My Area. This unlocks personalised data across the whole site:
- ✓Your MP's name, party, photo and contact details
- ✓Every vote your MP has cast in the House of Commons
- ✓Your MP's declared financial interests
- ✓Your local police force on the Stop & Search page — auto-selected
- ✓A direct link to Write to Them with your constituency pre-filled
Your postcode is sent directly from your browser to postcodes.io — an open-source lookup service built on ONS open data — solely to find your constituency. It never touches our servers and is never logged by us. The result is saved only in your browser, and you can clear it at any time.
Browse by issue
If you care about a specific topic — NHS, Housing, Economy, Crime, Environment, Immigration or Education — start at Issues. Each issue page shows you:
What the data says right now, in plain English
Every pledge from every major party, with delivery status
Stories from multiple outlets, ranked by how many are covering it
Jump straight to the relevant tool for that issue
Parliament, votes & committees
Three tools covering what Parliament is actually doing — what laws are being debated, how MPs vote, and what scrutiny committees are finding.
Legislation in motion
Every active bill passing through Parliament right now — current stage, last updated, straight from the Parliament Bills API.
How MPs actually vote
Every House of Commons division live from Parliament. See the ayes, noes, and which way each vote went. Use My Area to see your own MP's record.
Parliamentary scrutiny reports
Commons and Lords committee reports — often the most rigorous analysis of government performance. Reports are published here but rarely covered in the press.
What the public is demanding
Open petitions sorted by signatures. 10,000 signatures gets a UK Government response; 100,000 means the petition is considered for debate (debates are usual but not automatic).
The economic scorecard
Live ONS figures and Treasury data — the numbers politicians argue about, without the spin.
GDP, inflation, wages & debt
Six live ONS time-series with sparklines: GDP growth, CPI inflation, unemployment, real wages, net debt and the government deficit. Hover any card to share the stat.
Where your £1.2 trillion goes
HM Treasury PESA data: total managed expenditure by government department. Health, welfare, defence, education — with resource vs capital breakdown.
Tip: The deficit and debt figures on the economy page are often confused by politicians. "Deficit" is the annual gap between spending and tax revenue. "Debt" is the accumulated total owed. A falling deficit means the government is still borrowing, just less than before.
Contracts, donations & influence
Six tools for tracing where public money goes and who has access to government. These are the hardest things to find on GOV.UK — we pull them into one place.
Top recipients & direct awards
Every contract over £1m awarded in the last 10 months via Contracts Finder. Direct awards are flagged — they're legal, but they bypass open competition. Top suppliers aggregated by total value.
Who funds the parties
The Electoral Commission register of political donations. See who is bankrolling which party, sorted by amount. Covers all regulated political parties.
What MPs are claiming
IPSA 2024-25 expense totals per MP, sorted by total spend. Covers office costs, staffing, accommodation, travel and other claims.
Who ministers are meeting
Quarterly returns showing which companies, organisations and lobbyists are getting access to government ministers. Published under transparency obligations.
Paid influence register
Organisations legally required to disclose paid lobbying activity under the Transparency of Lobbying Act 2014. Who is paying whom to lobby government.
Ministers into private sector
ACOBA publishes every case of a minister or senior official taking a private-sector role after leaving government, along with the conditions it set. We show the register; you draw your own conclusions.
Cross-reference tip: Use the Cross-Reference tool to search a company or person name across contracts, donations, ACOBA and the lobbying register at once. Useful when a company appears in the news.
NHS, environment, policing & welfare
Real-world data on the services that affect everyone, from NHS waiting times to sewage discharge hours to racial disparity in policing.
Waiting times & performance
A&E four-hour target performance (the 95% target has not been met since 2015), elective waiting lists and latest NHS England statistics.
Water companies & raw sewage
Environment Agency EDM data: every storm overflow site in England, how many hours each water company discharged untreated sewage in 2024, and into which waterway. Hover stats to share on X.
Racial disparity in policing
Every stop and search in England and Wales by ethnicity, outcome and object of search. If you've set your postcode in My Area, your local force is selected automatically.
Benefits conditionality
DWP Universal Credit sanctions data: how many claimants are sanctioned, for how long, and the official recorded reason categories.
Freedom of Information refusals
Which public bodies refuse the most FOI requests? The Cabinet Office league table of government departments that withhold information most often.
Cross-reference & major projects
Power tools for deeper investigation — searching across multiple databases at once and tracking project cost overruns.
One search, four databases
Type a company or person name to search contracts, donations, ACOBA and the lobbying register simultaneously. Good starting point when a name appears in the news.
HS2, Hinkley C & beyond
Every IPA Government Major Projects Portfolio entry — delivery confidence RAG status (Green to Red), whole-life cost estimate, and department. Includes a notable cost overruns section for the most notorious cases.
What you can do with this data
Data without action is just noise. Every page has an action bar at the bottom.
Every data page has a 'Write to your MP' link that goes to Write to Them — the easiest way to send a letter to your representative. If you've set your postcode in My Area, your MP is pre-selected.
Pages covering NHS, sewage, sanctions and stop & search include a pre-drafted letter template. Click 'Draft letter', review and personalise it, copy, then paste into Write to Them. Takes 2 minutes.
Click 'Share on X' in the action bar for a pre-formatted post with the figure and its source. Sharing accurate, sourced data is one of the most useful things you can do.
Where the data comes from
Every piece of data on transparenC comes from official UK public sources. No third-party data aggregators, no scraping. Built on open public data under the Open Government Licence v3.0 and the Open Parliament Licence — see the per-source licence table.
Where a number can settle it, the number does. Where judgement is unavoidable — such as assessing whether a pledge is on track — the rubric, the evidence, and every status change are published on our methodology page, and anyone can challenge an assessment with evidence. All parties are held to the same standard. The goal is to make public data harder to ignore, not to push a political line.
Who's behind transparenC
transparenC is built and self-funded by one independent developer. It has no party affiliation, takes no donations, runs no ads, and is not backed by any campaign, company or think tank. The site makes no money and takes no money — it exists for one reason: to make public data usable so that anyone can hold power to account.
Every figure links to its official source, every party is held to the same standard, and every correction is published openly. If you think something here is wrong, you can challenge it with evidence.
When we get it wrong, we say so
A public, append-only record of factual corrections to this site. Publishing our own mistakes is part of holding others to account.
Was: “100 signatures gets a response. 100,000 triggers a Parliamentary debate.”
Now: 10,000 signatures gets a UK Government response; 100,000 means the petition is considered for debate (debates are usual but not automatic).
The original figures were simply incorrect. Corrected against petition.parliament.uk/help.
Was: “728,000 net migration (latest ONS figures)”.
Now: Net migration of 171,000 for the year ending December 2025 (the figure is now bound to the live ONS series with its release date).
The 728,000 figure was badly out of date; ONS estimates have since fallen sharply. Now sourced and dated via ONS LTIM.
Was: “Black people are 7× more likely to be stopped and searched.”
Now: Black people were stopped and searched at 3.8 times the rate of White people (year ending March 2025), sourced and dated.
The 7× figure was several years out of date; the disparity has fallen. Corrected against gov.uk Ethnicity facts & figures.
Was: “A specific, data-backed letter always gets a reply.”
Now: Responding to constituents is a strong convention, not a legal duty — so a reply is very likely but not guaranteed.
Overstated a convention as a certainty.
Was: “2 million extra NHS appointments per week”.
Now: 40,000 more appointments every week — two million more a year — matching the verbatim manifesto pledge.
Our summary overstated the pledge by roughly fifty times (it conflated the weekly and annual figures). Corrected against the Labour 2024 manifesto wording.
Was: “Every government contract over £10k is public.”
Now: Central government must publish contract details above £12,000 inc VAT (£30,000 for most other public bodies).
Incorrect threshold. Corrected against GOV.UK Procurement Act 2023 below-threshold guidance.
Was: “Up from 1.1% in 2024” (the comparison year for UK GDP growth).
Now: Up from 1.0% in 2024, matching the latest ONS revision of 2024 GDP growth.
The 2024 comparator was slightly out of date after ONS revised annual GDP growth down to 1.0%. Corrected against ONS Quarterly National Accounts.
Was: “Each overflow operated on average around 32 times” in 2024.
Now: Each overflow operated on average 31.8 times in 2024 (the exact published figure).
Rounded “around 32” to the precise figure for accuracy. Derived from the Environment Agency 2024 storm-overflow EDM dataset (450,398 spills across 14,162 monitored overflows).
Was: “7.58m” elective waiting list, dated “Sep 2024”.
Now: 7.2m on the elective (RTT) waiting list, dated February 2026.
The headline figure was over a year out of date. Updated to the latest NHS England Referral to Treatment (RTT) statistics.
Was: “Asylum Case Backlog — 113,000”, dated “Q1 2025”.
Now: “Asylum Cases Awaiting Initial Decision — 35,700”, dated March 2026.
The figure was stale and the label was ambiguous. The initial-decision backlog has fallen sharply from its June 2023 peak of roughly 134,000; relabelled to make clear it counts cases awaiting an initial decision, not appeals. Sourced to Home Office asylum statistics.
Was: “Turnout among 18–24s was 52% at the 2024 election.”
Now: Turnout among 18–24s was around 37% at the 2024 election, down from 47% in 2019 — the lowest of any age group (Ipsos).
The 52% was a misattribution: 52.8% was the overall voting-age turnout at the 2024 election, not the 18–24 figure. Corrected to the Ipsos “How Britain Voted 2024” individual-level estimate. The claim that under-25s had the lowest turnout of any age group remains correct.
Was: “In the same year [2024], water companies paid out over £1.4 billion in dividends.”
Now: Since privatisation in 1989, England's water companies have paid out tens of billions of pounds in dividends to shareholders (estimates range from around £66bn to £85bn depending on methodology).
The single-year 2024 figure of £1.4bn could not be cleanly sourced. Replaced with the well-evidenced cumulative range, with the methodology dependence stated openly rather than asserting one contested total.
Was: “The average household water bill rose above £500/year.”
Now: From April 2025 the average household water bill rose by about 26% to roughly £600 a year (Water UK).
The “above £500” figure was undated and understated the position. The 2025–26 national average is about £603, a rise of roughly £123 (~26%) on the previous year. Sourced to Water UK.
Was: “Only one company has faced criminal prosecution for unpermitted discharges.”
Now: The Environment Agency has brought dozens of prosecutions against water companies, including a record £90 million fine for Southern Water in 2021.
The original statement was simply false. The Environment Agency has prosecuted water and sewerage companies many times; Southern Water alone was fined £90m in 2021. Corrected against Environment Agency enforcement records.
Was: “Every government contract award over £1,000,000 from the last 10 months” — with a fixed “2,000+ scanned records” badge.
Now: Government contract awards over £1,000,000 with an award date in the last 10 months, drawn from the most recently published Contracts Finder notices — labelled as the most-recent slice (not an exhaustive list), showing the real number of notices scanned and the actual award-date span covered.
The old query filtered only on publish date and kept any record carrying an awards array, so tender/opportunity notices and awards dated as far back as 2021 leaked in, and tender framework ceilings inflated headline values into the billions. Rebuilt to filter server-side to award notices (stages=award), require an active award dated inside the 10-month window, use the award value only, dedupe by OCID, and add rate-limit backoff. The unverifiable “2,000+” completeness claim was dropped in favour of the true scanned count.
Was: Our earlier 2026-06-18 fix claimed it had stopped framework ceilings from “inflating headline values into the billions” — but the live list was still topped by a £1.42bn notice titled “Maintain Framework” covering 21 suppliers.
Now: Framework and other aggregate notices — where the headline figure is a lifetime ceiling shared across many suppliers or lots rather than the price of a single contract — are now detected and set aside, and the number set aside is disclosed on the page. Genuine single-supplier call-offs from frameworks are kept, because those are real individual awards.
The earlier fix switched from the tender estimate to the award value, but for a framework agreement the award value is itself an aggregate ceiling, so billion-pound figures still leaked through as if they were single awards. A notice is now set aside when its award lists more than one supplier, or its title contains “framework” or “lots”. On a representative refresh this removed roughly 30 aggregate notices and brought the headline total down from about £5.6bn to about £3.0bn, while correctly keeping single-supplier call-offs.
Was: Every postcode resolved to the same MP (Diane Abbott, Hackney North & Stoke Newington), regardless of where the user actually lived.
Now: The correct sitting MP for the user's constituency is returned — e.g. SW1A 1AA now resolves to Rachel Blake (Cities of London and Westminster), not Diane Abbott.
Wrong-endpoint bug. The Parliament Members `Search?constituency=` endpoint silently ignores its constituency filter and returns the first of all 650 members, so everyone saw the alphabetically-first MP. Rebuilt to resolve MPs via the `Location/Constituency/Search?searchText=` endpoint, which matches by constituency name and carries that constituency's current representation. Verified live against the Parliament Members API for multiple constituencies.
Was: The stop-and-search detail page stated Black people were “7× more likely” and Asian people “3 times” more likely to be stopped and searched than White people.
Now: Black people were stopped and searched at 3.8 times the rate of White people, and Asian people at around 1.4 times the rate, for the year ending March 2025 — both sourced and dated.
Both ratios were several years out of date and overstated the current disparity. Our 2026-06-12 fix corrected the 7× figure on the homepage headline; this extends the same correction to the detail page and to the Asian ratio it had left unchanged. Corrected against gov.uk Ethnicity facts & figures (stop and search).
Was: The environment headline was “3,614,427 hours” of untreated sewage discharged through storm overflows in England in 2024.
Now: 291,492 storm-overflow spills of untreated sewage in England in 2025 — 35% fewer than 2024's record, with total monitored spill duration down 48%.
The Environment Agency has since published 2025 monitoring data, superseding the 2024 figure. We switched the headline to the newer published spill count rather than a computed 2025 hours figure, keeping to our rule of never presenting a derived number as if it were official. Sourced to the EA release “Fewer and shorter storm overflow spills in 2025, new monitoring data shows”.
Was: The sewage totals summed England, Wales and unlabelled sites together — about 563,730 spills and 4.55 million hours across 16,626 sites — while the page described them as England.
Now: England-only totals: 450,478 spills and 3.61 million hours across 14,286 monitored overflows, matching the official Environment Agency headline for 2024.
The data query returned every country in the dataset (England, plus Welsh sites regulated by Natural Resources Wales, plus null-country rows), inflating the totals above the England figure the page claimed to show. The query now filters server-side to country = 'England'. Corrected against the Environment Agency 2024 storm-overflow EDM dataset.
Was: “Roughly one spill event every 9 minutes” across England.
Now: Roughly one spill event every 70 seconds, computed live from the actual spill count for the year.
The “9 minutes” claim was wrong by roughly an order of magnitude. The cadence is now derived directly from the current spill total (seconds in a 365-day year ÷ counted spills) so it stays correct if the underlying data changes.