A new investigation by openDemocracy reveals today that over the pandemic year, British MPs’ side hustles netted them a total of nearly £5m, on top of their annual £82,000 salaries.
But the figures we analysed significantly understate the wealth pouring into MPs’ coffers. The rules on declaring financial interests give our representatives a lot of privacy – contrasting sharply with the level of financial information you or I would have had to provide in order to access financial support this past year.
MPs’ interests are still too secret...
The 116 MPs with significant landlord income do have to declare how many properties they rent out – something both Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson were notoriously rather slow to do – but not how much their property portfolio is worth. Nor, in any detail, do they have to tell us how much they receive in rent – just whether it totals more than £10,000 a year.
