Of all the websites used by political journalists, one is the endless source of frustration and angst: that of the Electoral Commission. This is the treasure trove with all the donations and loans made to every political party in Britain over the last decade or so. There are updates every three months on all new financial gifts made to the political world.
I have worked out how to navigate the site to find out who has given donations to which party – but only by calling the EC’s press office and asking for guidance some time ago. A member of the public wanting to find out these statistics faces a gruelling journey through the commission’s online maze.
If you go to the Electoral Commission site you can see what looks like an open and transparent breakdown of the Q2 donation figures, published yesterday. “Latest donations and borrowing figures” is up in highlights at the top of the page. So far so good.
That leads you to a summary of trends, total donation numbers and so on. All very useful. But how do you find out which individuals have given money to a certain party, for example Labour?
First you have to go down the right hand column of the main page until you find a tiny heading: “finance of parties”.
That takes you to a different page full of sprawling red and blue text. Click here on “search the PEF online registers”.
This takes you to a new page, which has a blue box on the top left with half a dozen options. One of these – probably “advanced donations search” – is your Holy Grail.
But it is not plain sailing now that you are on the final page. Here you are presented with a drop box of four options. Instead of clicking the one you want (political parties) you have to delete other three; third parties, regulated donee, permitted participant. Frustrated yet?
There is then a similar process for “entity name”. But this time there are hundreds of parties, including the Pensioners Party, the Pirate Party, the Old Windsor Residents Association. This time you have to “deselect all”. You then reinstate the one you want, eg Labour.
The struggle is not yet over, comrades. You now need to fill in donation type, time period, and so on.
At this point – as many lobby colleagues (and myself) were reminded yesterday – the site has a tendency to freeze.
The site was in fact updated in March this year. But has anyone at the Electoral Commission been through this process and thought that maybe, just maybe, the site could still be improved?
UPDATE: The commission admits that yesterday was a particularly bad day and that the site did crash: “If there are issues we do need to work them out,” says a spokesman.
The reason the EC introduced the new site in the spring was to add greater “searchability”, he says. On the old site you could search for a single donor’s contributions to one party – but not his or her’s contributions to all parties. And now you can. Also you can now get export the information into Excel, making it easier to assemble. It seems, however, that these new functions have come at some cost to overall ease of use.
Jim Pickard
Kiran Stacey