UK MP Financial Interests Watchlist

Watch a list of named UK MPs and get told, run after run, exactly which new financial interests they registered since you last checked — new shareholdings, gifts, donations, land and property, paid jobs, family members employed, or foreign trips. Not a one-off scrape: a real watchlist with change detection, built the same way as this account's Companies House Watchlist Actor.

Why this exists

The UK Parliament publishes MPs' Register of Members' Financial Interests as open data, free, no API key. Several Actors already scrape or mirror that register as a static snapshot. None of them tell you what changed. If an MP you follow quietly registers a new directorship, a paid consultancy, or a foreign-funded trip, a static snapshot buries it in a list of 20–90 entries you have to re-read by eye every time.

The US Congress has an equivalent well-known pattern — Actors and apps that track members of Congress' stock trades have real, proven usage on this platform (tens of monthly active users). The UK has no equivalent watchlist for its own Parliament's interests register. This Actor fills that gap.

What makes this different from a plain scraper:

• Change detection, not just data. Every run is diffed against the previous run for the same MP (stored in this Actor's own key-value store). The first run is a baseline — no false "everything is new" alarm. Every run after that reports only interests registered since last time, sorted newest first.
• Category filtering. Watch only Shareholdings, or only Land and property, or only Gifts — instead of wading through all ten official categories every time.
• Official data only. Two UK Parliament APIs, both public and free, no key required: the Members API (resolves a name to the current MP record) and the Interests API (the full register). No scraping of parliament.uk's HTML, no third-party mirror, no ToS risk.

What you get (one row per MP per run)

{
  "input_name": "Nigel Farage",
  "status": "ok",
  "member": {
    "member_id": 5091,
    "name": "Nigel Farage",
    "party": "Reform UK",
    "constituency": "Clacton",
    "is_current_member": true
  },
  "total_interests": 40,
  "is_baseline_run": false,
  "new_interests": [
    {
      "interest_id": 17005,
      "summary": "International visit to Cayman Islands between 22 August 2026 and 28 August 2026",
      "category_number": "4",
      "category_name": "Visits outside the UK",
      "registration_date": "2026-09-19",
      "published_date": "2026-09-21",
      "updated_dates": []
    }
  ],
  "removed_interest_count": 0,
  "all_interests": [ "... every currently registered interest, flattened ..." ],
  "fetched_at": "2026-09-27T10:00:00.000Z"
}

• is_baseline_run: true on the very first run for that MP — the register is stored, nothing is reported as "new" yet (there is nothing to compare against).
• new_interests is always [] when nothing changed. A clean, empty result on every subsequent run is itself useful — "still nothing new" is the point of a watchlist, not a failure.
• status is one of ok, not_found (name did not match any current or former MP), lookup_error or interests_fetch_error (a transient problem with the official API — retried automatically with backoff before being reported).

Input

Field	What it does
mpNames	List of MP full names, e.g. "Rishi Sunak", "Keir Starmer".
mpNamesText	Same, pasted as one name per line or comma-separated — for copying a spreadsheet column straight in. Combined with mpNames and de-duplicated.
categories	Optional. Leave empty to watch every category. Otherwise pick one or more of: employment and earnings, donations, gifts (UK), visits abroad, gifts (abroad), land and property, shareholdings, miscellaneous, family employed, family lobbying.
maxConcurrency	How many MPs to check in parallel (1–8, default 3).

Names are matched against the official Members API's own name search — the closest current match is used. A name that matches no MP, current or former, is reported as not_found rather than silently skipped.

Pricing (pay per event)

Charged event: mp-checked, once per MP successfully resolved and checked in a run — whether or not a new interest was found. A not_found or error result is never charged.

What this Actor does NOT do (on purpose, not by oversight)

• No House of Lords members. The register and API cover MPs (the Commons); Lords have a separate register not covered here.
• No historical interests before an MP's first run through this Actor. The first run for a new MP is always a baseline snapshot, by design — reporting every existing interest as "new" the first time would be a false alarm, not a real change.
• No sentiment, no wrongdoing judgement. This Actor reports what MPs themselves registered, in Parliament's own words. It does not accuse, interpret motive, or flag anything as improper — that judgement is the user's, not this tool's.
• No email/alerting built in. This Actor produces a dataset; wiring its output to Slack, email or a webhook is done with Apify's own integrations or a downstream Actor.

Data source

• UK Parliament Members API — members-api.parliament.uk (official, public, no key)
• UK Parliament Register of Interests API — interests-api.parliament.uk (official, public, no key)

Both are UK Parliament's own open data services, documented at https://interests-api.parliament.uk/index.html and https://members-api.parliament.uk/index.html.