How we know what we show

OC Political methodology · last revised September 2026 · questions and corrections: [email protected]

If we show it, we can tell you how we know.
If we can’t know, we tell you that instead.

OC Political joins the public record of British political money into one place: who gave, who they met, and what their companies received. Every claim on the platform traces to a published government source, and this page explains how the joining is done — what is automated, where human judgment enters, and what we refuse to show.

1. Sources

Everything on the platform comes from the public record. We use no scraped private data and no leaked material.

Source	What it provides	Update cycle
Electoral Commission registers	Donations and loans to parties, members, referendum campaigns — including pre-poll reports	Weekly
Companies House	Officers, appointments, persons with significant control (PSC), company records — including published birth month/year	Live API + rolling cache
Registers of Members’ & Lords’ Interests	Declared benefits, donations and interests of parliamentarians	Each publication
Ministerial transparency returns	Ministers’ meetings with outside organisations	Quarterly, as departments publish
Consultant lobbying register	Declared lobbying clients	Quarterly
Government contract feeds	Contracts Finder, Find a Tender, Sell2Wales, Public Contracts Scotland; central-government spend over £25k	Daily
HM Land Registry	Corporate and overseas property ownership	Monthly
Charity Commission	Trustees and charity records	Periodic

2. Reconciled, not scraped

Every donation row we hold carries the Electoral Commission’s own reference number, and our copy is checked against the Commission’s live register — by their references, not by name matching. This catches something most users of this data never see: the register changes. Filings are corrected, withdrawn and re-issued, and an append-only copy quietly accumulates rows the Commission itself no longer stands behind. We hold those withdrawn filings for the record, but they appear in no total.

Example. The EC’s referendum data credits £1,000,000 to “Mr Alexander Trotter” in a pre-poll filing by Better Together. The audited post-poll return records the same donation from Ms Joanne Murray — J.K. Rowling. We display the audited truth, keep the superseded filing as provenance, and can show you both.

Pre-poll reports — the interim donation filings campaigns must make during election and referendum periods — are held in full but counted once: each filing is classified as re-reported in a later audited return (shown as provenance only), withdrawn by the Commission (shown nowhere), or never re-reported at all. That last class — roughly £5 million of campaign money whose only public disclosure was a mid-campaign filing — is searchable on the platform’s Pre-poll tab, and to our knowledge nowhere else.

3. People, not strings

The registers record names, and names are not people. The same donor appears under a dozen spellings; unrelated strangers share exact names. Joining on strings silently merges strangers and splits donors — so we don’t.

Machines propose; a human adjudicates. Automated matching surfaces candidate identities, but no two records become one person without human review of the evidence.
Date of birth is the anchor. Companies House publishes officers’ birth month and year. Every significant donor identity is verified against it, and a record whose published birth date contradicts the known one is treated as a different person — whatever the name says.
Every donor above £500,000 in the platform’s history has been individually adjudicated — verified to a person, or explicitly recorded as unresolvable with the reason held.

Example. Three unrelated John Wheelers appear in the record: a Conservative former minister who never made a donation, the late spread-betting founder John Stuart Wheeler (£5.8M across 186 donations under nine register spellings), and a Liberal Democrat donor named John F Wheeler. Their birth dates hold them apart. Search any of them and you get that man alone — including the first, whose card correctly shows £0.

4. What we refuse to show

Some sources publish no verifying detail. Where verification is impossible, the platform says so rather than guessing:

Corporate-control (PSC) claims require a verified date of birth. A person we cannot anchor gets no name-matched control entries — the card explains why the section is empty.
Charity trusteeships match only a person’s full verified name, and a person with a recorded death holds no current trusteeship, whatever the name-match says.
Ministerial meetings attribute only where the organisation is a listed participant — a search may find more mentions, and the two numbers are labelled as the different things they are.

5. Continuous verification

The platform audits itself. Every night, machine checks verify that the same person shows the same money on every surface — the search index, the directory, and the card — and that platform totals still reconcile to the source registers. Over six hundred identity checks run across three surfaces; a failure blocks release until resolved. Current status: zero violations.

6. Corrections

When we are wrong, we fix the cause, not just the symptom: every correction ships with a regression check so the same error cannot recur silently. When a source is wrong, we show the corrected truth and keep the original as provenance. If you believe something on the platform is incorrect, write to [email protected] — corrections are acknowledged, investigated against the source record, and published.

© 2026 Open & Candid Ltd (SC762730) · Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 · Companies House and Electoral Commission data reproduced under their respective terms.