Import Lords Register of Interests

[ajparsons]

Currently we have the Commons but not the Lords.

We do this by scraping HTML pages from the Parliament website for each MP.

Due to internal improvements in their system (with more specific fields) the free text on this page is more of a backward compatible output, with more structured information being dumped into free text. This still works fine for us (and it’s much more structured than the other Parliaments) - but we have the option of switching our XML generation to follow their new structured approach. While creating a new free text ourselves - we can store the additional fields in case we find a use for them later.

Here's our adaption of that data (with our internal ids): https://www.mysociety.org/2024/08/20/new-register-of-interests-spreadsheet-with-much-richer-data/

So a decision to make:

• Create a new scraper for how the Lords currently publishes
• Wait and see if they release it in a bulk data format