Our publishing rules
How we publish this data — and where we stop.
TaxSorted maps source-linked records that public bodies publish. Dataset records carry source identifiers, dates and coverage notes; live views add retrieval time where their contract says so. We do not enrich the record with private data or guesses.
The short version
- We only show what official bodies publish, with a source on every claim.
- Private addresses, guessed links and personality claims never appear.
- Some fields stay off until privacy and licence checks are approved.
What we publish
- Names, roles, parties, constituencies and dates published by UK Parliament.
- Parliamentary and constituency office contacts published for that public role.
- Declared interests, recent Parliamentary activity and election results from the official register and APIs.
- Non-personal election responsibilities, current finance rules, public-money accountability and source maps.
- Versioned formal-power assessments attached to offices, with every dimension, limit and source visible.
What stays out
- Home or residential addresses, private phone numbers and private email addresses.
- Donor street addresses or postcodes, even when an upstream register contains them.
- Guessed relationships, inferred beliefs, personality scores or claims without a source.
- Bulk-contact or campaigning tools. This is a public record, not a targeting list.
Fields still waiting for a decision
Article 9 is the UK GDPR rule that gives extra protection to political-opinion data.
- Named staff and job details: built, but not approved until necessity and reasonable expectations are assessed.
- Named professional contact details: require a field-by-field freshness and objection decision.
- Party donations: disabled until Political Finance Online reuse terms and the Article 9 basis are confirmed.
- Peers' party affiliation: requires a separate Article 9 decision from elected MPs.
Corrections travel back to the source
TaxSorted is a window onto official records, not the authority that creates them. If an official record is wrong, correct it with the publishing body first; our live view then follows. If our mapping or redaction is wrong and the report contains no private, personal or safety-sensitive evidence, use the public issue tracker. Never post such evidence publicly. A confidential TaxSorted intake is not live yet, so the project cannot safely receive that material until one exists.
Coverage, honestly
The first prepared layer covers Westminster: current Commons and Lords members and Parliamentary posts. Party donations have their own licence gate. Devolved legislatures (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), local government, party officers, special advisers, lobbying records and ministerial meetings need separate official feeds. Their official source lanes are mapped, but they are not silently treated as normalized or complete here.
The power number rates an office, not a human
Six sourced dimensions — executive, law-making, oversight, enforcement, public money and appointments — are each scored from 0 to 5 under a published rubric (a fixed scoring guide). Jurisdiction and legal limits sit beside the result. Several offices held by one person are never added, and no funding, meeting, interest or corporate relationship changes the number.
The first calibrations are explicitly provisional — early scores that may still move. A method change creates a new version; a legal change creates a new dated assessment, so history does not get silently rewritten.
The production gate
Publicly visible personal data is still personal data. Before this directory is switched on in production, TaxSorted needs a written legitimate-interests assessment (a documented check that our reasons outweigh the privacy risk), an Article 9 condition for political-affiliation fields, a data-protection impact assessment (DPIA) and a clear privacy and correction notice. Building the source-safe software does not replace that decision.
The non-personal system, process, rule and methodology endpoints remain readable while that people-data gate is closed. Their job is to make the framework inspectable without using a privacy switch as a secrecy switch.
The Electoral Commission publishes party-finance downloads, but its Political Finance Online database does not currently state general bulk-reuse terms. TaxSorted links to the official record and keeps its donation feed off until the Commission confirms the reuse and attribution terms in writing.