One in five Members of Parliament is a landlord. They vote on housing policy. This is how the country is currently governed, and the Housing Theory of Everything opens on that sentence because the pattern of ownership shapes the pattern of votes in a way that the present register of interests is not designed to surface. The Decency Platform states the principle: public office is a trust, the register is honest, undisclosed foreign money has no place in British politics. This briefing sets out the operational architecture that delivers the principle.
The platform makes no case for banning ownership, banning dual citizenship, banning political donations, or banning policy advocacy. Ownership is not a moral failure. Dual citizenship is not disloyalty. Donations are not corruption. Think tanks are not intelligence operations. The problem in every case is not the ownership, the citizenship, the donation, or the advocacy. The problem is the same in every case: concealment. Concealment of interest, concealment of loyalty, concealment of funder, concealment of foreign payroll. Daylight resolves the problem without criminalising the underlying activity.
The package rests on five operational commitments, one new independent statutory office to enforce them, one new criminal offence for those who treat disclosure as optional, and an anti-money-laundering regime extending to think tanks and policy-influence organisations on the same terms that apply to banks.
The existing Register of Members' Financial Interests is replaced with a two-layer register, maintained by the new Office of the Ethics Commissioner.
A complete, exact, and auditable record of every financial holding held by a Member of Parliament, Peer, Minister, or senior civil servant at grade 1 and above. Scope extends to the member's spouse or civil partner, minor children, dependent adult children living at home, and any entity in which the member or those family members hold ten per cent or more of the equity or any directorship. Record includes the specific asset, its value, its counterparty, and the date of acquisition. Held by the Ethics Commissioner's office. Not public.
The family-scope boundary is deliberate. Parents, adult independent children, siblings, and in-laws are out of scope. This is not a loophole. It is a civil-liberties line: a person entering public life consents to disclosure about their own and their dependent household's affairs, not to the surveillance of every adult relative.
A categorical summary, auto-generated from the private record and published on the Ethics Commissioner's website in machine-readable form. Categories include Property (residential, commercial, or agricultural, with unit counts flagged where any single member or household controls more than one residential unit), Public Equities (by sector, with country tag where any single foreign country accounts for more than fifty per cent of a holding's underlying revenue), Private Equity and Unlisted Holdings (by sector plus country), Corporate Directorships (by sector), Overseas Assets (country), Trust Beneficiary Interests, and Inherited Holdings.
A Member of Parliament with a spouse holding non-disclosed wealth in overseas private equity, the pattern of concern raised publicly during the 2022 controversy, would appear on the register as "PRIVATE EQUITY (spouse) — INDIA" and "TRUST BENEFICIARY (spouse)". The specific company and the specific value remain private. The pattern is visible. The public knows that when this Member votes on matters touching Indian corporate interests or on the non-domiciled tax regime, there is an interest. What the public does with that information is the public's business.
Disclosure threshold: £10,000 per holding, matching the Companies Act 2006 beneficial ownership threshold. Holdings below that threshold are recorded in the private layer but not categorically surfaced in the public one.
Statutory duties are imposed on Members, Peers, Ministers, and senior civil servants modelled directly on the general duties of directors set out in the Companies Act 2006, sections 170 to 177. The principle is straightforward: the fiduciary code that binds every company director in Britain applies, at minimum, to every person entrusted with legislating for the country.
The duties, in plain terms:
The asymmetry by which a director of a medium-sized company carries heavier personal liability than a Member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom is the asymmetry the platform corrects.
No bar on standing for public office. No bar on serving. No second-class membership of Parliament. Dual-citizen members are required to declare all citizenships held by themselves or their dependent household on the public layer of the register, and to recuse from votes on matters of national interest affecting any state in which they hold citizenship. Matters covered by the recusal rule: trade agreements with that state, defence and security arrangements, sanctions, diplomatic relations, intelligence oversight, and investment treaties.
The principle is consistent with the director-standard framing for the other commitments. A company director does not resign because of a personal holding in a competitor; they declare and recuse. An MP with dual citizenship does not resign because of the citizenship; they declare and recuse. The mechanism treats the conflict honestly without producing a constitutional category of citizen-with-reduced-political-rights.
Every registered political party with an annual turnover above £200,000 files audited annual accounts with the Ethics Commissioner, published in full. The existing PPERA declaration threshold for individual donations falls from £11,180 to £500 per donor per year, surfacing small-value donor networks that are currently invisible.
The structural problem in the current foreign-donation regime is the UK-registered shell company. Under PPERA, foreign individuals and foreign companies cannot donate to UK parties. But a UK-registered company, regardless of who ultimately owns it, is a permissible donor. The effect is that foreign money reaches British politics through a shell-company laundry. The platform closes the loophole:
Think tanks, policy institutes, research charities, advocacy organisations, and registered lobbyists are brought inside a three-tier disclosure regime. The principle is not that any of these organisations are suspect for taking a view. The principle is that an organisation taking a view while concealing who pays for the view is the problem, and disclosure is the mechanism that resolves it.
Applies to any organisation publishing policy research, producing briefings, or engaging Members, Ministers, or civil servants on policy matters. Scope is by activity, not by legal form: charities, CICs, limited companies, and unincorporated associations all qualify if they meet the activity test.
Triggered by any foreign-origin funding above £10,000 or five per cent of annual income, whichever is lower.
Triggered by any funding above £50,000 or ten per cent of annual income from a foreign government, state-linked entity, sovereign wealth fund, or entity with more than twenty-five per cent state beneficial ownership.
All-Party Parliamentary Groups declare their secretariat provider, publish its funding structure annually, and cannot receive secretariat services from any Tier 3-designated entity. APPG registrations that currently breach this rule restructure within twelve months of commencement or deregister.
All registered policy-influence organisations, regardless of tier, are brought inside the Money Laundering Regulations 2017 as relevant persons. They operate the same customer due diligence regime that applies to banks, solicitors, and estate agents.
Audit failure carries administrative penalties up to £100,000 per breach and personal criminal liability for the Designated Anti-Money-Laundering Officer of up to two years' imprisonment for knowing failure or wilful blindness. If the audit identifies funds traceable to a state actor not properly disclosed, the matter is escalated automatically and without prosecutorial discretion to the statutory offence set out below.
A new statutory independent office on the Electoral Commission precedent. Not a parliamentary office, not a House of Commons committee, not a unit of the Cabinet Office. Independent in law and in budget, sitting outside Parliament's own self-policing architecture, reporting to Parliament but not controlled by it.
The structural argument is the one the Electoral Commission settled in 2000. The enforcement of political conduct by the House against its own members has failed consistently and predictably, from the 2009 expenses scandal to the Owen Paterson affair to the Partygate enforcement. The problem is not that individual Commissioners have been insufficiently diligent. The problem is that the architecture gives the House final say on its own members' conduct. The Electoral Commission removed party finance from that architecture twenty-five years ago. The Ethics Commissioner removes member conduct from it now.
A new statutory offence modelled on the foreign-influence provisions of the National Security Act 2023, significantly aggravated for those in positions of public trust. Two criminal tiers and one civil administrative track.
Acting on the payroll of a foreign state, foreign state-linked entity, or foreign intelligence service while holding elected office, ministerial office, peerage, senior civil service position, or while lobbying, advising, or publishing policy material directed at any of the above, without disclosure under this Act.
Deliberately providing false or incomplete information to the Register of Members' and Spouses' Interests, or to the Foreign-Linked Policy Influence Register, where the falsity is material.
Distinct from criminal prosecution. The Ethics Commissioner retains power to impose civil penalties up to £250,000, require amendment of the Register within fourteen days, and publish the breach in the annual report, where criminal prosecution is not pursued. Typically reserved for the first, minor, good-faith error promptly self-reported. A second breach within the same Parliament is automatically referred for Tier B prosecution, and the prior administrative finding is admissible as evidence the member was on notice. There is no third chance.
Members of Parliament and the other office-holders within scope of this Act are presumed to know their own financial affairs. Failure to disclose is prosecuted under Tier B on that presumption. A defendant may plead genuine misinformation — that they were actively and materially misled by a third party whose disclosure they reasonably relied on — and the plea goes to a court on evidence. If the court accepts the plea, the defendant is acquitted. If the court rejects it, Tier B applies in full. There is no intermediate negligence tier: the governance of the country is not a domain in which inattention to one's own affairs is morally neutral.
The package is delivered through the Political Integrity Bill, a single piece of primary legislation combining the register reform, the director-standard statutory duties, the dual-citizen recusal regime, the party finance amendments to PPERA, the foreign-lobbying three-tier structure, the AML extensions to Money Laundering Regulations 2017, the Ethics Commissioner's constitution, and the criminal offences.
Prospective only: no retroactive penalty for pre-commencement holdings or pre-commencement foreign funding. But every holding and every funding relationship becomes disclosable from the commencement date regardless of when acquired or entered into. Grandfathering of past conduct is acceptable. Grandfathering of past concealment is not.
| Item | Year 2 | Year 5 | Year 10 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Office of the Ethics Commissioner (operations) | £35m | £35m | £38m |
| AML supervisory function | £5m | £5m | £5m |
| Register IT infrastructure | £15m one-off | £3m | £3m |
| Administrative and audit capacity | £2m | £2m | £2m |
| TOTAL additional spend | ~£57m (incl. one-off) | ~£45m | ~£48m |
Absorbed within the existing Cabinet Office and HM Treasury envelope. Relative to what the regime deters, it is the cheapest enforcement spend in the platform.
To voters across the political spectrum: "Every company director in Britain is bound by statutory duties to avoid conflicts of interest, to declare interests in transactions, and to not accept unauthorised benefits. This is not onerous. It is the standard expected of anyone entrusted with other people's money. Members of Parliament are entrusted with other people's laws. The asymmetry is indefensible."
On ownership and marriage: "No crime in owning things. No crime in marrying wealth. The crime is pretending that the pattern of ownership does not shape the pattern of votes. Daylight resolves the pretence without criminalising the ownership."
On the landlord-MP conflict: "One in five Members of Parliament is a landlord. They vote on housing policy. This is how the country is currently governed. It does not need to be."
On the foreign-payroll offence: "An elected member of Parliament taking undisclosed payment from a foreign government, while voting on matters affecting that government's interests, is acting against the country that elected them. The older generation had a word for that conduct. The statute carries the same weight. No parole. No return to public life. An ambassador sent home."
On think tanks and policy influence: "A think tank is not automatically suspect because it takes a view. A think tank that takes a view while concealing who pays for the view is another matter. Disclosure is not censorship. It is the precondition for readers to weigh the argument honestly."
The Decency Platform articulates the doctrine: public office is a trust, the register is honest, undisclosed foreign money has no place in British politics. This briefing delivers the mechanism.
The Housing Theory of Everything opens on the observation that one in five Members of Parliament is a landlord, and the present briefing makes the landlord-MP conflict visible and procedurally resolvable for the first time in British politics.
Foreign Policy (covered in the Foreign Policy briefing) depends on the integrity of Parliament's relationship with foreign states. The foreign-payroll offence and the Foreign-Linked Policy Influence Register reduce foreign-capture risk inside Parliament, strengthening the integrity of every sovereign-capability, security, and negotiating decision the platform relies on.
The Franco-British nuclear umbrella, the CANZUK defence partnership, the ESEP negotiation, and the sovereign-capability industrial programme all sit on the assumption that Parliament deliberates for Britain rather than for those who pay for access to Parliament. That assumption becomes testable under this regime, and failures become punishable.