Every UK Parliament member is required to declare their financial interests publicly. This includes shareholdings in listed companies, directorships, and other financial relationships that could influence their work in the House of Commons or House of Lords.
This data has always been publicly available through the Parliamentary Register of Interests, but it has never been easy to search by company. If you wanted to know which politicians held shares in a specific FTSE stock, you would need to trawl through hundreds of individual declarations manually.
Ticker now does this for you.
What you can see
We have matched declared interests to LSE-listed companies, covering 197 issuers with connections to 109 Parliament members across a total of 334 active declared interests.
For each company, you can see:
- Which MPs and Lords have declared shareholdings
- Who holds directorships or board positions
- When each interest was registered or ceased
- Whether the interest is currently active
Where the data comes from
All data is sourced from the official UK Parliamentary Register of Members' Financial Interests. Members of both the House of Commons and House of Lords are required to declare interests that could reasonably be thought to influence their parliamentary conduct.
The three main types of interest you will see are:
- Shareholdings - ownership of shares in a listed company
- Directorships - a formal position on the company's board
- Major shareholdings - significant holdings that cross a disclosure threshold
The companies with the most parliamentary interest
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the largest and most widely-held UK companies attract the most declared interests:
| Company | Members with Active Interests |
|---|---|
| Unilever (ULVR) | 12 |
| Diageo (DGE) | 10 |
| Rio Tinto (RIO) | 7 |
| AstraZeneca (AZN) | 6 |
| Standard Chartered (STAN) | 5 |
These are household names that feature prominently in pension funds and ISA portfolios, so it is not surprising that parliamentarians hold them too. But the data becomes more interesting when you look at smaller companies where a political connection may carry more weight.
Why this matters for investors
Transparency around political interests in listed companies serves several purposes:
- Governance awareness - knowing whether a politician sits on the board of a company affected by legislation they vote on
- Regulatory insight - understanding potential conflicts of interest when Parliament debates industry-specific regulation
- Due diligence - an additional data point when researching a company's stakeholder landscape
This is not about making political judgements. It is about giving investors access to information that already exists in the public record, but presenting it in a way that is actually useful.
How to use it
There are three ways to explore parliamentary interests on Ticker:
-
On any company page - look for the Parliament tab in the navigation bar. If a company has declared interests, the tab will appear automatically. For example, Unilever's parliament interests.
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The Parliament index - browse the full leaderboard of companies ranked by the number of parliamentary connections, along with a directory of all members with listed interests.
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Individual member pages - click through to any member to see all their declared interests across every listed company, plus any other declared financial interests.
The data is refreshed daily from the Parliamentary Register, so new declarations and cessations will appear as they are published.
A note on Lords vs Commons
The vast majority of listed-company interests come from members of the House of Lords rather than the House of Commons. This reflects the different rules and conventions around outside financial interests in each House, as well as the fact that many Lords have had long careers in business before entering Parliament.
All data is presented without editorial comment. Declaring an interest is not evidence of wrongdoing - it is the system working as intended.