Top five MPs bag £2m outside parliament since July

It’s only ten months since the general election, but the five MPs who rake in the most outside parliament have already bagged more than £2m – on top of salaries worth £93,904.

New analysis from Good Law Project of declarations since July 2024 reveals that a small minority of MPs is taking the vast majority of money from media appearances, consultancies and rents. MPs who are making the most in outside income – the top 10% – are taking home 87% of the total earned outside parliament.

Top of the list is the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, who has declared more than £873,000 since the general election. The lion’s share of this comes from appearances on the rightwing TV channel, GB News. The MP for Clacton has also recently registered his 10th job as a commentator for Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News Australia, for which he’s taken £25,000 so far. 

Farage’s other gigs include taking £40,000 to go to Kuala Lumpur and speak at an event for the company Nomad Capitalist– a firm which helps the hyper-wealthy reduce their tax bills and acquire favourable citizenship statuses. He’s also a paid brand ambassador to a gold bullion firm, does social media work on Cameo, and has written articles for the Telegraph. Which raises the question of whether the wannabe prime minister wants to be an MP as much as he wants to make money off the back of playing politics.

The Tory MP Geoffrey Cox comes in at number two, with the majority of his £686,000 extra cash from the 190 hours he’s declared since July working as a barrister. So far this parliament, the MP for Torridge and Tavistock has spoken eight times in the House of Commons.

The third-highest income declared from sources outside parliament goes to the Labour MP Jas Athwal, though since declarations around rental properties are shrouded in mystery the figure of £180,000 is only an estimate. The MP for Ilford South owns a string of rental properties, including three commercial and 15 residential entities, but there’s no way of telling exactly how much they bring in. 

MPs must only declare property if they have a “land and property portfolio with a value over £100,000 and where indicated, the portfolio provides a rental income of over £10,000 a year”. But Athwal told the BBC that he rents his residential properties to people in Redbridge on housing benefit. Based on Redbridge council’s allowances for housing benefit, each of these properties may be bringing in £12,000 a year or more. That’s not even counting Athwal’s three commercial properties, whose value is much more difficult to estimate.

A BBC investigation recently uncovered that Athwal rented out flats full of black mould and ant infestations. The MP said he was “profoundly sorry” over the state of these flats, but the London Renters’ Union still called for the rogue landlord to stand down as an MP.

Bayo Alaba comes in at number four. Estimating the income from his portfolio of 14 properties in Redbridge, Barking and Dagenham in the same way as his Labour colleague Athwal, the MP for Southend East and Rochford is likely to have brought in £168,000 or more. The Tory MP Nick Timothy completes the top five, with £145,000 declared in this parliament for writing columns in the Telegraph.

Each of these five MPs is making more money outside parliament than their salary – raising the prospect that for these MPs representing their constituents is only a side hustle.

And these figures are only the tip of the iceberg. It’s impossible to get a full picture of all the financial support MPs get through gifts and donations, and the rules around reporting shareholdings and rental income are so lax that we can’t really say how much money is involved – we’ve only included monetary gifts, income from outside jobs and estimates of rentals.

According to Good Law Project’s head of campaigns, Agustina Oliveri, despite the “gaping holes” in the law on declarations these figures reveal a “small gang of MPs raking in extra cash”.

“Unlike most MPs,” Oliveri said, “these five are making far more than their salaries from grandstanding in the media, consulting for big business and charging rent. And the loopholes around declarations mean they could be making much, much more. It’s time for all MPs to focus on the job they’re elected to do: standing up for all of us.”