Evaluating the UK Parliament's Career Transition Scheme for Departing MPs: Dataset of transcripts from the interviews

This data set arises from a research project I conducted while I was a Parliamentary Academic Fellow at the Members’ and Members’ Staff Services Team at the UK Parliament in 2025. My project contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0This dataset is used in an article accepted for publication in the journal Parliamentary Affairs titled: ‘Evaluating the UK Parliament’s Career Transition Scheme for Departing MPs’. A copy of this paper can be accessed through ORO. The abstract of this paper states: 'Leaving Parliament is not easy. The way that MPs exit Parliament matters because it can deter others from being an MP. The UK Parliament introduced a Career Transition Scheme (CTS) after the 2024 general election to aid this transition. In this paper I make a theoretical contribution to the literature on exiting political office by extending a typology developed for ex-leaders to cover departing MPs more generally and make an empirical contribution by providing the first detailed empirical study into the CTS and creating an original and unique dataset on the CTS. I interviewed 16 ex-MPs eligible for the CTS and asked whether the CTS provided them with appropriate support. Overall, the CTS did provide effective support. There was a desire among interviewees for tailored support to reflect the unique challenges faced by ex-MPs'. The data set consists of anonymised transcripts of interviews I conducted with 16 ex-MPs from the UK Parliament who were eligible for the Career Transition Scheme. Interviews were conducted in the summer of 2025.The transcripts have been anonymised and all identifying marks have been removed.In the data set, the interviewees are listed numerically. Gender markers have been removed to aid de-identification.Please note that one ex-MP did not give permission for their transcript to be deposited at ORDO. Thus, Interviewee 8 is missing from this dataset.