Most seats have now declared a winner (with a few recounts ongoing) and the Labour Party has won a large majority in Parliament. That will mean a change in government and big changes to what happens in Parliament in the next few years. 

Understanding your new MP

New MPs have been added to TheyWorkForYou – you can find yours using the postcode search on the homepage.

With so many new MPs many of these pages are empty (for the moment). To get an alert when your new/returning MP has spoken, voted, or received a written answer: enter your postcode here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the weeks ahead, the Hansard Society have published a guide of how the start of the new Parliament will work.

Understanding who represents you

Over the next few weeks, we will be adding MPs’ contact details into WriteToThem where you can also see details of your local councillors and representatives in the UK’s devolved Parliaments. 

We want to help people navigate this complicated system and are writing a series of guides to help individuals and campaigns ask the right questions in the right places. 

The first guide is up now: Who Represents Me – explaining what all the UK’s different parliaments, governments and councils do. To hear when we release more, sign up to our mailing list. 

Understanding your new constituency

For this election, the boundaries of many constituencies have changed.  In some cases the change is small, but others represent big shifts in the kinds of people and places who live within the constituency.

The Local Intelligence Hub, which we’ve made with the Climate Coalition, has a range of information and stats about your new constituency. Check out the data for your constituency! We’ll be adding lots more in the following months. 

We’re also publishing a big list of constituencies, and the overlap with local authorities and the old constituencies.  If you need to update data about what constituencies a list of postcodes are within, we’ve made a quick tool where you can paste a list of GB postcodes into the browser, and then copy the new constituencies out.

For more complex conversions, have a look at MapIt, which can convert coordinates and postcodes into a wide range of administrative geographies. 

What happens next

As MPs get settled, we will be picking up our work on WhoFundsThem, working with a group of volunteers to produce summaries of MPs’ registers of members interest, adding context and clarity to improve the transparency and understanding of MPs’ financial interests. 

For more details on this, and our other plans, please sign up to our newsletter. 

Support TheyWorkForYou and our work

And here’s the bit where we ask for money. 

TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem are run by mySociety, a small UK charity.

We’re a very efficient operation and do a lot with a small team: at the moment TheyWorkForYou, which is used by millions of people every year, is run with the equivalent of about two people.

If we had a bit more money, we could achieve a lot more.

We want to see a transparent, resilient democracy, with equal access to information, representation and voice for citizens.

If you believe in this vision please donate today to enable greater transparency and accountability of the next government.

Header image: Photo by Zetong Li on Unsplash