We have completed our quarterly update to the TheyWorkForYou voting summaries and they’re now complete as of the end of March 2025.

We’ve added 20 votes to TheyWorkForYou’s voting summaries, covering the first three months of 2025. We’ve also added several votes from the 2019-2024 parliament retrospectively when creating a voting policy in a new area. 

To learn more about our process, please read our previous blog post.  We have also recently released TheyWorkForYou Votes which, as well as providing open data for anyone to use in their own online parliamentary projects,  is  powering TheyWorkForYou’s voting summaries. 

This update has added new votes to existing policies:

• Climate change
• Low carbon electricity generation
• Smoking bans
• Increased capital gains tax
• Windfall oil and gas tax
• Employment rights
• Assisted dying (see note below)

We have also added four new policy lines:

• Renters’ rights
• Charge VAT on private school fees
• More powers to investigate welfare fraud, including requiring banks to monitor accounts of welfare recipients
• Nationalising teacher pay and the curriculum for academies, tightening child protection duties, free breakfast clubs (Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill). More about this below.

And behind the scenes, we’ve created four policy lines aren’t currently live, but could be used if and when we add historic or future votes on these topics:

• Greater alignment of UK product standards/measures with EU standards 
• Speeding up nationwide infrastructure consents and opposing local veto powers over large energy schemes 
• Draft border security bill policy
• Measures to encourage purchase and use of electric vehicles

Notes

Assisted dying

In our previous blog post we flagged that we might treat the third reading of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill differently, outside our normal process. This policy has been updated ahead of when it would appear in our normal review. 

We are now scoring based on the third reading rather than the second reading. Normally, there is almost no difference between these so we include both to cover people who are absent from one. 

But when people change their minds (which is more likely on a free vote), we should prefer the later vote (otherwise we create ‘voted for and against’ lines when the final one is clearer and more meaningful). 

As 58% rather than 62% are now in favour of the motion within the Labour Party, it no longer counts as a significant break from the party for those who voted in the minority. 

We also as a result of this have:

• We have amended some of our copy on significant differences and the whip to provide more recognition that significant differences between an MP and a party can emerge in a free vote. There was a fair comment from an MP that previously it could be inferred that this vote was whipped from the two bits of text close together (which is the opposite of the complaint we were trying to avoid here, that the summary implies there is no whip).
• added a new ‘tended to vote for/against’ label to better describe situations where a party is very split (these are rare, but worth having the language for). 
• added the full percentage of the alignment score for the (few) policies that fall between 35-65% policy alignment – to give a bit more information on the direction of the lean. 

Votes covering multiple topics

The TheyWorkForYou voting summary model works best when over time there are a range of votes on essentially the same principle. Assisted dying is a good example of this. 

Where the model struggles more is when a vote covers multiple principles. Sometimes you get a big vote that is clearly about one thing,  but often a bill does a range of stuff (A, B, C). 

You can do a few things here. You can say it mostly does one thing (other items less notable). You can also create a range of policies (voted for A, voted for B, voted for C) to reflect what happened. But if you then take this in isolation, it loses that context of “this was a vote against A as well as against B”.

Ideally, if there’s a simple thing, we should use that — but when it can’t be squeezed down to something simple (and especially when the line of opposition critique is not necessarily the main thing the bill does) we should try and reflect that in the simplest way possible. 

We’ve recently added the ability to view the voting records only for the tenure of specific governments. This gives us a bit more flexibility to add policies without being crowded by old votes,and lets us include policies that are very time specific and unlikely to be updated.

So for some votes, the policy description will effectively cover only that bill. For example:

[x] voted for nationalising teacher pay and the curriculum for academies, tightening child-protection duties, free breakfast clubs (Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill).

Ideally these would be the exception rather than the rule, but we have to reflect what is actually happening in Parliament, while trying to be both clear and accurate in how we present it. 

Electric vehicles

We created this policy because The Motor Vehicles (Driving Licences) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2025 flagged that there had been a run of relevant legislation on this issue. 

The Draft Vehicle Emissions Trading Schemes Order 2023 is included retrospectively.  We have also included an agreement for the approval of the ‘Public Charge Point Regulations 2023’. 

Finance bills over the last five years have been relevant to this,creating incentives for building  charging infrastructure through an 100% first year allowance, and renewing this each year. But then you also run into the 2024 Finance Act, which as well as extending this, started charging vehicle excise duty (VED) for zero emission vehicles (so could logically be counted as both encouraging and discouraging purchase and use of electric vehicles ). 

By the ‘cohesion’ element of our criteria we want to avoid too much use of votes on many items (like finance bills) in policies on a single item. In this case, we do not want the policy to be mostly about votes on finance bills given it is the same measure being extended multiple times. As such, we are including the initial 2021 introduction of the policy only. Other finance bills are included as informative votes that do not contribute to scoring. 

We have not included an agreement for ‘Electric Vehicles (Smart Charge Points) Regulations 2021’ for technical reasons (it was approved in a run of Statutory Instruments that have not been picked up well by our agreement detector). This is a candidate for inclusion when adding the policy in future. 

Gambling and agreements

A note on something we’re choosing not to include at this stage — but we’re open to feedback. 

The Gambling Levy Regulations 2025 was a statutory agreement adopted by agreement with no opposition (but when it was discussed in committee there was opposition). 

There are few options on how we could treat this. If it was a division, we would likely create a new policy on a gambling levy and assign it as a scoring vote (we could also extend our existing gambling regulation policy). 

However, as it’s taken by agreement (with no individual votes), there are a few possible approaches. There’s an “it’s not a vote” view, which means the summaries should stay focused on votes which have a common interpretation (if not reflecting the MP’s personal views, at least demonstrating that they did show up and vote for/against something). 

But then there’s the “impact is what matters” view, which is that it’s perfectly correct to include decisions like this on all MPs’ voting summaries as a record of impact (and to exclude it is to systematically miss points of consensus). That people might or might not support it in their hearts is interesting to understand, but ultimately irrelevant. 

Here is what we said in our 2024 review about the trade-off:

In general, our starting point should be accurately describing what is currently happening. “Agreements” are a large part of the current picture of how Parliamentary power works. We want to include decisions without a vote as a way power is exercised, while being accurate in what that reflects about individual MPs, and with an eye on making a point about the scale and lack of scrutiny of secondary legislation.

As such, we are starting cautiously. We have built technical approaches that let us include references to agreements in scoring and informative roles in a policy. We are applying this in a limited sense retrospectively, and will apply the same criteria used for vote inclusion to agreements moving forward – but may for the moment prefer not to include for borderline cases.

We have previously included agreements as components in policies that mostly contain votes (although depending on an MP’s tenure, agreements might make up more of their score).  The caution here is that this would be a one item policy, and so a step beyond how we’ve used it before (where it supplemented other votes).  As such, we are leaving this one in a draft policy for the moment, and might revisit on either future votes, or in an end of parliament retrospective. 

Greater UK/EU alignment

This is a draft policy to capture the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill. We have not made it live because logically there are some votes in the last five years that should also be included in this, and we have not had time for a comprehensive review. 

Anything we’ve missed?

We have a reporting form to highlight votes that should be added/are incorrectly in a policy, or a substantial policy line we are missing. We review responses for urgent problems, and otherwise these comments feed into the periodic updates.

What else we’ve been working on

We recently released TheyWorkForYou Votes, the backend we use to power the voting summaries for public use. You can watch our launch event for more about the wider context of the work. 

We’re continuing to do work around MPs’ financial interests: you can learn more on our WhoFundsThem page. 

Support our work

We create the voting summaries because we think it’s important to keep track of (and make more visible) decisions made by our elected representatives. We take doing getting this right seriously, and want to give creating the summaries the time they deserve.

If you value the work we do around voting records and would like to support our work, please consider donating. 

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Image: Engin Akyurt