We want to improve the quality of UK democracy by making more and better information about Parliament available to everyone. 

In previous updates to TheyWorkForYou, we’ve expanded the range of official sources the service pulls on: extending to cover all the UK’s parliaments, and recently bringing together all the registers of interest in one place. 

This update is about adding pipelines and data to bring in data beyond Parliament to provide richer insights into your representatives. 

What we’ve added:

• Committees and APPGs memberships
• Signatures (EDMs and Open Letters)
• Vote annotations
• Adding context to parliamentary debates
• Improved email alerts for political monitoring
• Navigation improvements to MPs profiles

You can also watch our launch webinar to learn more about how these changes fit together:

And as ever, you value the work we do, and want to help us go further – please consider making a donation to support our work. 

Committees and APPGs

An important part of how Parliament works is through the formal committee system and the informal APPGs. We wanted to improve the information we display on both of these kinds of groups. 

For Committees: we’ve pulled more information from Parliament to give extra information about the committees MPs are a part of,and to try to explain more about Parliament as part of the MP profile. 

For APPGs: there has not previously been a good central database of APPG members. We’ve set out to create this. We used a new LLM-assisted scraper to get lists of memberships off dozens of individual websites. For those without a website, we asked each APPG individually for a membership list to add to the collection. This database isn’t complete yet, but is now the best available source on APPG memberships.

Read more about this the APPG changes

Signatures

Early Day Motions are effectively an internal petition system available to MPs, where they can signal support for different issues. Including recent EDMs helps indicate which issues MPs see as important. 

But we also wanted to go beyond these motions to look at the growing trend for MPs to share joint open letters on social media instead. We have started to transcribe and store these open letters, so we can make the content more accessible, and show on MPs’ profiles the issues that concern them. 

We have separated out ‘motions to annul’ from other EDMs. The process of objecting to negative statutory instruments (which become law unless there is a vote against them) – felt worth highlighting above other proposed motions because it represents scrutiny of secondary legislation. These motions are technically called ‘prayers’ in the UK Parliament, but we use the term used in the Senedd and Scottish Parliament because it’s clearer. 

Read more about the EDM / open letter changes

Improved political monitoring

We originally created TheyWorkForYou’s email alerts to make it easier to track what your representatives have been saying in Parliament. But as well as following individual representatives, alerts can also be for phrases, and these have proven to be a vital tool that help civil society monitor what is happening in the UK’s parliaments.

To lean into this use, we’ve completely redesigned how you can create and manage complex keyword alerts, making it easier to group multiple terms, see results on the page, and manage a number of alerts across different topics.

With this, we want to make TheyWorkForYou a more powerful free tool for political monitoring —and make it easier for NGOs and grassroots organisations who cannot afford paid political monitoring to not be disadvantaged compared to those who can. We don’t think money should get you better access and want to build tools to level the playing field. 

Read more about the changes to email alerts

Vote annotations

Building on the release of our new site TheyWorkForYou Votes, we have made it easier to reach the new information we hold on voting. For recent votes in an MPs profile, we now link to our new richer analysis, and if MPs spoke in the section before the vote, we’ll also link to those speeches. 

We’re also starting to make some of the extra information we store in TheyWorkForYou Votes visible in MPs’ profiles and voting summaries, such as vote annotations and information about party instructions (whipping). TheyWorkForYou’s publication of voting records has led to more public justifications from representatives about how they vote, and we want to try and get that information back into the site. 

Currently we don’t have many examples of this while we test the system, but we will be picking a few specific votes to add more information and links to. 

Understanding parliamentary debates

We want to make it easier for everyone to understand Parliament, and one way we can do that is by adding context to debates beyond the official transcripts. 

We’ve gone back to features that have been around for twenty years and made improvements. We’ve overhauled our approach to linking words and phrases to Wikipedia to ensure there are fewer false positives. 

We’ve also revived aspects of the debate annotation system and glossary systems to give us the ability to add notes to high profile debates —and will be making more use of that over the next few months. 

A new coat of paint

To hold all this new information, we’ve redesigned our MP profile pages to make it easier to find different sections, and so they work better on mobile. 

We’ve added more explanatory text to different sections, and improved the display of registers of interest to make it easier to see only the new entries (also: see all the wider data we hold on registers of interests). 

Coming up

In the coming months we’ll be releasing some more work as part of our efforts to understand and improve how component parts of UK democracy are working in practice. 

We’ve been running a new survey on WriteToThem to understand more about what people are writing to their representatives about, and we’re going to release a report talking about the patterns we’ve learned from that, and how it’s affecting our thinking. 

As part of WhoFundsThem work, we’re continuing to dig into money in politics, and have two releases coming up. One is a report about the systems of tracking election donations, and the other is our research into MPs asking parliamentary questions about areas they have a financial interest in. 

That’s it for now, and remember if you want to help us go further – please consider making a donation to support our work!

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Header image: House of Commons