Representatives in the UK’s Parliaments and Assemblies do many things, but one of the most important is that they make decisions. These decisions shape the laws that govern us, and can affect every aspect of how we live our lives. 

On TheyWorkForYou, we list and display the individual votes of representatives, and for the UK House of Commons, we also create voting summaries that group a set of decisions together into a policy, like ‘preventing climate change’ or ‘increasing stamp duty’ — so for any specific MP you can see how they have generally voted around that issue.

As of this update, the summaries now contain all relevant votes up to  the end of April 2026. This blog post logs changes we’ve made to what’s included, and our ongoing thinking about how new votes suggest broader changes to our approach. 

We’re always working to improve our coverage and how we display and share our information. If you think this work is valuable, and want to help us bring greater transparency, please make a donation to support our work. 

About our summaries

Our summaries group a set of votes into a ‘policy’ (like ‘removing hereditary peers from the House of Lords’) where votes either agree or are against that policy . We label votes as either “scoring” or “informative”: only the scoring votes contribute to the headline of whether an MP is for or against a policy. We also compare an MP to a cohort of similar MPs (MPs of the same party who voted on the same votes) to give an indication when MPs’ voting notably differs from their party. 

We also sometimes include ‘agreements’ (where a decision was made without a vote) as part of policies — but do so conservatively to balance the difficulty of interpreting these decisions with the blind spots their complete exclusion would lead to.  

In drafting new policies and including votes, our main criteria for inclusion are:

• Substance – votes using the powers of Parliament
• Cohesion – we include votes that are mostly, if not completely, about the specific policy
• Uniqueness  – votes that have limited overlap with scoring votes in different policies
• Noteworthiness – where this might reflect impact of the legislation, news coverage, or public interest

The goal of these principles is to create policies where the top level summary is a good guide to the votes it summarises. When votes fulfil some but not all of these criteria, we may include them as informative votes.

You can read more about our approach.

New live policies

This update introduces the following policies:

• Universal Credit (Removal of Two Child Limit) Bill — [Person name] voted for/against scrapping the two-child limit so that families on Universal Credit get extra support for every child, not just their first two.
• Railways Bill – [Person name] voted for/against bringing the railways into public ownership by creating Great British Railways, a single body running most train services and the track in England.
• Northern Ireland Troubles Legacy 2025  — [Person name] voted for/against scrapping the scheme that let people avoid prosecution for Troubles-related crimes in exchange for cooperating, and removing the ban on bringing Troubles-related claims in the civil courts. 
• Northern Ireland Troubles Legacy 2023  — [Person name] voted for/against setting up an independent body to investigate Troubles-related deaths and injuries, ending most other criminal investigations and inquests, and offering people immunity from prosecution in exchange for cooperating.
• NIC Changes – National Insurance Contributions (Employer Pensions Contributions) Bill — [Person name] voted for/against taxing salary-sacrifice pension contributions above £2,000 a year (from April 2029).
• English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill – [Person name] voted for/against standardizing and increasing powers of devolved mayoralties, replacing two-tier local authorities with larger unitary authorities, and introducing a community right to buy.
• Sentencing Bill – [Person name] voted for/against making judges normally suspend prison sentences of a year or less, expanding suspended sentences and tagging, reducing independence of Sentencing Council from government. 

Votes added to existing policies

• A vote on government regulations around Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading was added to the ‘measures to prevent climate change’ policy line. 
• Two votes on government regulations around reception conditions and provision of accommodation to Asylum Seekers were added to the ‘stricter asylum system’ policy line. 

Notes

Fiscal drag

TheyWorkForYou has a number of ‘policies’ on changes to tax rates. Over the last few revisions, we have been conforming these where a vote ‘for’ a policy is a vote for a higher rate of tax. 

Where this immediately runs into trouble is the distinction between ‘more tax’ and ‘higher tax rate’, where a period of inflation has made this sharper than would have previously been the case. 

This update shows the problem in two changes. The rate of alcohol duty was increased inline with RPI (uprating): an increase in cash terms, but not in ‘real’ terms. Separately, basic rate and personal allowance has been frozen, which is fiscal drag. As the House of Commons explainer puts it “[n]ot increasing the value of tax thresholds (‘freezing’ them) increases people’s taxable income without tax rates actually increasing”. 

So, with a “change in tax rate” lens (how we currently evaluate this), income tax has stayed the same, while alcohol duty has been increased. But in terms of inflation adjusted tax (roughly) the opposite is true. 

An alternate framing would be to shift to a “tax impact” approach, where a vote is evaluated on whether it increases/decreases tax relative to an uprated baseline (where that baseline would typically be which of the varying possible indexes was defined in law). 

This is slightly more complicated, but is usually clear from the commentary where it matters most. The main problem is consistency retrospectively (although low inflation for the majority of the period covered generally makes this a bit of a wash).

The main impact of this is that as well as reversing the direction of our income tax threshold policy, we are changing some of the language used. 

Moving from:

[Person name] voted for/against raising the threshold at which people start to pay income tax

To:

[Person name] voted for/against increasing income tax (in real terms)

For the alcohol duty vote, we have added this to the existing policy line as a ‘neutral’ vote, which means we have cataloged it as relevant, but it doesn’t contribute to for/against scoring. 

Diago Garcia and votes that go nowhere

We have tagged the votes on legislation around ceding the Chagos islands to Mauritius  for the moment. While our usual policy would be to include votes after the third reading (which has happened), this decision has now effectively been put on pause in terms of the final steps of the legislation.

With the voting summaries, we have a focus on votes that have impact — but substantive votes that end up going nowhere can happen.

Ten minute rule bills (which can pass our criteria on being a substantive vote, but then get no extra time so have no prospect of becoming law) also merit a different approach. Here, we’ll include them if we have an existing policy line, but do not create new policy lines for them.

This means we do not create inaccuracies in existing content (if we say there is a list of votes on a policy, we will include the new vote on that policy), but also do not create new policies for a specific bill when that bill is unlikely to become live legislation. 

This is in line with our approach on legislation that is moving through Parliament while also a matter of substantial public discussion, like the recent Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. Here we added the votes to an existing policy around assisted dying as they were happening (because otherwise we would say an MP had not voted in an assisted dying vote), but in the end the legislation stalled in the Lords.

NI troubles legacy

The 2025/2026 bill votes reverses (or affirms the striking down by the courts of) elements of the 2023 Legacy Act.

As such, votes on the original legislation are read as being against the new policy that describes this bill. However, the original act had more elements, and so we’ve retrospectively created a policy line for the 2023 legislation. Generally these pieces of legislation have been coherent on party lines, so this should work cleanly for MPs present for both sets of votes. 

Lord Mandelson

Despite it being a hugely significant Parliamentary action, we have not created a new policy for the humble address (a parliamentary process to compel the release of government documents) on the release of Lord Mandelson documents and communications. 

This was passed by agreement (without a vote), and because of the difficulty of interpreting these, we include them conservatively where they fit into an existing policy.

We do have a currently unpublished policy that includes votes around openness and transparency which we have logged this in: this is waiting on sharpening up the description and/or splitting into smaller policy groups. 

Separating out older policies

We now display policies in voting summaries in five year groups – pushing policies that were last voted on longer ago further down each section. 

Here we are trying to balance a few different considerations:

• Long standing MPs have voted on a lot of things – some of these are now probably not what people are looking for when looking at the voting records – we want to have some recency bias. 
• Some of those long ago votes are still hugely significant – laws on the books continue to affect people’s lives even if the vote was a long time ago. 

Splitting policies into five year buckets based on when the last vote was will help keep votes that keep coming up in different forms present. At the same time, more historical policies are separated out, while still being in the list.

Uncontentious legislation

One of the signifiers of ‘noteworthiness’ we’re using is second/third stage votes on primary legislation (something that will become a law). 

This in general fits in with a shift towards describing these votes under policies that cover a specific bill (with a clear but simple description of what that bill covers) rather than covering the same vote under several different policies (which create a false impression that voting decisions are being made independently in different policies, when in practice it’s the same vote). 

Where we have been creating policy lines is where all major stage votes have been passed by agreement. In this update, for this reason we are not covering the ‘Industry and Exports (Financial Assistance) Bill’,  ‘Medical Training (Prioritisation) Bill’ and ‘Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill’.

This reflects that these are uncontentious legislation that are typically smaller in scope  — although it also raises the complaint that we’re not reflecting progress on areas of cross-party agreement. 

This is coherent with our general approach of not having ‘all agreement’ policies, but a switch to describing bills in policies means the voting records can double (if currently a bit uncleanly) as a record of legislation passed during a Parliament. 

One approach in future might be to better distinguish in the voting record display between ‘thematic’ and ‘legislative’ policies, which could in principle then include separately ‘uncontentious policies’ which are entirely agreements. For the moment we have marked these three as draft policies in case we want to revisit this in future. 

Motions to annul (and similar)

This is adjacent to votes, but as part of our signatures update to TheyWorkForYou we started to list Early Day Motions (formally a draft motion system that in practice works as a petition system) and open letters MPs have signed in their profiles. As part of this, we separated out ‘motions to annul’ from the wider set of EDMs, as these are motions that, if promoted to a debate and vote, would object to and annul government regulations passed through secondary legislation. 

We can pick these out because Parliament’s API marks them as different; however, they are not the only kind of substantive motion that can be proposed through the EDM process. 

The current EDM on the draft EHRC code of practice is substantively similar to a motion to annul, but is following a form set in the legislation rather than the general motion to annul process. As such, we have manually added this motion to this group and it is displayed in the more substantive section on the signature pages of MPs who support it.  We have created a tag to capture this sort of motion, and amended copy on MPs profiles to reflect a slightly broader scope on what we’re including under motions to annul. 

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Header image: Photo by Vimal S on Unsplash