Here’s a quick pre-Christmas round-up of what the mySociety democracy team has been up to in the last few months!

WhoFundsThem is our new project looking into MPs’ and APPGs’ financial interests. We want to improve the information available in TheWorkForYou, make better data available, and improve the standard of politics in the UK. 

We and our volunteers have been doing lots over the last few months – here’s what’s new.

New register of interests in TheyWorkForYou

A great development this year has been a big improvement in how Parliament gathers and publishes the Register of Members Financial Interests (RMFI). Information is now gathered from MPs in a much better format, making follow on analysis much easier. 

This is the result of a lot of great work by PDS, but we do also want to claim a win here. The way TheyWorkForYou publishes the register of interests has been highlighted for years (including by MPs) as an example for how Parliament can improve. We want to support people on the inside working to make things better. One of the ways we can do that is by demonstrating what is possible and helping win internal arguments and shift priorities.

Of course the downside of our “lobbying by demonstration” is that when you win you have to do work. In the last few weeks, the Commons have now turned off the old site, and the information is available on a new site and their API.  We’ve written a bridge to re-import this in a format TheyWorkForYou expects, to continue to power our comparison over time feature. This is now a lot more information than was captured before (which is great!) – so we’ve reformatted the page to make it clearer (to pick on my MP, here’s an example). 

While we’ve been doing this, we’ve also been planning out how we can improve how this information is stored in our database – and make it easier for our plans to get the registers for the other UK Parliaments in. 

We continue to publish the information as a set of spreadsheets – one is a re-publication of the official CSVs with some extra fields, and the other a backward compatible spreadsheet with all the information in a single cell. 

RMFI Crowdsourcing

Our volunteers have done a heroic job going through the registers of interests of all MPs and answering a set of questions for each. 

In some cases we were trying to gather more information about donations, or flag donations made from certain industries – but also in general we’re interested in how possible this exercise is – how are the rules working in practice, and how easy is it for people to easily parse the results?

We’re currently reviewing the results, and these will feed into two releases in February:

• A new section on TheyWorkForYou for each MP summarising what we found, and linking into the wider stories. 
• A report on the lessons we’ve learned, recommendations for improvement, and ideas on how we can go further from the outside. 

We have published the research that supported our question selection if you would like to know more. 

APPG information requests

One of the things we’re trying to do is use the new APPG rules to get more information in public. 

We’ve written this up in more detail in its own blog post, but the short version is we had mixed success with our pilot round of information requests. Some APPGs gave us the information, or were otherwise publishing the information they were supposed to – but others dragged their feet or didn’t respond. 

Given we’re going to have to spend more time chasing than we’d like, for the wider set of APPGs we’re going to reduce the scope to just getting the membership lists public. We’ve also got a planned escalation route for non-response through initially contacting the APPG chairs to encourage a response, and ultimately listing non-compliant APPGs.

What we don’t want is that rules brought in to reduce “bad” APPG behaviour are in effect only followed by “good” APPGs. We need to get more responses, and start highlighting when the information isn’t being published. 

Modernisation Committee 

One of the interests of the House of Commons new Modernisation Committee is on improving standards. 

We submitted a few practical recommendations based on what we’ve learned so far in the project:

• Chairs should enforce the rule that interests declared in debates should be clear.
• The details of conflicts of interests made when submitting parliamentary questions should be published.
• A few recommendations on new categories in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, to better structure common interests declared. For instance separating out payment or travel costs for media appearances, and gathering more information when MPs are receiving large donations to fund staff members for their offices.
• Parliament should gather and publish the required APPG information rather than just say it ought to be made available on request (to sidestep the problem described above). 

We are also developing a wider range of recommendations for release in February. 

As with the great new data coming out of the Parliament’s new register, there are big wins in getting Parliament to adopt better rules and publish more information. But also all of these are areas we think we can make progress on from the outside anyway – we just need support to do so. 

We can make a difference together

Through TheyWorkForYou and our wider democracy work we take a practical approach to improving politics in the UK, looking for opportunities to make things better through putting the work in, and where we don’t need to ask permission to succeed. 

But to make this happen we need money and support to investigate problems and understand how we can best make a difference. We want to do more to improve the data that exists, and help support new volunteer projects to build better data and services.

If you support us and our work, please consider making a one-off or standing donation. It makes a difference. 

The new House of Commons Modernisation Committee has made a call for submissions to reform House of Commons procedures, standards and working practices.

We’re going to make a submission to the Committee, focused around a set of practical fixes. But there are also bigger issues that will take longer to work through. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to publish blog posts on long running issues where deeper changes would improve how Parliament works.

Previously we’ve written about how it should be easier for MPs to vote, how giving MPs more power over the timetable helps them keep promises to voters, stand-in (or locum) MPs, citizens assemblies’ to set standards, and fixing the public ombudsman.

This week our pitch is Parliament should learn more from the devolved Parliaments on simplifying terms and procedure – with the goal of the how Parliament works being more easily understood by both the public and MPs.

Strangers and personalities

Parliament has a jargon problem, and that makes it hard for the public and MPs themselves to understand how Parliament works.

All workplaces make their own words and culture, but democratic institutions should also aim to be welcoming and accessible to the public as a whole. In Hannah White’s book Held in Contempt, she points out that it was only in 2004 that Parliament adopted the term ‘members of the public’ (e.g. ‘us’, the people they represent) to replace the previous ‘strangers’.

The guide to Parliamentary procedure (“Erskine May”) was finally opened up to free and public access in 2019, but its actual content remains written in archaic English and some sections are misleading without an understanding of the period in which it was written. For example, the rule on MPs not using each other’s names is explained as avoiding “personality”, which is an old term for “personal insult” rather than a belief that MPs should talk robotically.

The problem isn’t just a historical legacy. In 2012, MPs renamed Parliament’s famous clock tower the ‘Elizabeth Tower’. This has led to changes in how the building and its history are described on the Parliament website, reflecting the new 150 year history of ‘Elizabeth Tower and Big Ben’. The exception is the part of Parliament with the keenest eye on clear communication with the public: the gift shop. This beacon of clarity continues to describe the tower, primarily and correctly, as Big Ben.

From this, we suggest a ‘Big Ben’ rule: the publicly accessible and understood term should be the official term. Parliamentary trivia is for the tour guides, and no one should need to know it to understand how Parliament works.

The UK’s newer Parliaments use different ways of working. MSPs in Scotland and MSs in Wales address each other by name, talk about stages of legislation (rather than ‘readings’), and instead of accumulated jargon (Hansard, Erskine May), use terms like ‘The Record’ and ‘Parliamentary rules and guidance’.

This is not just about being legible to the outside world, but about clearer working within Parliament. MPs having a lack of clarity over complicated procedures makes it harder for them to do their job. Amendments to legislation are often presented as impenetrable lists of text being deleted and modified in other legislation, rather than a clear “track changes” that makes it clear to MPs what the effect of the change is (the US House of Representatives has made progress on an approach to this). Making how Parliament works clearer makes it a more effective institution.

What can mySociety and TheyWorkForYou do?

While the best approach is to fix problems at the source, TheyWorkForYou has some capacity to adopt this approach in the language it uses itself. For instance, because this is a change already provided by the Hansard data, the convention of not referring to MPs by name is already broken in TheyWorkForYou. We could introduce more annotations that undo ways MPs are required to make themselves unclear.

Additionally, we can provide extra analysis and search over documents like the Parliamentary rules and guidance to make it a more understandable guide to the public and MPs.

If you’d like to support us in trying to fix problems from the outside, we can always do more with more funding – one-off or standing donations are appreciated.

Image: Huy Phan on Unsplash.

As part of our TICTeC work bringing together civic tech practitioners, we are running a community of practice for Parliamentary Monitoring Organisations (“PMOs”).

The other week we ran a session looking at “Subnational PMOs”, and this blog post is to work through what I’ve learned from the speakers, why that was a bad name for the session, and how it’s shaping my thinking on our future UK and international work.

Finding projects I want to learn from

As the name suggests, a Parliamentary Monitoring Organisation is a civil society/non governmental organisation that observes and monitors what happens in a Parliament. It’s a term that’s used internationally to help draw together and network organisations doing this work in different places.

My key interest here is that we run TheyWorkForYou, seen internationally as one of the first civic tech enabled PMOs (and it’s a delight to see new projects like Thailand’s Parliament Watch continue to cite us as an inspiration).

The trouble I’m having is in jumping between international work (where we say ‘PMO’ a lot), and long term planning for our UK services —where I see some of the key democratic problems/opportunity areas as further away from Parliament, but still something that logically fits within TheyWorkForYou.

I’ve got two “problems” here.

In the UK, I’m trying to think about what our approach should be to new levels of devolution in the UK. For international readers, the UK is an unusually centralised state, with a few layers of weak local government and a semi-federal arrangement in some areas of the country, but not others. In recent years, there has been more devolution to the larger cities and elected mayors. But this is a structure that doesn’t fit well within the framework of TheyWorkForYou, and needs new approaches.

Internationally, I’m trying to understand how we can add value in joining up organisations that wouldn’t otherwise know about each other. Joining up PMOs isn’t a new idea, and we don’t want to duplicate work with other regional networks. So part of looking subnationally is trying to learn more about organisations that may or may not consider themselves to be PMOs, and may be less discoverable (to us and each other) through the channels that already exist.

Ideally these two problems have some overlap in the solution. But the first step was to find some organisations doing what can badly be described as “subnational PMO” work. Fortunately, we found two (more detail below)! And this has helped me refine our thinking about what we’re actually trying to do here, and how we might better discover these groups in future.

Moving beyond Parliaments

I think the first thing we need to do is generalise PMOs: the term I’m thinking about is ‘Democratic Transparency Organisations (DTOs)’. Here’s a working definition:

Democratic Transparency Organisations are projects that [rework / create] public information about [democratic institutions / politicians] to improve [transparency / accountability / standards / efficiency].

The important bits of this definition for me are:

• DTOs will generally build on existing data from one or many institutions, but can also create new analysis or data.
• Their focus is democratic institutions – generally elected representatives, but could include scrutiny/transparency of citizens assemblies.
• Their role isn’t passive —it is to change the democratic system they are a part of. While the theory of change may differ, the goal isn’t to just record, but make things different.

This captures what I generally consider to be a PMO, but is also language that captures projects that share the same spirit. The tools of PMOs are a strategy that DTOs adopt when faced with democratic institutions that look like parliaments. But lots of democratic institutions do *not* look like parliaments —and these need a different approach.

Subnational DTOs

When we talk about subnational DTOs, there’s a lot of things that can be covered with the language of PMOs. Many state/devolved legislatures fit perfectly into the general model of elected representatives who are in parties and have debates, votes, etc.

But there’s a transition to entirely different forms of democratic institutions that the PMO model works less well for. The forms of democratic institutions become more varied, and the number of institutions to deal with increases.

DTOs aimed at the sub-national/municipality level have a different set of problems and these are in some respects harder problems. If your goal is to explain subnational democracy in a country, you have massively increased the scope of the work. This now involves thousands of politicians rather than hundreds, and hundreds/thousands of institutions rather than one or two.

This means a huge amount more foundational work and that changes the kind of project that’s viable. As such, even when PMO tools might be appropriate, the scale of the work makes them more inaccessible than other approaches.

Benefits of local DTOs

The scope of decisions made below the national level means improving the flow of data and understanding can have a substantial impact on public policy and the lives of citizens. Often the policy changes that have the biggest impacts on people’s day-to-day lives are made at the local level. Huge amounts of decisions and adaptation in climate especially involve local action.

The theory of change of local DTOs is the same as national ones: improving democracy through usage by citizens, civil society and official institutions.

• Citizens: Creates better feedback loops between citizens and representatives — better principal-agent alignment.
• Civil Society: Gives new tools to infomediaries (journalists, academic, CSOs) to understand, share information, and take action.
• Institutional: Creates internal efficiencies for the representative organisation(s) by making their own information more accessible/inspire improvements.

For each of these, national PMOs can hit a sweet spot of effort/cost to impact. But for each of these paths, different approaches may be more cost effective at the local level.

Going wide – Querido Diário

Querido Diário is a project that aims to bring together and make searchable the government gazettes for every city in Brazil (of which there are over 5,000). The goal is to create a national level database of decisions made in every municipality.

This evolved out of Open Knowledge Brazil (OKB)’s national level projects looking at public spending data. There often isn’t great data at the national/federal level, but this gets worse the more local you go. However, if information is technically available but horribly fragmented, this is something that civic tech can try and address from the outside. As there isn’t an API of government decisions available, OKB are building it themselves.

When you’re trying to build a project covering hundreds or thousands of different institutions, you have to do more work further down the value chain just bringing the data together before you can analyse it. For instance, in the UK, we’ve ended up being the holders of the best list of local authorities, because we needed that to power our climate analysis. The uses of that base layer are a bit abstract,- but it is the foundation that is required for highly impactful services.

In the case of Querido Diario, Diários do Clima builds on top of this base layer to create a service specifically looking at new environmental and climate regulations in all municipalities covered. Having this information in one place makes cross-city comparisons of climate action possible. As well as making gazettes easier to search for local journalists or civil society, this dataset enables subject areas journalists and researchers to do new cross cutting analysis.

Lowering the cost of accessing all local information helps people and organisations with subject matter expertise do work that would otherwise be unviable or incomplete. The scope of Querido Diario shows the challenges of scale when going wide —but also the big rewards of joining up the data.

Going deep – Datos que hacen Ciudad

An alternative to covering lots of municipalities is to build a service catering to one.

Datos que hacen Ciudad’s goal is to create better information about Santiago de Cali, a city in Colombia. The project includes familiar PMO approaches of displaying information about representatives, but is also consciously aimed towards getting better information to those representatives. The theory of change here is “If we give our leaders more information, it will lead to better decisions.” Through councillors sharing information on their areas of focus/problem areas, Datos que hacen Ciudad can both provide that information to citizens, and shape the information to be sourced and created.

One of the complexities of local governance is that they are best understood as a patchwork of different institutions. This project makes that complexity an advantage —it’s a partnership of different local institutions, pulling on resources and knowledge from different places, with a key anchoring in the university.

This feedback loop between decision makers and different groups helps create highly localised information. Data collection and analysis catering to the exact needs of decision makers can be more sensitive to local patterns than generalised national data.

The different approaches use expertise and technical knowledge in different ways, and can work constructively together:making the data of different cities more accessible helps local analysis pull on other polices and data better.

What can we learn from this?

A key takeaway, in terms of finding other organisations to connect and learn from, is that we should be looking for examples based around cities and municipalities (rather than language around ‘subnational PMOs’). This isn’t always what we’re trying to apply it to,- but they’ll be more discoverable and the approaches might be more generalisable.

In terms of work in the UK, ‘deep’ vs ‘wide’ represent different approaches. Our natural inclination at mySociety is to do ‘wide’ projects and be a foundational service. But funding wise, it’s difficult to score well in competitive bids with this approach (we’ll keep making the case, but it’s a recurring obstacle).

For new levels of devolution, it’s not just a transparency problem but a place-making problem, which requires tailoring approaches to different areas. Doing a better job in current and future devolution means more partnerships with local institutions that can shape the work towards what is most useful. Alongside that, less abstract work with a clear place based approach might be an easier sell.

In new mySociety projects, we tend to work with partners to pull in greater expertise and have a bigger impact. In our core democracy work, we’re getting back towards partnering with volunteers. We’ve thought about being accessible to students in our crowdsourcing approach (and have a few in our current cohort)– but this could go further: for instance, a more direct partnership with a London or Manchester-based university would be good for anchoring how we treat covering the respective mayors.

In general the future of TheyWorkForYou’s devolution approach may need an element of partnership with existing organisations, or incubating new groups. Going local means scaling up — and we need to find sustainable ways of doing that.

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If you’d like to join our global Community of Practice on parliamentary monitoring, then feel free to email us on tictec@mysociety.org

Image: Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash.

The new House of Commons Modernisation Committee has made a call for submissions to reform House of Commons procedures, standards and working practices.

We’re going to make a submission to the Committee, focused around a set of practical fixes. But there are also bigger issues that will take longer to work through. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to publish blog posts on long running issues where deeper changes would improve how Parliament works.

Previously we’ve written about how it should be easier for MPs to vote, how giving MPs more power over the timetable helps them keep promises to voters, stand-in (or locum) MPs, and using citizens assemblies’ to set standards.

This week our pitch is that Parliament should make all the casework passing through MPs offices more efficient by completing previously abandoned reform of the Ombudsman system.

Systems for dealing with things that don’t work

Part of an efficient layered democracy is helping people who feel let down by public services to raise their issues in the right place. Currently in the UK, too many complaints go through MPs to be referred back to local councillors, and the network of different complaints processes and ombudsmans* is confusing and difficult to access.

An Ombudsman is an independent official who investigates and resolves complaints from the public. Another term for ombudsman is ‘public advocate’ and in the UK system, hundreds of MPs and thousands of staff are engaged in helping constituents resolve problems dealing with government departments or agencies (and post-privatisation, the same services being delivered by private organisations). The intervention of an MP can lead to extra external and internal scrutiny and changed outcomes for the people who raised a complaint.

There are different schools of thought about how to improve this situation. Some see this as a core part of the post-war MP’s job, with an MP as a vital bridge between citizens and the technocratic state, which should be better supported with more resources. Others see this kind of advocacy as being a distraction from the national legislating duties of an MP, and believe that more of this should fall to local councillors (or more fundamentally, that things should just work without intervention).

Both these perspectives could find common ground in the idea that better systems can both ease the workload and increase the systematic effectiveness of complaints made.

Fix the ombudsman

Following years of reports recommending a change, in 2016 there was significant progress made on proposals to merge several ombudsmen together to create the Public Services Ombudsman – with the goal of reducing complexity to the citizen, and modernising the structure.

Functionally, this meant removing the “MP filter” from complaints made to the Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman. Currently PHSO has to turn away complainants who have not gone through their MP for non-health complaints, but can just accept health-related complaints (no one thinks this makes sense). The proposed reform also gave it a new role in improving complaint handling and promoting good practice through issuing recommendations.

Despite getting as far as a draft bill, this process has now stalled, and the PAC Committee in 2023 said that “it is disappointing that the Government has again failed to recognise the importance and urgency of sector-wide ombudsman reform. The current arrangements are outdated and needlessly complex and prevent the public from effective access to justice in cases of wrongdoing.” The PHSO continues to call for itself to be replaced, and points out the efficiency savings of replacing it. This is an area where the basic problem is agreed and the details hammered out: what is missing is Parliamentary time. But a little investment now can lead to both improved outcomes and lower costs.

A more efficient ombudsman would become a vital complement to MPs’ current work. The existing public service ombudsmans for Wales and Scotland both process comparatively few pieces of casework compared to MPs, and the mailbag volume isn’t diminishing any time soon. But the goal of the ombudsman isn’t to fix 1,000 problems individually – instead we want it to make one recommendation that fixes 10,000 problems that haven’t happened yet. Completing this oven-ready reform is vital to lighten MPs’ workload and improve public services (and people’s lives) by turning complaints into long-term solutions.

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*Because I’ve had such fun writing this footnote before: there’s no settled gender neutral pluralisation of Ombudsman. The original Swedish term (ombudsmän) is gender-neutral, and it’s fine to apply English rules and assumptions once something has become an English word (ombudsmen, or ombudspersons). Alternative approaches include shorting to ‘Ombuds’. The International Ombudsman Institute sidesteps the problem by referring to multiple ‘ombudsman institutions’, which also reflects that the idea is often localised using a term that is more descriptive in the local language (public advocate, etc). It’s not the main reason, but if we keep merging ombudsmans, it does help avoid this problem.

Image: Sear Greyson on Unsplash.

The new House of Commons Modernisation Committee has made a call for submissions to reform House of Commons procedures, standards and working practices.

We’re going to make a submission to the Committee, focused around a set of practical fixes. But there are also bigger issues that will take longer to work through. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to publish blog posts on long running issues where deeper changes would improve how Parliament works.

Previously we’ve written about how it should be easier for MPs to vote, how giving MPs more power over the timetable helps them keep promises to voters, and stand-in (or locum) MPs.

This week our pitch is that Parliament should commission a Citizens’ Assembly to write a job role for MPs and consider how Parliament, MPs and MP support staff should relate to each other.

A unique role

We think that being an MP should be a more normal and understandable job — and that creating more clarity and structure around the role is good for both MPs and their constituents.

The role of ‘Member of Parliament’ is, for legal and historical reasons, odd. MPs are appointed by 650 elections to 650 separate positions, with a legal status similar to being self-employed. There is no formal connection between an MPs employment and their party, and at the same time no formal idea that they’re supposed to be independent of their party.

While the devolved Parliaments have a requirement that representatives should ‘be accessible to the people of the areas for which they have been elected to serve and to represent their interests conscientiously’, there is no such rule for MPs. This gives a great amount of freedom to MPs, but is in its own way, a trap. In the absence of a clear direction on what they should be doing, it is easy for MPs to be squeezed between party leadership and constituent demands. A clearly defined job role helps evaluate and manage conflicting pressure, and defines the support necessary for the role.

The premise of TheyWorkForYou is in the name — representatives should, in a meaningful way, be understood to be working on behalf of their constituents as a whole, and society in general. But it’s also true that if we’re collectively MPs’ bosses, there are not the structures in place for us to be good employers. If we want to come to a clearer settlement on this, we need a constructive dialogue that goes further than infrequent elections and public polling. We need to meaningfully engage citizens in thought and deliberation about how we can have the best system of representation possible.

Setting standards

We need a way of involving a wider group of people in setting the standards and expectations for what an MP does. One way of doing this would be a Citizens’ Assembly, that brings together a diverse group of people from every part of the country and different ways of life. UCL Constitution Unit’s Democracy in the UK assembly provides a number of useful directions about ethical standards set by MPs (with solid support for a stronger code of conduct); we can go further down this route to explore different ideas of what MPs are supposed to be doing, and give them support to do so.

As a basic task an assembly could be used to define a job description for MPs. What evidence we have suggests this is unlikely to be hugely prescriptive (there is recognition that MPs need to slide between multiple modes of representation) but would be informative about how that better defined role can be supported – and a wider set of questions about the MPs’ role that we could clarify at the same time. Involve have argued that a citizens assembly should play an important part in setting the roles and standards for MPs’ behaviour, and potentially as part of the way that MPs are judged. Introducing deliberative democracy into this process helps fix processes where MPs both set and mark their own homework (seeing deliberation as part of the anti-corruption toolkit rather than a replacement for MPs).

Creating a new conversation

There are wider questions where there are different schools of thought on how Parliament should work. Having citizens weigh in on the balance would help advance arguments and unlock reforms. How much should the government control Parliament? How should MPs fit into that? What is the appropriate scope of casework? What should MPs be spending their time on? How do we make sure they have the resources they need to do that? How can we provide decent working conditions to the representatives and their staff who work on our behalf?

This last point is especially important. While the MP is the only office holder, they have a wider staff to help them support their work. While thousands of people are collectively employed by MPs, they are all employed by individual MPs in small groups. This makes it difficult to impossible for MPs’ staff to raise bullying or abuse issues. Staff groups have proposed staff should be employed centrally, rather than by MPs, but this was rejected by a Speaker’s Conference.

This is a dispute it’d be useful for MPs’ employers collectively to weigh in on. The Democracy in the UK assembly found strong support for the idea that “In the workplace MPs should be subject to the same sanctions as other employees regarding the treatment of staff. Bullying or harassment should not be tolerated.” A Citizens’ Assembly focused on the job role and structures of support would provide direction from the level above MPs on appropriate structures to both be supported and support their staff.

Healthier democratic conversations

For MPs who feel constrained, this is a forum to make the case on how they could be supported to do their job better. For those MPs who use the idea that they are accountable to “the electorate” as a justification that there should be almost no restrictions on their behaviour, citizens’ assemblies are a vital guide to the kinds of standards that citizens will and won’t accept from their representatives.

From our point of view, this would help clarify the approach TheyWorkForYou should take in holding MPs to account — but this would also be helpful as a reset in democratic relations. This debate is often put in “public versus elite” framings that lead to a number of unhelpful attitudes. Views from “the public” of what MPs should do are framed as incoherent and uneducated, in a way that elite discussion almost becomes resentful of the idea that the public are part of the discussion at all.

The ghost of the public is used to justify both underinvestment in democracy, and detachment from the idea the public have anything useful to say on the subject. At the same time, the public has no actual power here. Reforms stall, not because they are popular or not, but because of opposition from those who already have power.

Creating structures to meaningfully involve citizens in this discussion provides a way out of this problem, and could lead to a more constructive discussion on the relationship between citizens and representatives.

Image: Deniz Fuchidzhiev on Unsplash.

A key part of my job is to think about problems that exist in the UK, understand where technical approaches can make a difference, and help make pitches to funders who care about those problems (or who like technical solutions), that we’re a good place to spend their money.

A big part of that process is being turned down a lot! There are far more good ideas than there is funding. But as a result, a big chunk of my work is probably best described as “writing sci-fi for a small audience of grant managers”. I’d like to change that by talking a bit more publicly about the problems we think are important, and how we can make a difference in solving them.

In this case, we (working with brilliant partners in Democracy Club and The Politics Project) were putting together a bid for Google’s Impact Challenge around more resilient democracy. This was unusual in being a potentially large grant of €1 million, which both meant it was enough money to pick off a big problem and that there was a lot of competition. 340 organisations applied across Europe and there was only €15 million to go around. It was always unlikely we’d win – but I think the idea was good – so here’s more about that!

Improving civics understanding in the UK

The quick summary is that we were going to make better information about who is responsible for what in this country, and we were going to make sure it was available where it was needed.

If you think devolution is essential to the economic and democratic future of the UK, worried about youth engagement with democracy, or concerned about abuse in public life, a lack of civic knowledge is a common problem. We think it is possible with a relatively small amount of money to make a real impact on this problem.

A key benefit of devolution isn’t just making better decisions locally, but freeing up inherently limited capacity at the centre to deal with truly national issues. But the problem with spreading responsibility around multiple levels of democracy is that you make it harder for people to know the right place to go to when they need help. Part of MPs’ offices being overwhelmed is because they receive messages that need to be sent on to local government, and the Jo Cox Civility Commission highlighted that people being bounced around a system they don’t understand is a specific cause of frustration which results in abuse towards MPs and their staff.

This is a problem we can fix. We’re already one of the best approaches to this problem by accident — a big use of WriteToThem isn’t to write messages but just to find out who the local councillors are for your ward (see also Democracy Club’s Your Area tool) . We want to build a system that gets this information everywhere, and supports a much wider range of uses.

Our plan was a set of interconnected technical and educational approaches, working with partners Democracy Club (who are responsible for getting election information everywhere), and The Politics Project (a leading democratic education organisation).

Getting the data right, and getting it everywhere

At the foundation of this approach is better data. Democracy Club would build on their existing elections database to create a representatives database that could feed a “WhoDoesWhat” API.

We’d then use this centralised resource to improve information on our existing high traffic services. But that’s not how we solve the big problem. We need this information everywhere.

We don’t want WriteToThem to be how people get to the right place: we want every single MP’s website, local council, and news site to be able to say who is responsible for what based on where you live and how you get in contact. We’d do this following the Democracy Club model, of producing APIs and widgets that make it easy to put this information everywhere it’s needed.

(If you would be a potential user of this database – Democracy Club has a mailing list you can sign up to for more information if we can make progress on this in different ways.)

Get the right information to people who need it

There are lots of organisations working to get civics education where it’s most needed. We want to make every single one of them more effective, by creating tools that help make online and offline materials more responsive to local circumstances.

At the moment, if you’re The Politics Project, going into schools across the country, you need to adjust materials all the time. Does this area have a devolved parliament? Combined authority? Two tier council? When’s the next election; who’s currently running the council? Everything either needs hedging, or customisation.

One of the ways they customise their work is by using WriteToThem — but we can make something better! Our plan was to create a templating tool that builds on the WhoDoesWhat database to make it easy for educators and civics organisations to make materials that are instantly customisable — saving time and making materials more relevant to the communities they’re working with.

We were going to work with a range of organisations to design and test this tool and move huge amounts of existing materials across to this approach — creating a fantastic “last mile” tool for civics education.

Improved systematic information and signals

Once we’ve made WriteToThem less useful by scaling up a key feature, we’re going to reinvent it.

People should use WriteToThem not because it’s the best way of finding out who your MP or councillor is, but because everyone agrees communication using it is better than just sending emails (to the right person, clear, non-abusive). We want to have a big think about how we can best adapt WriteToThem to the problems of today.

We also have a unique position sitting between many people writing and many representatives receiving. We want to make more use of this: we want to understand more about the content of messages, where they’re coming from, and where they’re going, creating a ‘Zeitgeist’ view on constituent communication (without processing the text of messages).

This helps create more visibility of issues over multiple representatives (and different layers of government), but also helps highlight where the mailbag is systematically missing areas and groups. We know MPs use mailbag as a metric of constituency opinion — but also that they probably shouldn’t. We want to create tools that help understand distributions in the messages coming in, and create more interest in other ways of gauging constituency opinions.

Please give us £1,000,000

Google said no — but if you happen to have a lot of money and think any or all of this sounds like a good idea, please get in touch! (Always happy to share the longer concept note).

If you have less than this (say £10), this is also useful and helps keep the idea factory churning!

If you support our work and want to set up a regular payment, in the long run this helps make us more independent of big funders, and more able to make steady progress. Every little helps.

The new House of Commons Modernisation Committee has made a call for submissions to reform House of Commons procedures, standards and working practices.

We’re going to make a submission to the Committee, focused around a set of practical fixes. But there are also bigger issues that will take longer to work through. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to publish blog posts on long running issues where deeper changes would improve how Parliament works.

Previously we’ve written about how it should be easier for MPs to vote, and how giving MPs more power over the timetable ultimately helps them keep promises to voters.

Today we’re publishing our research into Stand-in (or ‘locum’) MPs. This is the idea that when MPs have a substantial period of absence (e.g. parental or long-term sickness) there should be a process to appoint someone who can temporarily fulfil the duties of an MP.

The need here is to find an approach that starts with the fact that MPs are people, and we need to be able to handle prolonged absence well —both for constituent representation and the wellbeing of MPs.

The idea of replacing absent representatives with stand-in MPs is (if not universal) certainly something that happens in other Parliaments. Generally these are in Parliaments elected by party-list proportional representation, and there is a good ‘next person’ on the list to appoint. We need an approach that works for the candidate-based system we use in the UK.

Our pitch is creating a new role with speaking rights in Parliament, while voting continues to be handled by proxy vote (over an extended period). But other approaches are possible, and what’s important at this point is trying to draw out objections and views, and trying to find ways forward.

The research is consciously not comprehensive, but we’ve sign-posted what we think the next set of questions is, and how it’s possible to get more answers.

You can read the report online.

For feedback, please email me at alex.parsons@mysociety.org.

Image: Yaopey Yong on Unsplash.

Citizens Assemblies are processes that bring together a representative group of citizens from different walks of life to discuss problems. These can be used to overcome political gridlock and to use diverse perspectives to improve policy approaches. 

Assemblies in the UK have been held by several of the UK’s Parliaments, by local authorities, NHS Trusts, and by academic institutions. 

To help us add citizens assemblies to CAPE, we have done upstream work in making it easier to find and keep track of citizens assemblies. We have:

• Created a dataset to keep track of assemblies
• Updated our guidance on publishing citizen assembly reports to reflect this archive, and guidance around licensing reports.

An archive of Citizens Assemblies

Because citizens assemblies are not standardised processes, there isn’t one place where you can see all the assemblies that have been held, or read what they concluded. Involve has maintained a tracker, but this has fallen a few years out of date.

To add information about local citizens assemblies on climate change to our CAPE website, we needed to create a good up-to-date dataset.  To do this in a sustainable way, we now host a register that aims to cover citizens assemblies held in the UK.

Using an automated trawl of all local authority websites, which we then reviewed to remove false positives, we identified ten new citizens assemblies in addition to the one’s Involve had already collected.

But that turned out to be the easy part. The bigger problem was due to local government website changes, many of the links that had worked a few years ago were broken, and needed to be added manually. 

We’ve found updated links, and where possible links directly to the PDF final report. We have added a cache of these PDF reports to our registry – meaning we’re preserving a record of reports, and that services using our register can fall back on our backup if a future re-organisation breaks the links again. 

(This may have fallen out of date by the time we publish the blog post – let us know if we’re missing yours!)

Licencing democratic documents

Citizens assemblies as new democratic processes do not have standardised forms for publishing recommendations or reports. Part of that lack of standardisation is inconsistency on how the final report is licenced (meaning the terms under which someone can reuse or share the report).

Our view is that for Citizens’ Assemblies held by public authorities, or funded with public money, the results of the assembly should be released under either the Open Parliament/Open Government licence – or the equivalent Creative Commons licence (CC BY 4.0).

This wouldn’t just clarify “it’s fine to rehost in a cache or archive” but would allow explicit re-use and re-publication in other forms. Most reports are only published as PDFs, meaning there would be added value from a site that did for Citizens Assemblies what TheyWorkForYou does for Parliaments – bringing all the information together in one place.  It would also be permissive to translations of citizens assembly reports into other languages, or for re-publication and compilations of recommendations on similar themes. 

Reviewing the 39 reports we have in our database: 24 had no information on copyright or licensing, 4 were published under Open Government/Equivalent CC licence, 7 were published under a slightly more restrictive CC licence (not allowing commercial usage), and 4 explicitly claimed general copyright in some shape or form. 

These differences are generally explained by different facilitator organisations writing reports. Shared Future’s template report consistently uses the same CC licence. Organisations that work with a mixture of public and private clients may retain copyright boilerplate sometimes without thinking about it, and for smaller organisations, there may not be awareness of the benefits of permissive licensing of democratic documents.

In other cases, there may be an attitude that licensing is something that is none of the facilitator’s concern – they produce the information for the client who should release it themselves however is appropriate. As a result, the document itself is silent on the copyright status. In practice authorities will just rehost the file that the facilitator provides; so what is eventually published is similarly silent on the status of the document. 

GIven this, our recommendation is that  facilitators should establish a standard view on a default licence for public sector clients, and have that conversation with the public authority. 

Due to the public benefit in maintaining an archive of the results of citizens assemblies, we include the complete set – including those that are explicitly copyrighted – in our cache.

The explicitly copyrighted entries are:

• Oxford City Council 2019 Climate Assembly – 2019 Ipsos MORI – all rights reserved.
• City of Wolverhampton 2020 Climate Assembly – Marked “Private and Confidential” by BritainThinks
• Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council 2021 Climate Assembly – Marked copyrighted by Cynnal Cymru – Sustain Wales, 2021
• UCL’s Constitution Unit – Democracy in the UK – Copyright – The Constitution Unit and Involve 2022

We are happy to have conversations with any of the organisations involved.

Updating our guidance

In 2019, we published a set of guidance on useful possible features to host on a website for a Citizens Assembly before, during, and after the assembly. We have updated this with clearer sections on licensing approaches, and inviting depositing a copy in our dataset as a long term archive.

Header image: Photo by Glen Noble on Unsplash

In how we’re framing TICTeC and our wider work, we’re talking less about civic tech and more about what we’re calling Pro-Democracy Tech (PDT).

The reason for this is we’re finding civic tech is a less helpful term for the kind of convening work we want to do. It won the argument of its time, and there is much less need to make the basic case for technology as part of the civic tool kit. But as a result, it has less to say about the situation we’re in now. Instead, we need framing that better talks to the range of people and institutions who are doing civic and democratic work with technology today. 

What is Pro-Democracy Tech?

Pro-Democracy Tech describes digital tools aimed at realising and defending democratic values. 

A key motivation of this approach is that authoritarianism isn’t standing still – and is learning how to use technology to extend its surveillance and control over people. Democracy’s reaction to this needs to be not to reject technology but to use it to evolve and compete. Democracy needs to be fast, effective and popular, while not conceding that the only way to do this is by becoming more centralised and authoritarian itself.

Within this, there are two key activities:

• Defensive democratic tech –  defending the open society: anti-corruption, anti-misinformation, etc.
• Constructive democratic tech  – empowering technologies that build democratic fibre and capacity: participation and deliberation, community tools, civic response tech. 

These are interconnected, and not hard divides. Defensive approaches safeguard the openness which democracy needs to function, while constructive approaches build the capacity of the engine of democratic progress. 

There are tools and approaches that apply to both. Access to Information laws are both vital anti-corruption tools, and part of capacity building through lowering costs of accessing information. Democratic transparency organisations (PMOs and similar) are both about increasing anti-corruption surveillance, and transforming the capacity and connections of democratic institutions.

Where they differ is in their approaches to new technological tools. Defensive democratic tech is in an arms war with anti-democrats. We have to keep moving and innovating to stay in place.  It is reactive against a well-financed opponent, and needs to understand how to bend tools (often developed by those with deep pockets and their own motives) to democratic purposes.

Constructive democratic tech is less of a zero-sum game. Just as there are technological approaches that make authoritarianism much more effective, there are approaches that make democracy much more effective. Here the enemy is less organised but omnipresent: inertia, low expectations, and a belief that things can’t be better. The goal of this approach is developing civic capacity, and taking us on the path from “citizen sensors” to “citizen thinkers” – where the extraordinary capacity and cognitive diversity in a democracy are fully enabled to work together to solve the big problems of the age (such as climate change). 

Why do we need this shift?

Going back twenty years (or even just ten years to the first TICTeC), what the “civic tech movement” is trying to get across is that there are civic-minded people who are using technology to create new kinds of organisations and services. Civic tech is a term to describe this novelty, make the case to funders, and advocate for this idea that technology isn’t just about online shopping, but can help people work together to improve the society they’re in. 

The good news is that these people mostly won. Governments, journalism and NGOs have generally taken on the lessons of the early civic tech movement. A wider range of governments and organisations understand the value of technology in helping them achieve their purpose, and there are more outlets for the kind of people who originally would have founded civic tech organisations. 

As a result, when we look internationally, we see very few organisations where the core identity is “civic tech” and that run a range of services in the same way that mySociety does. Instead, we tend to see organisations more tightly focused on an area of work (like access to information), and tech is one of a range of skill sets represented, or where civic tech-like work is part of a broader portfolio of more traditional research and advocacy work.

As civic tech is speaking to problems that no longer exist in the same way, the phrase doesn’t apply well to the problems we have now.  We need language and terms to bring together people who are using tech as part of the work to defend and enrich our democratic societies. 

Putting this into practice

The purpose of this framing is to create practical language. At TICTeC 2025, we’re exploring how we’ll use constructive/defensive framing to structure the conference – across specific areas of work we have a focus in: democratic transparency, access to information and climate change. We also want to use it to be clearer about the broader range of organisations and projects we ‘d like to see there. 

Pro-Democracy Tech reflects both the purpose of the technology, a general attitude that pro-democracy tech is possible, and a recognition that there is anti-democratic technology out there. It was really helpful putting this together to see some similar language and divides in this NED/IFDS essay collection.

Leaving the tech aside, the spirit of civic tech is about challenging low expectations of how things are, and demonstrating that things can be done better.  As mySociety, we still see ourselves as a civic tech organisation, and the idea of a civic tech movement as important to understand ourselves and our history. But we also need language that helps us understand how we relate to others that don’t share that history.

A feature of the current moment is that ideas of democracy are under attack, and authoritarians have embraced and made technology core to how they work. What is up for debate is the orientation of the pro-democracy side towards technology. We think ceding the ground would be a mistake and through TICTeC we want to incubate the best version of the pro-democratic tech argument. At the same time, we want to stay true to an important value of the civic tech movement: that the best advocacy is the demonstration of what’s possible.

Header image: Photo by Bhushan Sadani on Unsplash

In our WhoFundsThem work, we want to make MPs’ financial interests much easier to understand and more transparent. One of the ways we think our work can make a difference is in highlighting processes that don’t make sense, and prodding Parliament to see what happens.

In this case, we’ve noticed an issue in how declarations of interests by MPs on Written Questions are handled — and raising this has triggered a review of the process.

We have also released a new dataset of Written Questions where an interest has been declared.

What’s the problem?

When submitting parliamentary questions, MPs should say if they have any relevant interests, and if so what they are. In the guide to submitting Written Questions online, MPs are told “If you have an interest to declare, click the box saying ‘yes’ and explain what the interest is.” Similarly, on the offline form, members are told to email the Table Office to say what the interest is.

However, only the ‘yes/no’ bit of this gets onto the Written Questions section of the Parliament website. The actual interest being disclosed is never released. The problem is this is a lower level of public disclosure than contributions to debates, where the standard is now (in theory) that it should be clear what the interest is as well as the fact that it exists. For oral questions, that interests need to be declared on the form is explicitly given as a reason there is no need for further declarations in the chamber. This would be reasonable if the information was available to be added to Hansard later – but as stands it is not.

Both in the chamber and on the form, MPs may refer to interests they have already declared, or raise something with a closer connection to the topic that doesn’t otherwise need to be disclosed. As well as financial interests, this might represent more personal interests (for instance, a health issue they have an interest in because of their own experiences).

Because we only have ‘an interest has been declared’, different types of disclosure are lumped together. This requires more work from anyone who wants to understand whether a declaration has further financial implications, or simply added context/personal background. In this case, it’s not even that the MPs are at fault: they’re disclosing information, but the process means that it’s not going anywhere.

Asking for more information

To see what would happen, we made a Freedom of Information request for this information that’s being recorded but not released.

As we mostly expected, this was withheld under the exemption that gives Parliament control over publishing its own proceedings (we can’t compel extra information to be published even if it exists). However, there was a recognition that this gap was a problem and as a result the process is being reviewed:

Nonetheless, while there is no statutory right to this information, Mr Speaker considers greater transparency would be desirable and has commissioned an urgent review of the publication policy. The review may well lead to the information you seek being provided on a non-statutory basis, but it will take a little time to carry out.

This is great news, and better future publication would help make disclosure more uniform and effective.

This response also confirmed that the current process is a bit of black hole, with it being inappropriate for officials to screen questions as a result of interests declared:

It is Members, not officials, that are responsible for deciding what to register or declare, and deciding whether or not their interests are of a sort which should prevent them asking a particular question or taking part in a debate.

As such, the disclosures MPs make as part of this process are functionally going nowhere (except as an honesty exercise for the MPs involved): they have no public visibility and no internal decisions are made as a result of information disclosed.

Why this matters

We’re interested in Written Questions because they’re both an important part of how Parliament holds the government to account, but also a potential way that MPs can use their public position for private gain.

MPs have privileged access to government information. Written Questions are both faster than Freedom of Information requests (normal reply of five days rather than 28 days), and can ask questions that might require producing new information (while FOI only applies to data and information that already exists).

In the 90s, there was a Cash for Questions scandal, and there is reason to suspect that some version of this continues. Simon Weschle found a statistical connection between a group of MPs with second jobs (especially those in the “knowledge sector”) and increased numbers of questions asked. Looking at the content of these extra questions, he found these MPs asked more questions about internal department policies and projects. While Weschle is careful to avoid suggesting impropriety by any single MP highlighted, this suggests a slightly less immediately transactional version of cash for questions. Companies that can hire MPs have the ability to extract more information about government work, that may enrich the company, even if the MP’s formal role is tangential to this work. In general, MPs should strive to avoid even the appearance that this is what is happening.

What can we do in the meantime?

We’re going to keep an eye out for changes made as a result of this review, but there’s more we can do in the meantime.

The first thing we’ve already done is make the dataset of questions with declared interests more accessible. Using the Parliament website’s Written Questions service, you can’t easily pick out just those with a declared interest. We’ve set up a process to republish Written Questions with declared interests as a spreadsheet and through a data explorer.

If we decide to start weekly summaries of interests declared in debates, we could similarly keep track of new questions with declared interests and try and reconcile them to information elsewhere. The volume is low enough we could email MPs to ask what they’ve declared if unclear.

Something we considered was categorising questions with interests disclosed as part of our crowdsource of the register of interests, but we left this off to keep the scope of the exercise manageable. However, the real issue to dig into is not the relatively small number of questions with interests disclosed (around 256 last year), but understanding whether there are interests undisclosed in the 40,000 other questions submitted.

This is too great a volume to easily crowdsource, but we’d like to explore whether we can pair the task with a machine learning approach to narrow the problem down to a smaller list of entries for manual review. As part of the current crowdsource, our volunteers are collecting information about associated companies. This might be a first step in exploring this problem.

Help us go further

This is part of our wider WhoFundsThem project – where we are building new datasets and crowdsourcing information about MPs’ financial interests to improve what we list on TheyWorkForYou.

Under pretty much every rock we turn over, we find something that needs more attention. We would like to do a lot more work like this: finding ways to apply new technology to make parliamentary monitoring more comprehensive and sustainable.

If you’d like to help us do more, please consider supporting us with a one-off or monthly donation.

Image: Jon Tyson on Unsplash.