At the start of the month we made a major update to TheyWorkForYou coverage of registers of interests. 

This added enhanced registers of election donations and gifts (using volunteers to add more details and summaries to disclosures made after the last election) and a highlighted interests page. 

We have also released a major report looking into how the Register of Interests system in the UK Parliament can be improved. 

With this release we’ve shifted our focus away from Westminster, and are publishing the registers of interests for the Scottish Parliament, Senedd/Welsh Parliament, and Northern Ireland Assembly.

On Thursday 10th April we will be running an event to run through the data we publish how journalists and researchers can access and make use of it — you can sign up now. 

What’s new

Registers of interest on MSP/MS/MLA profile pages.

For members of the three devolved Parliaments and Assemblies, you can now see their current register of interests on their profile pages, and we have made the underlying data available as spreadsheets.

To find the registers for your representatives, the postcode search on TheyWorkForYou.com will show you your devolved and national representatives. 

For users in Wales, there is a Welsh language version of the site and the registers. 

As time goes on, our register comparison tool will start to be able to show the change in these interests over time. 

Register-wide view, showing what’s new

Each Parliament now has a register of interests page where you can see all entries in the current register. For Parliaments where we have this information (which is all of them except the Senedd) you can also choose to highlight entries that are new in the last few weeks. 

Devolved register of interests spreadsheets

We have also made all the information for the devolved registers of interest available as spreadsheet and raw data downloads (both per Parliament, and a single spreadsheet that covers all our current information). 

Like all our datasets, this is searchable through an online Datasette interface. Learn more about all the data we publish. 

Ministers’ gifts and hospitality

While we’re here, we’ve fixed a transparency problem in the Government’s gifts and hospitality registry for ministers. 

This has recently all been bought together on one gov.uk page, but in the form of dozens of files (many of which are empty) per month for different departments. 

We’re now republishing this as a single spreadsheet for gifts and hospitality that will update whenever there are new releases. This is similarly accessible through a Datasette explorer. 

This work fixes a flaw identified by Transparency International: 

The Government recently introduced their promised gifts and hospitality register but it’s not what most might consider a register, rather its a series of 20 odd CSVs on one webpage. Whilst its useful these are now published together, this approach still requires researchers and journalists to download and analyse dozens of files per month, making it difficult to track patterns or identify trends. mySociety have fortunately stepped in and addressed the shortcomings of the register by making this data set accessible and searchable.

This is one of those low-hanging fruits that took about an hour to make a big improvement. We think there’s a lot more we can do in this area to build on sometimes half-hearted publication processes to make the most of data that is released. 

Learn how to use our data

On Thursday 10th April we will be running an event to run through the data we publish how journalists and researchers can access and make use of it — you can sign up now. 

We’ll cover features on the website, spreadsheet downloads, data explorers and where the raw data can be found. 

Help us go further

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.

Last year we undertook a major overhaul of our approach to the voting record summaries on TheyWorkForYou. This was aimed at creating a sharper and clearer throughline to the summaries, supported by updated explanations of parliamentary voting.

We have just made the first update to our voting summaries of the new Parliament, with the information now covering votes up to the end of 2024.

Our goal is for these updates to be at least quarterly: this update has been delayed in part because we have been doing work on the underlying infrastructure.

In April we will launch a new votes explorer website, which is our replacement for the Public Whip website. This includes a new range of tools and analysis we’ve been using to understand votes, and is part of our general goal of creating better public information and understanding about parliamentary processes.

For more on what we’re doing over the next few months, see our list of upcoming new features — or subscribe to our mailing list to hear about updates.

You can view summaries for your MP on TheyWorkForYou.com – where you can also view registers of interest, and sign up for email alerts when your MP speaks.

What we’ve changed

We’ve added new policy lines for:

• Increasing windfall tax on oil and gas
• Increasing stamp duty
• Reducing minimum detention requirement before release from custody.
• Means-testing/removing universality on winter fuel payments for pensioners
• Creating a publicly owned energy investment company (Great British Energy)
• Employment rights
• Raising Capital Gains tax

And added votes to these existing policy lines:

• Assisted Dying
• Environmental Water Quality
• Publicly Owned Railways
• Tougher On Illegal Immigration
• An Elected House Of Lords
• Removing Hereditary Peers From The House Of Lords
• Proportional Representation When Electing MPs
• Taxes On Alcoholic Drinks

We have retired:

• Lowering Capital Gains Tax (this has been replaced by a raising Capital Gains tax, which is more consistent with our other policies around taxes).

Additional notes

Greater range of new policies

Previously we’ve had a conservative approach to adding new policies, as in doing so created a mix of old and recent votes for long-standing MPs, making their positions in the present moment harder to understand.

Our new technical approach calculates voting summaries for the current Parliament as well as an ‘all time’ calculation. Although this is not yet visible in TheyWorkForYou, we are in general adding a higher number of new policy lines in anticipation of being able to show both (we want to reflect ‘here are live issues’ but also just because a vote was a long time ago doesn’t mean it’s not still important).

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

There is an existing policy line that we have added the second reading vote to.

Because what is being voted on can be become clearer after revisions between the second reading vote and third reading vote, we prefer to include third reading votes if voting patterns are significantly different. We might sometimes include both when there’s not much difference (so we cover MPs who might be absent from either).

As a high profile vote it felt like it would be a notable absence not to include the vote as of this stage. Our expectation is that when the third reading vote happens, we may retrospectively downgrade the second reading and lead with the final vote being a clearer indication of where MPs stand at this stage.

Generally, the vote broke down mostly along party lines, but with a significant minority of Labour MPs voting against the second reading. As we class a significant difference from the party as anything more extreme than a 60/40 split (which this just was for Labour MPs), a number of MPs now have this highlighted on their voting record page as a new significant policy.

We also note that a lot of MPs made public comments about the reasons for their vote (part of a wider trend of greater visibility of votes leading to more public justification).As part of our new votes site we want to make it easier to collect and share comments that MPs make publicly about their voting.

Renters’ rights

The Renters’ Rights Act is not included in this round, as the third reading was in January 2025. The second reading passed by consent, but with a reasoned amendment beforehand. As such:

• It is inaccurate to say consent reflected cross party agreement: an attempt to stop the bill immediately preceded it.
• It would be confusing to present the only vote as the reasoned amendment.
• We are waiting for the Third Reading before including that and the reasoned amendment as scoring votes.

This will be part of the next release.

Ten minute rule bills

By focusing on votes affecting parliamentary powers, we exclude a range of votes that could never be impactful, but ten minute rule bills are in an ambiguous position.

In principle, as seen with the vote on proportional representation (which won, but possibly as an oversight), they are a vote to start the process of legislation. However, even when this vote is won, since parliamentary time is not allocated, it does not go anywhere.

Our policy for the moment is to continue to include ten minute rule bills where we have existing policy lines.

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 will review responses for urgent problems, and otherwise feed into the periodic updates.

What else we’ve been working on

Last week we released a major new report and several new datasets onto TheyWorkForYou as part of our WhoFundsThem project.

We’ve been looking through the MPs Register of Financial Interests with a group of volunteers, and have published what we’ve found along with recommendations for change and what we think we can do next.

Over the next few months we’ll be making more improvements to our registers of interest, voting records, and political monitoring.

If you would like to support our work – please consider donating.

If you can’t make a donation now, you can still help by telling us what you value about our work. If you’d like to do this, please take our supporters survey.

Image: Paul Buffington on Unsplash.

Over the next few months we’re making some major updates to TheyWorkForYou improving our coverage of registers of interests, votes, and the email alerts system.

If you’d like to be updated as things are released, please sign up to our newsletter.

What do you value about TheyWorkForYou and our democracy work?

We want to understand what you value about our work, to better shape our plans. If you’d like to help us out, please take our supporters survey.

March

March is Register of Interests month.

At the start of the month we released a major new report and several new datasets onto TheyWorkForYou as part of our WhoFundsThem project.

We’ve been looking through the MPs Register of Financial Interests with a group of volunteers, and have published what we’ve found along with recommendations for change and what we think we can do next.

You can rewatch the launch event here.

Later in the month, we’ll be adding the Registers of Interests for the UK’s other parliaments to TheyWorkForYou and creating spreadsheet downloads.

April

April is Votes month.

We will be launching our new votes site to provide better resources on understanding parliamentary voting.

This new approach builds on the official data to provide:

• Automated party breakdown analysis and party alignment (“rebelliousness”) stats.
• Quick descriptions of parliamentary dynamics (which side proposed, strength of conflict) powered by a clustering approach.
• Links to motions that clarify what is being voted on (and power some additional analysis of motions)
• Detecting ‘agreements/consents’ when decisions are made without a vote.
• Tools to supplement official data with annotations (by division, or by MP’s vote) and recording of whip reports.

Sign up to our mailing list to hear more about when this launches.

May

May is Monitoring month.

A major use of TheyWorkForYou is as a political monitoring tool, helping civil society keep up to date with Parliament, and keeping information moving around Parliament and government itself.

We have been working on a set of changes and guidance to make it much easier to use TheyWorkForYou to monitor areas you care about, helping you set up better alerts with a wider range of keywords, and manage a wider range of alerts.

As part of this, we want to improve our coverage of APPGs — building on our earlier lessons about how best to gather information.

Sign up to our mailing list to hear more about when this launches.

June

June is TICTeC!

Our global pro democracy tech/civic tech conference will be held in Mechelen & online on June 10-11th, and we’re excited to share our work with, and learn from, fellow pro-democracy technologists and thinkers from around the world.

Full schedule to be announced soon, but our keynote speakers are:

• Marietje Schaake – former Member of the European Parliament, Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and the Institute for Human-Centered AI, columnist for the Financial Times and author of The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley – read more about what Marietje will bring to TICTeC 2025 here
• Fernanda Campagnucci – Executive Director of InternetLab, global specialist in data governance, digital transformation, and open government. Read more about Fernanda and TICTeC 2025 here.

Learn more about we mean by pro democracy tech, and buy tickets now!

Second half of 2025

In the second half of the year, we’ll be overhauling the WriteToThem experience, with improved guidance, and the addition of questions to help us build a better systematic picture of what’s important to people in different areas, and when writing to different kinds of representatives.

We will also be revisiting TheyWorkForYou’s annotations feature, to explore ways we can make important parliamentary debates more understandable through better glossaries, annotations and explanations, either working alone or in partnership with other organisations.

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.

If you can’t make a donation now, you can still help by telling us what you value about our work. If you’d like to do this, please take our supporters survey.

Image: Matt Foxx on Unsplash.

Yesterday we had a launch event for our new features on TheyWorkForYou and report on money in politics.

We didn’t get time for all the questions,  so we’ve answered a few now.

You can also a look at the report, the new features on TheyWorkForYou, and donations are appreciated if you like this direction for our work.

Information questions

Is access to all your data available via CSV or APIs?

All the data we make available is currently listed on the registers page of TheyWorkForYou. This includes reworkings of the published registry into spreadsheets and json. We’re not yet publishing our extra information as a spreadsheet, but will be in the coming weeks (working on some additional spreadsheets we’ll release at the same time).

Are there public lists other than the MP list of members’ financial interest available from the Parliament website please?

So Parliament publishes a few different registers: MPs, Lords, APPGs, MPs staff, journalists. 

Of these, the MPs has been the one most recently looked at and is in the best condition to access data-wise. 

As we understand it, PDS are currently looking at the staff register list (and we have some recommendations around that in the report). 

On APPGs, some things need to be released in the register, but also APPGs are supposed to provide these on request – we’re having some trouble with that. Ongoing work!

Do you track donations to constituency parties as these may be a way to donate to Members indirectly?

In principle, the register of interests has passthrough rules for donations to local or national parties, that mean the original donor should be declared in the register. The ones to be more concerned about are unincorporated fund-raising clubs or other intermediate organisation that are *not* parties as these are not covered by the rules. We think they should be. 

We did some digging to see if we could detect problems in party donations by comparison electoral commission data to the registry – but the data and time period are either covering different things,  or the EC data comes *from* the registry in the first place. 

Systematic reform

Will the new ban on MPs doing consultancy/providing advice on Parliament make a difference and clean up politics?

For background on this change, when the new reforms take effect they will not substantially ban second jobs – but further restrict MPs giving advice on public policy or how Parliament works as part of paid employment. 

This is a good change, but the concern is that this was not actually what the exchange was for, just one of the more plausible reasons to have them on the payroll – and that other semi-plausible ways to extend credit to MPs remain.

We’ve made two recommendations to double down in this area:

• The first is that currently the parliamentary commissioner can ask for the MP’s contract (or similar) to ensure it aligns with this rule. We see no reason this shouldn’t just be required to be made public.
• The second is creating more disclosure around the nature of the organisation rather than the role. For instance,  if MPs need to declare “does this org lobby parliament/government” or “is this organisation a government contractor” – ‘yes’ to either question really shifts the evaluation of corruption risk regardless of what is on paper is the specific role. 

Direct corruption has given way to a “you scratch my back” culture – the reciprocal “favour” coming years later & benefit associates. How can this be monitored?

We talk a bit about this in the original literature review, where the UK as a high trust society makes these kinds of deferred rewards more possible. MPs and officials don’t need to be explicitly told about job prospects (and the kind of actions that would make them less eligible for those job prospects), but understand the system as it has been modelled to then. There are few brown paper bags (but not none) – in general there is more of a series of ambiguous events where money changes hands for individually semi-defendable reasons.

That doesn’t mean we can’t make progress. We have longer (and actually enforced) periods where people who have worked in senior jobs can’t accept jobs in relevant industries. ACOBA currently makes recommendations on whether appointments break the government’s rules, but doesn’t have strong powers. They have themselves recommended some improvements that don’t require new laws. We could build some more scrutiny here – linking to relevant ACOBA reports from the register. 

Institutions

Should an appropriately funded arms length organisation be created to pursue this scrutiny job more systematically and thoroughly?

Yes, transparency in this area has always been trying to head off calls to create strict rules enforced by real regulators – because once a scandal concedes there should be rules other than what Parliament itself sets, that’s a big shift in how our democracy works. 

The question is “is putting restrictions on elected representatives democratic?” and I think the answer to that can clearly be yes. There are arguments made that given the electorate elect with second jobs, the electorate is fine with this. But in reality, we can, and do, ask the electorate if they have opinions about ethical standards for MPs, and they come back with nuanced opinions about what those standards should be, and support for processes outside elections (like enforced codes of conduct with independent regulators) that ensure the standards are met.

MPs work for the public, other organisations can also work for the public to make the overall system work. 

If funded, would mySociety run its own citizens assembly on the reforms needed?

Would definitely be happy to be part of a consortium supporting one – although we’d leave running it to others. In general, we think anchoring our work in deliberative approaches would help make us more effective, and help participants in seeing results from their work that isn’t “does the government accept this or not”. 

In this project we’ve tried to stick close to principles we can identify in existing polling and research, but building a better picture of public expectations (and especially considered trade-offs) would help align our work to a civic agenda. Joining civic power to deliberative democracy provides power in one direction, and legitimacy in the other — a powerful force to engage with conflicts within Parliament to shift official rules and responses.

Going further

Can you also include the Mayors of combined authorities in any later editions of WhoFundsThem?

One of our questions at the moment is how to best approach devolution in England. Longer blog post about one of our funding attempts here.

One of the areas we think we can add value is just bringing together all the local authority registers of interest, but there are lots of these. Doing this in waves by combined authority would be a good approach – and as always interested in anyone who has an interest in local government scrutiny to help find funding for this (it’s one of those “very possible, just tedious” projects). 

Does Tortoise’s recent piece of work, the Peer Review, relate at all to your work?

So I’ve been interested in the wave of work looking at Lords conflicts of interests (Tortoise’s series and some recent work from the Guardian).

We don’t currently have the Lords register on TheyWorkForYou, we’re loosely waiting to see if it’s going to be migrated to the same format as the Commons because then it’d be really easy to copy our existing process. We can do it without that, but we don’t have unlimited funds (in fact, we have quite limited funds) so trying to work out what are the easiest approaches, or where we should try and build funding for a strong move.

In general, we want to have a good think about the House of Lords. We’ve got a document of potential ideas, but we need a different approach to how we approach elected chambers. A key feature (and reason for stalled reform) is its several kinds of chambers fused into one. It’s a technocratic revising chamber, it provides a deescalation venue for bad ideas in a less partisan setting, it’s an underpowered talking shop, jobs are hard won by expertise, and given as political gifts. Depending who you’re looking at, it’s either incredibly functional or incredibly not. 

And really neither house can be understood without the other. Effective manoeuvring in the Lords depends on understanding where there are openings in the Commons. Similarly, poor scrutiny in the Commons makes more sense as part of this dance between the two chambers. 

Much more than the Commons, conflicts of interests are just part of the fundamental design (and that’s bad). How we scrutinise it from the outside needs to be different to how we look at MPs, because there are questions about “judging it by its own (odd) standards” versus “the point of scrutiny here is to show it shouldn’t exist”.

—

That’s it for event questions – but please take a look at the report, the new features on TheyWorkForYou, and donations appreciated if you like this direction for our work.

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.