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

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

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

This update has added new votes to existing policies:

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

We have also added four new policy lines:

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

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

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

Notes

Assisted dying

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

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

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

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

We also as a result of this have:

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

Votes covering multiple topics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Electric vehicles

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

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

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

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

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

Gambling and agreements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greater UK/EU alignment

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

Anything we’ve missed?

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

What else we’ve been working on

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

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

Support our work

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

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

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Image: Engin Akyurt

mySociety’s WhoFundsThem work combines technology and volunteers to create better data and visibility on money in politics. We’ve published a report of what we’ve learned, given evidence in Parliament, and made more information available on TheyWorkForYou. 

This update covers some recently declared freebies, cash for questions paper trails, paid membership of APPGs, and how we can help the public set the rules of the game. 

Cash for questions (if not answers)

The Sunday Times has a great papertrail on George Freeman [paywalled] (related BBC article) where he’s emailing back and forth with his second job employment about questions that he then uses his Parliamentary position to ask ministers.

It’s rare to have clear evidence of the exchange, but that “cash for questions” is probably going on is something that’s visible in the aggregate. Simon Weschle found that MPs with second jobs (especially those working in the knowledge sector) asked more parliamentary questions – specifically about internal departmental policies and projects. 

While MPs have a box they can tick to declare that they have an interest when asking a question*, this does not differentiate between “I’m asking about a health condition I have personal experience of”, and “I’m paid money by someone who would like to know more about this”. 

We want a procedure change here so the exact conflict of interest needs to be publicly declared with the question, in line with the rules on parliamentary speeches. This would hopefully shame some of the more obvious connections we’ve seen between financial interests and parliamentary questions. In the meantime, we’re exploring a prototype to suggest matches between register entries and questions to help understand more about what is happening here. 

Because all of Freeman’s questions were asked on the same day, you can see the questions and answers in the Parliament website search. Notably, all the answers are a bit vague and unhelpful. The short turnaround time of Parliamentary Questions (PQs) means you’re going to get a reworded version of a press release if one is available rather than big insider secrets.

A big change since the big cash for questions scandal of the 1990s is that we now have the Freedom of Information Act. While there are still a lot of things that PQs can do that FOI can’t,  the government is a lot more porous. Open government laws reduce corruption risks from the other end, by making it much easier for everyone to access information without needing an MP rewording questions on your behalf. 

So if you’re considering giving an MP money to ask questions for you a) don’t do that, it’s bad b) maybe you can get the information you want another way instead.

* See linked blog post – technically there is a box for more information, it’s just not made public, and nothing happens internally with the information.  

Tracking freebies

When a new Register of Members’ Financial Interests comes out, we make that available in more formats in TheyWorkForYou, and we look at the new entries to see if there are any interesting patterns. It was noteworthy looking at the release a few weeks ago to see five MPs registering free football tickets, including Keir Starmer. 

This was a big conversation last year, and there was never actually a promise to stop doing this  — just a much more limited change that they would stop accepting clothes as a donation (which as the Guardian points out, was only ever a small proportion of gifts received). There is an emerging pattern with ministers (examples for David Lammy and Jonathan Reynolds) accepting the hospitality ticket, but donating to the associated club charity an equivalent amount. 

The Starmer example is tricky, because the argument made for him is security issues around not being in a private box (in this case donated by the club). But it’s also true that when MPs are considering if they want a free day out, they can look to the top and see tacit approval in what ministers accept. Unless there’s a rule change, or leadership from the top to set a norm, this unpopular practice is just going to continue. There are entirely predictable “here are the freebies MPs got over the last five years” news stories that can be avoided at the next election —but it needs leadership now.

MPs accepting free football/concert tickets is unpopular, with a 2024 YouGov poll showing 64% found it either somewhat/completely unacceptable (and only 6% find it completely acceptable).  And to be fair, most MPs are not appearing on these lists. The reputational damage is collective, and the benefits only go to a small few.

But there is also the possibility that more is going on than appears on the register. In the latest release, Jim McMahon declared a pair of tickets valued at £580 – because of this he needed to retrospectively declare a £110 ticket received in April (the limit applies to all gifts from the same source). If an MP receives a single gift below £300, it doesn’t need to be declared at all.

We think this is too high – our recommendations on this were to both lower the threshold for disclosure from £300 to £100, and for Parliament to develop principles on when MPs should just not accept gifts, in line with how this practice works outside Parliament. 

There are questions about what the right lines are to draw here. Does donating the value solve the problem? Do we view tickets from the club differently from third parties buying tickets? Further down, there’s a good example of how the public can be bought in – but a clear first step is having more information about what is actually going on. 

APPGs – MPs, Lords, and other friends

There was a mid-June update to the APPG register: with 35 new APPGs, and three APPGs disappearing (Kuwait, Yemen and Digital Markets and Digital Money). 

We’re continuing with our efforts to build a dataset of APPG members, thanks to people who helped with our double-checking of website information. 

Something that’s less well known is that you can have associate members of APPGs (for outside organisations)  —and that APPGs can charge these groups for membership. 

For APPGs focused on an industry, this can be a practical way of spreading the costs of the group across multiple interested organisations. However, it can also look a lot like cash for access. For instance, the Events APPGs issued a press release inviting people to become members for a price:

UK-based organisations are invited to become members for £1500 + VAT by nominating a senior representative, offering them the opportunity to engage directly with MPs and influence policy decisions.

While other groups might be more subtle than this, access to legislators is obviously the value proposition of paid memberships. The Events APPG lists its external members, but hasn’t yet declared any income the pricing suggests they should have received from these memberships.

Currently the rules don’t require the pricing scheme to be published (other APPGs have external members who will not be paying £1,500). We’d like to see both this, and a central list of membership being published to make it clearer exactly what is or is not changing hands here. 

Setting the rules of the game

IPSA (the body responsible for setting MPs’ pay and business costs) is convening a Citizens Forum (representatively chosen via a sortition process) to inform IPSAs’ work. 

We’re all for this and have argued for a version of this that is also setting a job description. There’s an issue where the general public’s low lack of knowledge about how politics works is used to dismiss the idea that the public should be involved in setting the rules politicians work by. Deliberative processes like this allow a small group to be given the same opportunity and structure as political elites to fully understand options and consider trade-offs.

This is specifically something we think would be a good idea on the wider problem of funding politics, helping unblock arguments about public funding with a clearer sense of how people see different approaches. 

Support our work

We don’t want to just complain about how the system is broken: we want to do something about it. 

We think there are a lot of practical things we can do to improve transparency from the outside, and keep these issues on the agenda — but we need your support to do so. 

Donations help us make progress on the low hanging fruit we’ve identified, explore new approaches, and get the information we have where it needs to be.

If you want to support our work, please consider making a donation, or sign up to our newsletter to hear more about our work and other opportunities to volunteer. 

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Header image: Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash

Parliamentarians (MPs and Peers) have access to two different systems of getting information from the government.  As members of Parliament,  they can use Parliamentary Questions (PQs) to ask questions and receive information from government ministers. They also have the same rights as everyone else to access information from public authorities through the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. 

This blog post describes the different features of the two systems, and where it might benefit Parliamentarians to use the more general right to access information.  

Parliamentarians should use FOI when:

• The information is held by a public authority that is not a central government department or agency.
• The information is held in datasets or full documents rather than snippets of information. 
• If information is likely to be (or has already been) withheld on public interest grounds and a right of appeal would be useful. 

In general, we think that Parliamentarians should take the same interest in Freedom of Information compliance that they do in Parliamentary Questions, and recognise it as an essential way that information enters debate and facilitates parliamentary scrutiny of government. 

FOI is not just directly useful for Parliamentarians, but is part of the information environment that informs wider work and scrutiny.  FOI use by journalists, campaigners, and researchers regularly finds its way back into the parliamentary discussion. 

We think Parliament can do more to take an interest in the good functioning of the FOI system, and would always love to chat to any MPs or Peers who want to see a stronger FOI system. 

If you’d just like to learn more about Freedom of Information – we have a series of guides on WhatDoTheyKnow with everything you need to get started.

Parliamentary Questions and Freedom of Information

The Freedom of Information Act requires information to be disclosed on request except where it is covered by one of a range of exemptions. The Information Commissioner’s Office is the regulator for FOI, and the ICO’s decisions are ultimately appealable in the Information Tribunal. 

Parliamentary Questions are based on a convention of government transparency to Parliament rather than a formal law. This convention is part of the general expectation that government business should be open to Parliament, that also underpins how Select Committees ask for documents. 

This is reflected in the Ministerial Code as: 

Ministers should be as open as possible with Parliament and the public, refusing to provide information only when disclosure would not be in the public interest, which should be decided in accordance with the relevant statutes and the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

How this works in practice is led by the government’s Guide to Parliamentary Work. Parliament’s interest in the effectiveness of this system is shown through the Procedure Committee producing monitoring statistics and recommendations for updates to the guidance. 

The two systems are of comparable scale: in 2023 there were 56k Written Questions to central government departments and 70k FOI requests. Within a department, the responsibility to reply may or may not be held by the same people (there may be a practical split between wider parliamentary affairs and FOI management), although requests for information will then branch out to teams within the department. 

Differences in practice

In principle, where both mechanisms can be used to ask for the same information, they should get the same response. In practice, FOI can be a more reliable way of accessing information if the information is covered.

The government’s guidance encourages alignment between the standard applied for Freedom of Information and PQs (i.e. information should not be withheld that would be released under FOI) and the language used to deny access to information is similar across both.

However, there are examples of where information not released under PQs may be released under FOI, or the underlying source information can contradict answers given (as found early on in FOI’s availability through usage by the All Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition).

This difference does not require a bad faith approach to giving Parliament information, but this may sometimes be the case and it is something that Parliamentarians should pay attention to. The parallel systems have different compliance approaches,  and are often administered separately, and this can lead to different results.

Comparisons

	Freedom of Information	Parliamentary questions
Scope (authorities)	All public authorities	Central government departments and agencies
Scope (information)	Must be existing documents or information	May involve (within cost limit) extra analysis on top of existing documents to answer the question
Time period	20 working days	5 working days
Right of appeal	Yes – internal review, ICO and courts.	No – seen as Parliamentary activity but no explicit internal appeal system.
Cost limit	£600 (24 hours) – Central gov £450 (18 hours) – Other public bodies	£850 (34 hours)
Who can use it	Anyone	MPs and Peers
Results are…	Private/Public (it depends)	Public

 

Scope

Freedom of information covers all public authorities (Scottish public authorities are covered under the similar Scottish Freedom of Information law), while PQs can only be asked of government departments or their associated agencies. 

FOI requests must be for existing information or documents. PQs have a wider scope in that they may involve (within cost limit) extra analysis on top of existing documents to answer the question.

In practice, if seeking information from an existing document, PQs may result in an extract from this document, while an FOI response may return the whole document. 

Time period

PQs should be returned faster. The standard for PQs is they should be answered within five working days, and are considered late after ten.

Freedom of Information requests should be responded to within 20 working days. Technically, it should be as fast as possible – but information tends to be released at this last point.

A shorter time limit is an advantage for certain kinds of questions,  but may be a disadvantage when documents are hard to locate/access, leading to an incorrect “not held” response. This is one of the reasons why we recommend FOI for full documents. 

Right of appeal

A key advantage of FOI is the legal appeal route. 

Under FOI, there is an appeal regime through an independent regulator and the courts. There is no similar function for PQs. The guidance may encourage departments to apply the same logic to FOI and PQs, but the department’s logic may be wrong. Under FOI there is an external check on this, and disclosure can be compelled. 

Because the question and answer process is seen as part of Parliamentary proceedings, outside regulators and the courts cannot compel different answers. This is a construction of Parliamentary supremacy that is to the advantage of the government, and to the disadvantage of MPs.

As FOI exemptions are part of the logic used to allow information to be withheld, requests can end up in a situation where the FOI standard is used to withhold information, but without the equivalent ability to appeal.

For instance in this Written Answer there is the effective use of the FOI commercial exemption. If this was an FOI request, this could be appealed at first through internal review and then to the ICO. As a Written Answer there is no right of appeal (although it could be resubmitted as an FOI request). 

Cost limit

PQs have a higher threshold for the cost limit, meaning that in principle a slightly higher search time is allowed. 

Freedom of Information requests to central government departments and agencies have a cost limit of £600 worth of time (24 hours).The “disproportionate cost threshold” for PQs is currently £850 (34 hours)  — this is pegged at 140% of the FOI cost limit to the nearest £50.

In practice, this will rarely matter. Most responses that engage the cost limit reflect search times well above either cost threshold. An example of the disproportionate cost threshold being used can be seen here.

Who can use

Anyone can make an FOI request, while only MPs and Peers can ask PQs. 

In practice this is a fuzzy boundary. Campaigners with a friendly MP/Peer may be able to have questions asked and information released. Similarly, it might sometimes be useful for a government MP critical of party policy to have information requested by a third party through FOI. 

Information or documents released through PQs will enter the record or be a deposited paper, and so covered by parliamentary privilege and effectively public domain to use.

Information released under FOI does not have this same guarantee. Public authorities have a duty to provide information even if it is copyrighted or defamatory, and can’t be guaranteed to be legally safe to further republish. 

For instance, an FOI request for an internal report that a third party considers defamatory might be vulnerable to a SLAPP. In most cases, this is not a significant factor. When it is and the requester is an MP/Peer, key information could be covered under privilege in different ways. 

Who can see the results

The responses to FOI requests are less public by default, but this varies. 

Answers to PQs are given to the parliamentarian in question and published as part of the official record. 

FOI results are returned to the requester. If requested through WhatDoTheyKnow, the results are published in public (unless using our WhatDoTheyKnow Pro service, where results can be embargoed for a time). 

The authority may (or may not) release the results of an FOI request either through a disclosure log, or other public disclosure. For instance, information might be released simultaneously through FOI and through a public announcement to get the authority’s framing of the information across, and reduce the newsworthiness to the original requester. 

FOI is worth Parliament paying attention to

Both Parliamentary Questions and Freedom of Information open doors the others can’t. Both are important tools in a Parliamentarian’s role. 

FOI is not just directly useful for Parliamentarians, but is part of the information environment that informs wider work and scrutiny.  FOI use by journalists, campaigners, and researchers regularly finds its way back into the parliamentary discussion. 

We think Parliament can do more to take an interest in the good functioning of the FOI system, and would always love to chat to any MPs or Peers who want to see a stronger FOI system. 

Header image: Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

A few weeks ago, I was part of a panel giving evidence to the House of Commons’ Standards Committee on ‘outside employment and interests’ (second jobs).  Here’s the video, or the transcript. 

My evidence was based on our findings and recommendations from our WhoFundsThem project and our Beyond Transparency report. We worked with volunteers to go right through the register of members’ interests, to add new information to TheyWorkForYou, and to draw some conclusions on reform from what we learned.

The relevant section on second jobs is here in the report.

Here’s a quick summary of what the session was digging into, and what our evidence was about. 

How to handle rules

The meta-question of the session was if you are going to have rules, what form should the rules take? Should they be:

• Transparency-based – do what you like, but you have to tell people.
• Limit-based – don’t take up jobs that earn more than X, or take more time than Y. 
• Principle-based – don’t take up roles with conflicts of interests
• Role-based – don’t take up certain kinds of role

In practice, you want some combination of these – but in general we think that looking at role is a good foundation to be supported by other approaches. 

Transparency is not enough

We love transparency here at mySociety Towers – but the title of our report (Beyond Transparency) is our general message here – it’s not enough on its own even if done well, and it’s not currently well. 

If you are relying on transparency to make this system self-enforcing then the transparency needs to be really good. It’s not! We brought a group of volunteers together because we wanted humans to be able to go through the register and add extra context through research (for example, researching what a named company does) but we just ran into massive obstacles with what wasn’t there. Contradictory information, information that logically should have been updated that wasn’t. Simple questions like “is this person still a councillor” were difficult. 

Fixing this needs a systematic approach. You can’t just say it’s an MPs responsibility to do a good disclosure – you need systematic efforts (validation, prompts and audits) to make this data strong enough to be load bearing. 

Reasonable limits struggles to make practical recommendations

The limit-based approach fell apart immediately because the main proponents of “reasonable limits” (Committee for Standards in Public Life) also decided they couldn’t commit to recommending what these limits should be. Requirements on time might cause problems for medical people who need to do minimum practice, and requirements on money would cause problems for people earning book royalties. So given this, you need to have a sense of roles otherwise you end up in the situation where people do not have to defend lucrative law careers outright, but hide behind the nurses. 

Org-based risk, rather than taking people’s word 

One of the things the committee is considering was principle-based rules proposed by the Parliamentary Commissioner.

Our concern with these is they quite heavily imply that a range of activities is impermissible without actually making it so – making it vulnerable to people just actively lying or non-disclosing. 

For example, a principles-based approach: would struggle to catch an MP being given a semi-fake job, where the actual work is insider contacts and using parliamentary questions. Everyone involved is smart enough to keep what the real deal is out of the contract. They might certify there is no conflict, but there is not a good way of verifying or challenging that.

If we’re trying to prevent outright corruption (while allowing other activities), the risk is not in the role, but the organisation who is paying. The question isn’t “do you as an MP certify this job isn’t corrupt” but “are you taking a job with an organisation that poses corruption risks?” Do they supply government services? Do they separately lobby Parliament?

You want factual questions that don’t rely on any particular role, that can be independently investigated and challenged. The risk is posed by who is paying, not what they say they’re paying for.

The simplest solution (just ban things) has a lot going for it

As a TheyWorkForYou person it feels partly my job to highlight that the majority view is clearly against almost all forms of moonlighting.  By YouGov polling the only professions there was majority public support for allowing was doctor/nurse or author. And even then, a survey experiment by Rosie Campbell and Phillip Cowley found a penalty in support for a hypothetical GP decreased as the extent they continued to practice increased. The conversation in Parliament naturally reflects lots of specific examples of people this would cause problems for, but starting from the public position of almost nothing – the problem should really be trying to justify limited allowances rather than slightly increased restrictions. 

Transparency International’s position is a tight ban, with exceptions for jobs “that maintain a professional qualification, are political activity or provide an essential public service, such as army reservists”. This seems like a good starting point! There are going to be some more fiddly exemptions that need to be argued about (I’d separate out the dual mandate discussion) – but I’m much more comfortable with a list of exemptions than trying to define a list of bad jobs. 

This list of exemptions can be nuanced – and this is an area where using citizens’ panels or assemblies can be useful in really getting into the details (see other examples of select committees making use of deliberative processes). You need broad principles, but you also need to be translating that into specific rules on roles, and have processes for updating these over time. 

This needs collective decisions, not individual discretion

Whatever the approach, it is important that Parliament takes a collective view, rather than seeing this as a matter between MPs and their constituencies. This stretches from better audits of transparency, to just banning activities that are bringing Parliament into disrepute. 

Most MPs are doing the maximum individual action they can – they are not taking these jobs. Meanwhile a small number of MPs have second jobs that cause reputation problems. They get most of the private gains from this, while everyone bears the cost of the headlines. It’d be really great to have one less political trust scandal going around every few years – and a simple approach is in reach. 

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For more on the *other* problems with the current approach (especially on gifts) – please read the report!

As part of our WhoFundsThem project, we released a big report detailing what we learned while working with volunteers to explore the MPs’ Register of Members Financial Interests (RMFI). 

Many of our recommendations are for changes Parliament should make, but we always want to think about what we can do from the outside to keep things moving. 

In this post I’m going to quickly recap our recommendations, and what we think we can do to improve things and work to enable reformers in Parliament to go further. 

Better data collection

We recommend that Parliament review the categories of the register to better reflect common interest types, and capture appropriate information for different kinds of democratic problems. Whether this is making the categories easier to parse for constituents, or collecting data that is easier to compare in bulk – we need the most relevant information to be recorded for different kinds of interests. 

What we can do from the outside

While we cannot create information from thin air, we can rework and expand on what is published to make it more useful. Our enhanced election summaries are an example of how this data can be expanded through matching to other datasets and volunteer crowdsourcing. 

There is also value in making messy data more easily available – we can scale our existing spreadsheet approach to registers of interest beyond the House of Commons. We’ve now added the devolved registers of interest – but there’s a lot further to go, for instance to local government and the House of Lords. 

Stronger checks

There need to be better processes to improve the quality of the data released – through more validation rules, data audits, and enforcing Parliament’s own rules on disclosure. Parliament as an institution should stop seeing poor quality disclosures as the MP’s problem, but instead treat it as something that affects the standing of the institution as a whole (and that the majority of MPs want to see working well).

What we can do from the outside

We can more actively flag where information needs to improve – and use our position to create better correction pipelines.

For instance, we can produce automated validation approaches to flag entries with missing/conflicting information and send these back to the MP/Parliamentary Commissioner for review. 

Similarly, where disclosures in debate are not being followed, we can promptly pass this back to the MP in question and the chair of the debate who did not enforce Parliament’s rules during the debate, and keep track of incomplete disclosures in public.

Tighter rules

These recommendations aim to achieve more disclosure through lowering thresholds, and to make more interests impermissible – for instance, lower disclosure thresholds for gifts, shareholdings, or family members’ interests.

What we can do from the outside

We cannot change Parliament’s rules to capture information we think is missing, but we can demonstrate where those rules are out of step – and the specific implications of that. 

For instance, our highlighted interests page flags interests related to industries with low public support and governments of not free countries, and offers MPs opportunity for additional context. We can focus on aspects of this that produce the most benefit for least effort.

Systematic reform

Ultimately, we see systematic reform of political finance as being necessary to reduce the dependence of parties on big donors – enabling caps on political donations.  Here we recommend a citizens’ assembly on money in politics as a way of progressing arguments about public funding that have been stuck for decades. 

What we can do from the outside

While ideally an assembly would be commissioned by Parliament itself, it doesn’t have to be – and would have a lot of value if convened by civil society to move the debate forward. 

For our purposes, sharper information about public preferences (and importantly trade-offs) would help inform the rest of our work. 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.

Help us do more

Key to our work is the philosophy that we don’t have to wait for a better political system to be given to us – we can work together to make it happen now.

If you want to support our work, please consider making a donation, or sign up to our newsletter to hear more about our work and other opportunities to volunteer. 

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Header image: Photo by Dan Senior on Unsplash

Today we’re launching TheyWorkForYou Votes – our new vote information platform. 

Our goal with this service is to create and support better analysis of decisions taken in the UK’s Parliaments. We want this service to both be directly helpful to the general public, and indirectly by providing new tools and data to specialists.

We ran an online event to talk about the new site and the context of this work that you can watch on the event page.

If you like our work, and want to see us go further – please consider donating to support mySociety and TheyWorkForYou.

What’s new in this site

Vote analysis

For each vote we show:

• Breakdowns for and against the motion by party/government/opposition. 
• A searchable voting list with party alignment – how far off an individual MPs vote is from the average position of their party.
• Which of eight common ‘parliamentary dynamics’ the vote falls into – reflecting who was proposing, divisions among opposition parties, and levels of participation. 

Here is an example of this for the approval vote of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill.

We calculate this daily for all new votes we know about, but for House of Commons votes this will be calculated and published within minutes of the vote being published on the Commons Votes site.

Motions and legislation tags

The day after a vote, we automatically link up decisions with the motion that is being voted on. From this we can link deeper into debates, and add extra explainers for common types of motions.

We also automatically tag votes that seem like they’re related to the same bill to make it easier to find amendments or significant stages of the bill (because of naming variations, sometimes some are missed). 

Here’s an example of that for the Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill.

 

Divisions and agreements

For the House of Commons and Scottish Parliament, we extract from the official record references to decisions made without a vote (“on the nod”) and create ‘Agreements’ from these, linking to the related motion. 

We do this to create a canonical reference for agreements. When a high profile issue may be passed without a vote, it can be hard for people to find. By extracting these from the official record, we show more of how the parliamentary process works, can tag them as being part of the process of passing legislation, and include them in voting summaries (in rare cases). 

Here is an example of an amendment made to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill that was accepted without a vote.

Voting summaries by time period

TheyWorkForYou Votes now powers our voting summaries – where we group related votes together to show a record on TheyWorkForYou. 

Building on last year’s change to how we approach scoring and vote inclusion, our new technical approach gives us more flexibility in calculating voting summaries for different time periods. We now show voting records in TheyWorkForYou by ‘all time’ but also by the different government tenures since 1997. 

By creating a view for the current Parliament, we can make recent decisions easier to discover and include, while reflecting that the implications of votes can be long running, and the record is not reset at each election. 

The voting summaries are currently updated up to the end of 2024 – we will do an update covering the first part of 2025 in early June. 

Annotations and whip reports

An impact of TheyWorkForYou has been more public explanations by representatives of how they’ve voted.

We want to start recording this, to make them more accessible to people viewing their representatives’ voting records.

Divisions, agreements, and votes by individual representatives can be annotated with additional information or a link. We can also record information about party voting instructions (the whip). 

Initially, we will be testing this out on specific votes, but our plan is to make this directly available to representatives to annotate their own votes, and have this information feed through to TheyWorkForYou. 

A hub of voting information

Over time, we will make more of the information in this platform more directly accessible on TheyWorkForYou to reach our wider audience. 

But our goal is generally to raise the standard and ease of analysis of parliamentary data for everyone. We make all our data available not just through an API, but as bulk downloads that make it easy for researchers and analysts to get the benefit of the work we’re doing to join up different data sources. 

Support our work

Through TheyWorkForYou and our wider democracy work, we take a practical approach to improving politics in the UK. Over the last two decades we’ve shone  light on UK democracy by tracking MPs’ votes, publishing registers of interests, and sending email alerts—making sure those in power know the public is watching. Because we don’t have paywalls – charities, community groups, and everyday citizens can access unbiased political information without cost.

To keep the service running and continue to innovate and adapt to changing times, TheyWorkForYou relies on supporters. A monthly contribution of £5 (or what you can afford) helps cover core costs, safeguards its independence, and lets the team keep innovating for a fairer, more transparent political system.

If you support us and our work, please consider making a one-off or monthly donation.

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Header image: photo by Christian Boragine on Unsplash

Here’s an update on some upcoming TheyWorkForYou projects, and how you can help us make them better. 

TheyWorkForYou has also joined Bluesky – so follow us there!

Come to the launch of TheyWorkForYou Votes

TheyWorkForYou Votes is mySociety’s new platform that provides more information than ever about how MPs (and other elected representatives) have voted. 

Join us for our launch event at 12pm Monday 19 May to cover both why we publish votes, and what you can get out of the new platform.

Crowdsource APPG information

We’re working to create a list of APPG memberships, but to do that we need to double check we’ve identified the APPGs that don’t have a website (so we can ask for the information directly, using Parliament’s rules). 

Here’s more information about that, and what we’ve learned about changes to the APPG register. 

Crowdsource MPs’ views on the Assisted Dying vote 

This Friday (17 May) the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill may have votes on its report stage (accepting/rejecting amendments made by committee), and its approval stage (third reading). If it passes approval, it will go to the House of Lords. If time runs out, amendment votes and the approval vote may move to another week. 

One of the things we want to do with our new TheyWorkForYou Votes sites is to collect when MPs give extra explanations or justifications of how they vote — and this is especially important in free votes such as this one, where parties do not instruct their MPs how to vote. 

If you see an MP making a post or public statement about their planned or actual vote on the overall bill, please add links to this spreadsheet. 

Follow us on Bluesky

TheyWorkForYou is now on BlueSky, where we’ll be posting about new data, analysis, and how to get the most out of TheyWorkForYou.  After the launch next week, we’ll be posting links to House of Commons vote analysis as they happen. 

While we’re talking about Bluesky, we’ve also added links from MPs’ pages on TheyWorkForYou to their Bluesky accounts (based on a list that PoliticsHome has put together).

If you use Bluesky, you can help us by following and raising the profile of our work. 

Donate

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 monthly donation. It makes a difference.

Header image: Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

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.

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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.

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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.