One thing we want to take more advantage of with TheyWorkForYou is the fact that we’re not an official website — and so can pull on multiple official and unofficial sources of information to present a richer picture of how our democracy works. 

Our trajectory with voting summaries has been to focus on votes that are substantive. This means they’re generally on issues whipped by parties, and there are few differences between the voting records of MPs in the same party.

But we’d also like to make it easier for everyone to understand what differentiates MPs: the signals they give about their values and interests, and where they fall on internal arguments about policy direction. 

As such, all MPs now have a Signatures tab on their TheyWorkForYou page, which tracks Early Day Motions (EDMs), open letters, and Motions to Annul signed by the MP. 

EDMs

One form of information we want to make more use of are Early Day Motions (EDMs). These are technically ‘proposed motions’ that may be elevated to a full debate. In practice this rarely happens and they work as an internal parliamentary petition service, where MPs can propose motions and co-sign ones proposed by others. They are still useful in reflecting the interests of different MPs even if EDMs rarely lead to substantive change in themselves. 

To provide better access to this information, we’ve added EDMs to TheyWorkForYou Votes as ‘Signatures’. Here TheyWorkForYou Votes is working as a general data backend that will help power features in our own services, and makes it easier to access the data for bulk analysis. This then feeds into individual MP profiles. 

With this, we are catching up to what Parliament displays on their MP profiles (EDMs), but also building the framework to expand to the UK’s other Parliaments and to capture extra-parliamentary statements like open letters that serve a similar function. 

Open letters

Over the last few years, we’ve noticed more open letters being shared on social media, where screenshots of a list of names on official parliamentary paper are serving the purpose of  signalling in public that a grouping exists in a political argument. 

A recent example of that is the big open letter for UK recognition of a Palestinian State. This was initially posted on X as images, and we’ve transcribed it and made the list of MPs searchable. 

There are a few reasons why MPs might prefer to use these kinds of open letters rather than submitting an EDM. Social media reach means that MPs can make a full public statement without the parliamentary publishing process. A letter can be published in full without the word count restriction of a letter to a newspaper, so can pick up more names.

Similarly, open letters are free from the format restrictions and word count of EDMs (a single sentence of less than 250 words). This can be important as many letters represent a group of government MPs trying to change the government position. Being able to write more is important in referencing previous government actions, anchoring the change in agreed principles and so on,  while still being a critical signal. 

This fits with a general change in usage of EDMs. While the number of actual EDMs proposed per year  have remained roughly the same, overall signatures have dropped by almost half since 2015 (33k to 15k), and far fewer petitions get a large number of signatures. The average number of signatures per EDM has dropped from 27 to 12. Some of this activity has moved to the new social open letter format. 

There are also some disadvantages to open letters. Publishing via screenshots means it’s not very accessible or searchable — a problem if one reason for signing is to signal to constituents.  If an open letter is important, people want to sign after the fact. EDMs have a mechanism for that, while for open letters you might get “here’s another page of names in another tweet” or social media posts saying “I support this too” —  but not in the same place as the original. 

For our purposes, it also means there’s collection work to be done finding the letters in the first place, and transcribing the images into text. We’ve got some good technical processes on the latter; and we’ve opened a form here where people can tell us about them. But it’s more work than just plugging into Parliament’s feed, which is what we do for data elsewhere on TheyWorkForYou. 

Looking at open letters is a shift towards including more extra-parliamentary activity — but reflects the need for parliamentary monitoring sites to react to changes in how parliaments and representatives behave, and think creatively about how to make use of new sources of information. 

Motions to Annul

Motions to annul are technically a form of EDM, but we’ve separated them out because we see them as something worth highlighting in their own right. 

To take a few steps back, when Parliament passes laws (primary legislation), it fairly commonly gives the government authority to make additional orders/regulations (secondary legislation) that fill in specific details in laws without the full parliamentary process. 

Secondary legislation still needs to be approved by Parliament – and this happens in two ways depending on how the law was written. Either the regulations need to be approved in a vote to become law (positive procedure), or they need to not be voted against within 40 days (negative procedure). 

Most legislation (around 75%) is passed through the negative process, and in practice the power to object is used very rarely (the last successful Commons objection was in 1979).

The mechanism is to make a Motion to Annul (for historical reasons called a ‘prayer’) through the EDM process. There is no threshold at which this is promoted to a vote and the government controls the Commons agenda. It is more likely if the motion is tabled by the Leader of the Opposition, or as the number of signatures goes up.

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Join us on Thursday 23 October for a webinar on our new features, plans for the site, and our vision of a more open Parliament. 

Even if rarely successful,  these represent engagement with the legislative scrutiny process, which we felt was worth highlighting, and we separate these out in the signatures page from other EDMs. 

I’ve written before about how we’re thinking about “low resource” use of Large Language Models (LLMs) — and where some of the benefits of LLMs can be captured without entering the “dependent on external API” vs “need new infrastructure to run internally” trade-offs.

One of the use cases we have for LLMs is categorisation: across parliamentary data in TheyWorkForYou, and FOI data in WhatDoTheyKnow we have a lot of unstructured text that it would be useful to assign structured labels to, for either public facing or internal processes.

This blog post is a write up of an experiment (working title: RuleBox) that uses LLMs to create classification rules, which can then be run on traditional computing infrastructure without dependence on external APIs. This allows large-scale text categorisation to run quickly and cheaply on traditional hardware without ongoing API dependencies.

Categorising Early Day Motions

We have a big dataset of parliamentary Early Day Motions (EDMs), which are formally ‘draft motions’ for parliamentary discussion but effectively work as an internal petition tool where MPs can signal their interest or support in different areas.

For our tools like the Local Intelligence Hub (LIH) we highlight a few EDMs as relevant to indicating if an MP has a special interest in an area of climate/environmental work. We want to keep these up to date better, and to have a pipeline that’s flexible for future versions of the LIH that might focus on different sectors. We want to be able to tag existing and new EDMs depending if they relate to climate/environmental matters, or other domains of interest.

A very simple approach would just be to plug into the OpenAI API and store some categories each day, but this is giving us a dependency and ongoing cost. What we’ve experimented with instead is an approach where we use the OpenAI API to bootstrap a process. We’ve used the commercial LLM to add categories to a limited set of data, and then seen how we can use that to create rules to categorise the rest.

Machine learning and text classification

Regular expressions and text processing rules

The “traditional” way of classifying lots of text automatically is to use text matching or regular expressions.

Regular expressions are a special format for defining when a set of text matches a pattern (which might be “contains one of these words” or “find the thing that is structured like an email address”).

The advantage of this approach is that you can see the rules you’ve added and at this point the underlying technical implementations are really fast. The disadvantage is that you might need to add a lot of edge cases manually, and regular expression syntax is not always clear to understand.

Machine learning

The use of “normal” machine learning provides a new tool. Here, models that have already been trained on a big dataset of the language are then fine-tuned to map input texts to provided categories.

The theory of what is happening here is that in order to accurately “predict the next word”, language models need to have developed internal structures that map to different flows and structures in the text. As such, if you cut off the final “predicting the next word” step, and replace it with a “what category” step, those internal structures can be usefully repurposed to this task.

As such, machine learning based text classifiers can be more flexible. They are picking up patterns like “this flavour of word is in proximity to this flavour of word” that would be difficult to manually code for. The downside is that they are a black box, and it is hard to understand what it has done to make a classification decision. They are also more resource intensive and slower to categorise large datasets — but still fundamentally possible to run on traditional hardware.

LLMs

The next wave is LLMs, which take the same basic concept and massively increase the data and the size of the model. Here, rather than replacing the “next word” step, the LLM is trained on a datasets that contain both instructions and the results of following those instructions. This makes zero-shot classification possible. Without retraining, a model can be given a text and a list of labels and it can assign the label.

This remains a (now massive) black box, but errors in category assignment can be improved by adjusting the instructions. The new downsides over smaller machine learning models is the much larger size of the model hugely increases the cost of self-hosting and creates dependencies on external companies providing models. If you use proprietary models (that are regularly updated and deprecated) this creates problems for reproducible processes.

Rulebox approach

The Rulebox approach combines aspects of both approaches. One of the things that LLMs are quite good at is writing code to solve stated problems. Here we’re doing a version of that: providing text and a category, and asking it to produce a set of regular expressions that should assign this category.

This has its unique set of pros and cons: you are still bound by the underlying problem of regular expressions that they are matching on text rather than the vibes of the text (which language models are better at). But you have massively reduced the labour time needed to create the huge set of rules, and once you have these they can be applied at speed on traditional hardware.

This is part of a focus on “low resource” use of LLMs – where we want to think about where we can get the most value out of new technology, in a way that avoids dependence or hugely increased capacity.

The process

We used an OpenAI-based process to assign labels to a set of 2,000 EDMs (1000 each for a training and validation dataset).

We then created a basic structure for holding regular expression rules using Pydantic for the underlying data structure of the collection of rules. For each rule, this either allows a list of regex expressions that are AND (all must match) or OR (one must match) — with the option of NOT rules that will negate a positive match.

Once we have the holder for a set of rules, and a dataset with a set of labels, we can start to calculate mismatches between what the rules say, and the result. Running this in a loop with steps that query an LLM helps refine the result.

The steps are:

• Calculate mismatches between ground truth labels, and assigned labels: finding both missing labels and incorrect labels.
  • AI: For each missing label, create a new regex rule that would assign the correct label.
  • AI: For each incorrect label, adjust and replace the regex rules that triggered this label.
• Repeat until no missing or incorrect labels.

PydanticAI is used to interface with the OpenAI API. This includes not just using pydantic to validate the returning data structure, but some extra validation rules that the resulting rules match the text that was being input. So for instance, if a rule is being generated to assign a label to a piece of text, if the generated rule fails to match the input text, this failure is passed back to trigger a retry.

The initial attempt at this got stuck in a loop creating rules that were too general, and trying to narrow them down. At this point, we cut the categories down to just a few we were really interested in, and after that performed better, expanded out to eight where it felt like keyword categories should perform reasonably well (or at least successfully generate rules). This ends up with 1,500 regular expressions to assign eight categories.

Applying the rules

Once we have the rules, we know they work for the training dataset, but how useful are they in general?

Using the validation dataset, we can see the following differences:

• Correct labels: 230
• Missing labels: 73
• Incorrect labels: 41
• Items where no labels were assigned: 808 / 1000 total items

Reviewing these, incorrect labels generally felt fair enough – these tended to be examples that contained obvious keywords related to the environment, but were part of longer lists where the labelling process did not judge it as one of the focuses of the text. The missing labels were more of a problem, where 33 of the missing labels were environmental ones. Expanding the training data should improve this, but there is always just going to be a long tail that’s missed.

Something else we experimented with at this stage was moving the process that applied the rules from Python to Rust (using an LLM to translate a basic version of the Python mechanics). This cut the time taken to categorising 13,000 EDMs from 2 minutes to 4 seconds. The benefit of this isn’t just being fast on this dataset, but that much more complicated rulesets would not be a big slowdown.

What have we learned

In general this is an approach worth investigating further as a bridge between several useful features: with it, we are able to translate an initial high intensity of LLM into a process that can be run fast on traditional hardware, and importantly is not a black box in terms of how it assigns labels.

It doesn’t completely carry over the benefits of LLMs:it is better for smaller, more precise categories. It really needs a good theory on why a keyword approach would be a good way of categorising something. It might be a good transitional approach for a few years while options stabilise around more open models with lower resource requirements.

Next steps

The next steps on this are to expand the training data a bit and start seeing if we can practically make use of the categories assigned, or if the accuracy causes problems.

Depending how this goes, we can revisit the initial experiment code and tidy it up into a more general classifying tool. This could tackle other classification problems we have that might be suitable, and we could make the tool more widely available. An advantage of this kind of approach (as our previous work around vector search) is it is the kind of project where “a technically-minded volunteer helped us to create a tool” might help organisations without creating significant new dependencies or new infrastructure requirements.

We also want to think about where hybrid approaches might be useful. For instance, in these datasets, most items are not labelled at all. A fast first pass that identifies potential items could then switch to an LLM approach to knock out false positives from the data. Similarly, once we have a smaller pool of environmentally-linked items, further subclassification using LLMs is much more viable.

Our general approach is to try and identify the things that LLMs can do uniquely well, and build them into overall processes that tame some of the things that worry us about AI in general. Here we are exploring how we have focused on the use of LLMs, resulting in new processes that are both fast and efficient. For more about our approach, read our AI framework.

Photo by Marc Sendra Martorell on Unsplash

Transforming and publishing official Parliamentary transcripts is one of the key activities of parliamentary monitoring organisations (PMOs)  — in our case, that means running our website TheyWorkForYou, but there are many organisations around the world doing the same for their own parliaments. 

Building on top of transcripts means that PMOs can focus their time on where they can add value to those transcripts: either applying their digital skills to make them more accessible, or merging them with other datasets and sources in ways the official Parliament sites cannot. 

One of the interesting things about Parliamentary transcripts is that they don’t exactly reflect what happened. They can be an official record of what was supposed to have been said rather than what was said: a constructed version of Parliament that is close to, but not exactly, reality. 

This can be very important when democratic needs are not for verbatim transcripts. MPs can ask to make corrections on factual content if they misspoke. The Record can add useful shorthand, referring to standing orders, or additional information that was not said orally. For parliaments with multiple official languages (in the UK’s case the Senedd/Welsh Parliament), transcripts make parliamentary activity accessible in all official languages. 

But the difference can also be political in the “first draft of history” sense. The transcript can retrospectively apply rule-following in a way that can remove political speech on the edge of those rules. We’ve noted before there are times where the transcript does not reflect reality in procedurally significant ways. Historically famous events can be at the edge of the transcript, rather than visible in it. 

So there are pros and cons to our understanding of parliamentary activity being dependent on transcripts alone. But the existence of accessible video recordings of Parliament makes it easier than ever to see the difference between what officially happened and what actually happened.

Combining transcript and video

In 2008 we did some work with the BBC to explore how to make parliamentary video searchable. At the time the best approach we had was a crowdsourcing approach to reconcile timestamps and speeches  — around 400 volunteers aligned 160k speeches. Ultimately this process had big technical overhead in video storage, and a lot of manual work was required to keep the two feeds together, and we stopped using video in this way. 

New approaches make this possible at scale with much less manual effort. As part of our TICTeC Community of Practice around Parliamentary Monitoring we ran a session on video and transcripts, hearing from OpenParliament.tv about their approach (video of the presentations). 

OpenParliament.tv currently covers the German Bundestag, but is interested in expanding the approach to more countries. The platform is a combined video/transcript search platform, where individual speeches can be searched for, and jump the video to that point in the record. 

There’s a lot of moving parts that make this work, but the core work is in how the video and the transcript are aligned. The transcript is converted to computer-generated audio, and then the generated audio is matched against the real audio. The matching uses an adapted version of the aeneas framework for ‘forced alignment’ of text and speech. 

When you think about it, this approach makes a lot of sense: speech to text is often specifically bad at generating the punctuation of written language, while one of the key things in syncing transcripts to video is finding the start and end of blocks. This can still run into difficulties when what is being said is just not present in the transcript, but generally it can flow around problems and match items on either side. From an international perspective, this is also interesting in that it’s an approach that works better across different languages than speech-to-text approaches. 

In other technical details, Open Parliament TV does not host the video themselves. Offline they need to process it to extract and match audio, but online their player links to the videos as hosted by the Parliament. In the long term, they want a workflow that sends videos to an internet archive as a backup. This is another useful purpose of democratic transparency project: – to act as civic redundancy against backsliding access to democratic materials. 

Switching between modes

We had a bit of a discussion in the group about transcripts, and about where AI approaches might make it possible to generate them. This might be useful in settings where there is only video output, to make it easier to search and parse. This could also be a useful bridge in cases where there is a significant delay before transcripts are released. 

But official transcripts are an art beyond just writing down what’s happened,  imposing a consistency on the parliamentary record that is very useful as a building block connecting it to other data. For instance, Open Parliament TV does additional detection of named entities based on the transcript, meaning that specific mentions can then be seen in the video. 

The future of parliamentary monitoring might be switching between these modes: making the ground truth of what happened visible through video, augmenting this with the formal transcript, and bridging from that to other sources of information. In short, pulling on what different mediums do best to make democratic processes stronger and more transparent.

Header image: Photo by Diego González on Unsplash

We don’t talk a lot about elections at mySociety: we see our unique contribution as being about the democracy between elections, with a focus on how democratic institutions work (sometimes how they can work better), and the connections between the public and those institutions.

But whatever part of the democratic system you care about, elections shape everything. Rules about elections not only decide the winners, but the incentives that all players operate by. In our work looking at money in politics, we started looking at broken forms and worked our way back to problems in how elections are financed. There’s a lot of good work to be done on small problems, but we need to keep our eye on the big picture too.

This blog post looks at the new government’s new election strategy (which will be the basis of the forthcoming Elections Bill) 

This strategy provides some certainty around large-scale changes in how UK elections will work in this Parliament, which is good as we’re at the point in the election cycle when the practical work to make these changes happen needs to begin.

The strategy is a solid foundation to build on, that needs to be followed up with complementary support and legislative action through the rest of the Parliament. There are also areas where the plan doesn’t go far enough – and from the outside we need to be building better evidence and campaigns for change. 

Making it easier to use your vote

The big headline changes are:

• automatic voter registration
• expansion of valid Voter ID
• votes at 16.

These are all changes that make it easier for people to vote if they want to. 

It is important that these changes are enabled now to facilitate the substantial work that will take years — both within the electoral administration system, and for civil society. 

One of the significant hopes for votes at 16 is that it will give more people a first election while they’re in an educational setting that helps them understand and use their new right.  But this doesn’t happen on its own: the Democracy Classroom have outlined the work that is required over the next few years to create the environment where young people not only have the right to vote, but the knowledge and willingness to use it. 

Election finance and donor caps

There are good foundations on improved electoral finance laws in the strategy.  A key improvement is much stronger regulation of unincorporated associations: creating Know Your Donor requirements, and bringing the transparency thresholds into line with donations to parties and candidates. These transparency thresholds are too high (and have gotten higher), but this is an area that could (and should) be redressed through a statutory instrument at a later point.

What this strategy does not go near is the idea of donation caps to limit the power of large donors. As we explored on our Beyond Transparency report, a key blocker in this area is both the comparative lack of public funding of elections in the UK compared to European and Anglophone countries, and a belief that public opinion is an obstacle to a move in that direction (public funding is not popular on its own, but the status quo is also deeply unpopular). 

In the spirit of “what is the work needed now to enable change by the end of the Parliament”, our key recommendation is that either government or civil society actors convene a citizens’ forum/assembly to further unblock this line of argument by creating a better understanding of how the public approach trade-offs in this area. There is good reason to believe that, while exactly what it looks like might be open to debate, increased levels of public funding are possible, enabling donor caps and restricting the uneven influence of wealth on elections. 

In the absence of this, we are unlikely to make substantial progress within this parliament. We need well-developed answers to the “how are we going to pay for elections then?” question  — and to be building those answers now. 

The Electoral Commission needs better data infrastructure

A key part of the new strategy is creating much greater enforcement powers for the Electoral Commission, increasing maximum fines and expanding to cover financial offences by candidates and local third-party campaigners. 

This implies more resourcing for the Electoral Commission, but also improved data infrastructure.

For instance, basic infrastructure (such as the Electoral Commission having a list of all candidates covered) does not exist in a formal centralised way. This is currently provided indirectly through Democracy Club’s work using volunteers to source hundreds of different statements. 

The strategy provides both a need for a better solution, and the framework of how it can happen – through new requirements for Electoral Register officers to provide election information to the government and Electoral Commission. Building on this legal foundation will require important work over the next few years to create reliable flows of data to enable both better public participation in elections, and an effective regulator of candidates and parties. 

For investigation of campaign finance offences,  the flow of financial information currently has significant problems, not only in terms of external accessibility but in terms of usable data for a regulator to enforce the rules. Our forthcoming report, Leaky Pipes, will explore this problem in more depth, and propose solutions that help support both public transparency and effective regulation. 

Abuse and intimidation

The strategy includes a number of elements aimed at reducing the incidence and impact of abuse and intimidation of candidates and election staff.  These range from privacy measures such as removing the need for candidates’ home addresses to be published, through making intimidation related to an election an aggregating factor in other offences, and requiring candidate ID checks to avoid sham candidates. 

A key aspect of this in the strategy is better guidance on the different parts of the system and creating clearer understanding on roles, available protection, thresholds for action and ways of accessing police support. 

A throughline of the Jo Cox Civility Commission report is the potential high rewards of better joining up and signposting existing systems of support.  A consequence of creating the guidance may be discovering further opportunities for better joined-up procedures. 

This is another area where improved data infrastructure would enable a range of goals, for instance making it possible for consistent updates to guidance to be sent centrally from the Electoral Commission.

Managing scope

A running theme through the strategy is trying to close loopholes that can be abused. However, some loopholes reflect genuine ambiguity that can be hard to address with either creating a chilling effect or problems with enforcement through covering a large number of organisations.  One area of concern is the expansion of the need for a digital imprint to cover unregistered campaigners (the name and address of the organisation creating/promoting a viral post), which might bring a huge number of organisations into scope. We would want to see more examination of this as the bill progresses through Parliament. 

Character and truth

One interesting element of the strategy is support for the recommendation that the current Speaker’s Conference on the security of MPs, candidates and elections establish a code of conduct for campaigning and coordinating cross-party discussions. 

Given the Speaker’s Conference‘s specific interest in s106 (the rule where defaming a candidate’s character can be an election-invalidating offence), discussion of conduct inevitably enters grounds around truthfulness. The problems in agreeing a code of conduct was one of the reasons that the Advertising Standards Agency stopped policing election adverts in 1999 (the lack of regulation here is generally not known by the public). 

Progress here could work as an enabling measure for the ASA to adopt New Zealand style rules on policing political ads. But it could also run into problems finding consensus. It is worth campaigners in this area paying attention to where practical progress is possible, and could be enabled by outside research and campaigning. 

Electoral Commission independence remains at risk

This strategy intends to use the government’s power to set the Electoral Commission’s strategy and policy rather than abolish that power. Labour was opposed to this in opposition. It undermines all electoral offences if parties have a viable “win at any cost” approach to electoral compliance and then can deprioritise enforcement of rules against them once in government. 

As the Chair of the Electoral Commission said, they “remain opposed to the principle of a strategy and policy statement, by which a government can guide our work. The independence and impartiality of an electoral commission must be clear for voters and campaigners to see, and this form of influence from a government is inconsistent with that role.”

This is a change that needs to be made through primary legislation. Failing to do this within this parliament will set a norm where two major parties have agreed that electoral enforcement priorities are set by the winner, rather than reflecting an agreed democratic understanding of the rules. 

Improving candidate/voter privacy

In the 19th century, when the franchise was heavily restricted, the list of electors was public so that people’s eligibility could be challenged. This has continued into a big dataset of all registered electors being commercially available to buy from local authorities. 

This is out of sync with modern ideas of privacy, and especially the risks of these kinds of massive datasets. The opt-out to the open register was added in 2002, and by December 2018 56% of the register had opted out. The usefulness as a universal dataset has now been broken, and it serves little purpose. 

The election strategy says that for automatic voter registration, opt-out will become the default. We would recommend going further to fully remove the register.

This is just one way that electoral transparency is out of step with our current democratic needs. In our forthcoming Leaky Pipes report, we explore how GDPR is both used as an obstacle to useful donor transparency, while at the same time a surprising amount of information on small donors is available for public access.

—

Image: Ben Allen

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, parliamentary questions paper trails, paid membership of APPGs, and how we can help the public set the rules of the game. 

Just asking questions

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 there is a connection between second jobs and asking questions is 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. 

* 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