Our partner organisation Climate Emergency UK put us in touch with Mat Allen, based in Northern Ireland. They described him as “one of our most dedicated Scorecards volunteers” — and when we heard what he’s been up to, we could certainly see why.

Volunteering for CE UK is, for many, an opportunity to do something tangible and impactful around climate action. “Getting busy and doing something useful can counter the effects of negative stories,” Mat told us.

So how did it all begin? He explains: “My wife forwarded me a link to an article about CE UK, and I was struck by the importance of somebody taking oversight of the action taking place to address that a third of greenhouse gas emissions that can be influenced by our councils. 

“That is a bit niche, but addressing the climate emergency requires so many things to be done at the local level that I thought this could be something I could usefully contribute to.”

Volunteering as a marker

So Mat got involved. “I signed up to be a marker for CE UK’s 2023 survey, and was assigned a batch of UK councils to score against the criteria laid out in the Buildings and Heating section.” 

There’s no denying that the marking work can be complex, so how did Mat find it? 

“The process was well documented”, he says, “with support from the small CE UK team, and other volunteers available to give guidance when needed. While searching the internet for the evidence that allows marks to be awarded, I found inspiring things happening in councils all over the UK, pockets of brilliance! Some I recommended for inclusion in the Best Practices section of the CE UK website for others to enjoy, and perhaps replicate in their own areas!”

Once the 2023 Scorecards, based on those marks, were published, Mat was able to assess his own region. “The challenge in Northern Ireland became apparent, with much lower scores than the rest of the UK. Our eleven Northern Ireland councils have many challenges — as do all UK councils — with the cost of living crisis putting immense pressure on service delivery, and the level of rates chargeable (yes, we still have rates over here!).

“I made useful contact with my own council, Mid and East Antrim, who gave consideration to our recommended ‘easy wins’ — the actions that can have greatest benefit with least expenditure. They were facing huge financial challenges that year.”

Coming back for more

That was enough to bring Mat back for the next round of work — and this time, he got even more involved!

“I was properly hooked by the time CE UK was seeking volunteers for the 2025 survey, and I signed up as a marker and an auditor, this time in the Transport section. 

“As an auditor, I reviewed the Right to Reply responses made by councils to their initially assigned marks, to determine if scores should be changed based on the new evidence they supplied. This was more challenging, often requiring further online research, and comparison with other councils, to ensure scores were  fair.”

One perhaps unexpected result that we hear from many volunteers is how assessing councils’ climate action can lead to a better understanding of the challenges they face. Mat feels this too:

“I’ve learned a lot while marking and auditing, both about the complexity of council operations, and about successful climate action. The council staff involved are trying their best to do the right things, but surrounded by challenges of understanding and prioritisation. I feel for them, as they try and do right by their ratepayers and the planet!”

Getting the word out there

A small organisation like CE UK doesn’t have a big marketing budget, so anything that helps spread the word is useful, especially from those on the ground who can forge links with their own councils. Mat was able to assist here, too:

“As the release date for the results of the 2025 survey approached, I wanted to get more impact locally than we achieved with the results of the 2023 survey. I signed up as an ambassador for Climate Emergency UK (have yet to be offered a Ferrero Rocher!). 

“Along with my daughter, we decided to act locally, trying to gain traction with my own and the other two County Antrim councils (Antrim and Newtownabbey, and Causeway Coast and Glens), by holding a public launch meeting in Ballymena to publicise our initiative.

“With help and support from CE UK and Friends of the Earth, we held that meeting in June 2025 in Ballymena. The climate change teams from Antrim and Newtownabbey and Mid and East Antrim Councils joined us, as well as Councillor Quigley and residents from all three target council areas. 

“Thanks to the efforts of Councillor McShane from Causeway Coast and Glens Council, we made contact with their newly appointed Climate Change Manager the following day on a Zoom call, and we look forward to ongoing useful engagement with CCC&G! 

“We were pleased to award the ‘Most Improved NI Council’ award to Antrim and Newtownabbey in the presence of our local newspaper, The Ballymena and Antrim Guardian.

“The meeting was worthwhile, helping us at CE UK better understand the challenges these motivated climate teams face, and I hope introducing those folks to useful case studies and information about best practice we can offer.”

Looking to the future

Mat is a great believer in communication, saying, “Perhaps the greatest challenge we all face, and more so in Northern Ireland than elsewhere in the UK, is public engagement, and our councils are important players as they have those everyday interactions and influence with residents and communities.

“The work goes on in councils all over Northern Ireland, and at CE UK we are taking stock and thinking of how we can best help our eleven councils progress essential actions to reduce emissions, bringing communities with them, and prioritising the needs of the vulnerable.”

Mat has found something valuable in CE UK, beyond the ability to get out and do something: a set of data that backs it all up:

“Taking effective action — in anything — is helped by objective measures and targets. Climate Emergency UK is the only organisation offering such measures in the UK, and we research and publish these measures for all councils for free!”

Finally, he says, “We hope to continue engagement with our three Country Antrim councils, and would like to make contact with, and help the other eight Northern Ireland councils add more objectivity, breadth and substance to their climate action plans. 

“We would welcome contacts from the Climate Change Teams and councillors across the province, and we hope to invite more councils to an event to launch the 2027 CE UK Council Climate Action Scorecards!

If you are reading this and you are one of those councils, do drop CE UK an email at declare@climateemergency.uk. 

Many thanks to Mat for sharing his journey as a CE UK Scorecards volunteer — we hope it will inspire others who are wondering how to play their part! CE UK are not currently recruiting for volunteers, but when the next round of activity starts up, you’ll be able to see opportunities on this page.

—

Image: K. Mitch Hodge

The UK has two Freedom of Information laws – one that covers Scottish public authorities and one that covers public authorities in the rest of the UK. While similar to the UK law in many respects, we think there are a number of practical ways the Scottish system improves on the wider system of FOI in the UK. 

While being better than the UK law is a good start, our sights should be set a lot higher than that: Freedom of Information needs to keep pace with how the world has changed, the changing ways public services are delivered, and huge shifts in how information can be stored and shared. 

Currently there is a Private Member’s Bill going through the Scottish Parliament with a combination of practical fix-ups to problems that have emerged, and bigger picture changes to encourage better proactive publication of information.

Last month, the Scottish Parliament’s Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee invited views on the Freedom of Information Reform (Scotland) Bill, which aims to modernise and strengthen the existing law. Our submission welcomed the Bill as a timely and proportionate improvement to an already effective system.

In addition to our written evidence, we were delighted to be invited to give oral evidence to the committee. You can watch Alex’s evidence session here.

Overall we’re really supportive of this effort to update the FOI system in Scotland, and as Alex said to the committee, we’re especially pleased to see proposals for a new proactive publication duty. 

This change would help public bodies make information available as a matter of course, reducing the need for requests and ensuring that information, once released, is accessible to everyone. In our research on fragmented public data, we’ve shown how better coordination and consistent publication practices can unlock huge public value. The Bill’s provisions around proactive publication are a welcome step towards achieving this.

This feels like a key moment for transparency enthusiasts to unite around the opportunity to make Scotland’s FOI system even better, and we’re delighted to play our part.

—

Image: Chris Flexen

The Council Climate Action Scorecards are only possible thanks to the work of volunteers, who attend training from Climate Emergency UK before going off to gather the multitude of data required to assess the climate action of every council in the UK.

We’re always keen to hear from volunteers about what motivates them, and any other results that have come from their enhanced understanding of councils and climate action.

And so we were pleased to hear from Lucy Bramley, who first explained how she had come across the Scorecards project. As with so many of the volunteers, Lucy was already involved in climate action, and saw the opportunity to do more.

“I am a Climate Ambassador for the Women’s Institute. We have periodic team calls, and on one of them Don from Climate Emergency UK popped in to tell us about the Action Scorecards.

“I was really keen to find out more, so I asked him to lead a call with others who are also interested in climate change and biodiversity issues in my area. That session made me realise the gulf that exists between councils and residents, even when the residents are environmental activists… and that made me keen to volunteer to support the work of CE UK in shining a light on what our councils are doing — good and bad.”

Lucy took what she learned still further, though, and had a useful route through which to do so:

“I deliver Carbon Literacy training to local authorities for a public sector non-profit. I’m not a full-time employee, but whenever I get to deliver a course, I mention the fact that councils can gauge their own success in their quest to decarbonise, and use their influence to encourage others to do so, by engaging with the Scorecards.

“In fact, most councils seem to have some awareness of the Scorecards, and usually the Climate Change Leaders are most knowledgeable. I have seen the discussion on the Scorecards spark actions which hopefully continue outside the course!”

When asked about longterm outcomes, Lucy says, “I have a much deeper appreciation for the complex and difficult nature of the work that councils have to do.

“I have been frustrated by the impression I get that councils do not seem to work together to share successful strategies, but over time networks do seem to be building.

“The Scorecards are flexible in terms of taking these burgeoning networks on board, and sharing their stories to help amplify local authority challenges and successes. I’d very much like to continue to get as many people as possible to understand and use the Scorecards.”

Many thanks to Lucy for sharing her valuable thoughts and experiences.

Scorecards are a joint project from Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.

—

Image: Daria S

The government is making a significant investment into AI in public services, and systems are changing apace.

AI is increasingly being deployed in every department of government, both national and local, and often through systems procured from external contractors.

In a recent article for Public Technology, mySociety’s Chief Executive Louise Crow flags that we urgently need to update our transparency and accountability mechanisms to keep pace with the automation of state decision-making.

This rapid adoption needs scrutiny: not only because significant amounts of money are being spent; but also because we’re looking at a new generation of digital systems in which the rules of operation are, by their very nature, opaque.

To see Louise’s thoughts on what needs to change, and why, as this new technological era unfolds, read the full piece here.

If you find it of interest, you may also wish to watch this recent event at the Institute for Government, The Freedom of Information Act at 25, where Louise was one of six speakers reflecting on the future of transparency in the UK.

 

—

Image: Alex Socra

We want to improve the quality of UK democracy by making more and better information about Parliament available to everyone. 

In previous updates to TheyWorkForYou, we’ve expanded the range of official sources the service pulls on: extending to cover all the UK’s parliaments, and recently bringing together all the registers of interest in one place. 

This update is about adding pipelines and data to bring in data beyond Parliament to provide richer insights into your representatives. 

What we’ve added:

• Committees and APPGs memberships
• Signatures (EDMs and Open Letters)
• Vote annotations
• Adding context to parliamentary debates
• Improved email alerts for political monitoring
• Navigation improvements to MPs profiles

You can also watch our launch webinar to learn more about how these changes fit together:

And as ever, you value the work we do, and want to help us go further – please consider making a donation to support our work. 

Committees and APPGs

An important part of how Parliament works is through the formal committee system and the informal APPGs. We wanted to improve the information we display on both of these kinds of groups. 

For Committees: we’ve pulled more information from Parliament to give extra information about the committees MPs are a part of,and to try to explain more about Parliament as part of the MP profile. 

For APPGs: there has not previously been a good central database of APPG members. We’ve set out to create this. We used a new LLM-assisted scraper to get lists of memberships off dozens of individual websites. For those without a website, we asked each APPG individually for a membership list to add to the collection. This database isn’t complete yet, but is now the best available source on APPG memberships.

Read more about this the APPG changes

Signatures

Early Day Motions are effectively an internal petition system available to MPs, where they can signal support for different issues. Including recent EDMs helps indicate which issues MPs see as important. 

But we also wanted to go beyond these motions to look at the growing trend for MPs to share joint open letters on social media instead. We have started to transcribe and store these open letters, so we can make the content more accessible, and show on MPs’ profiles the issues that concern them. 

We have separated out ‘motions to annul’ from other EDMs. The process of objecting to negative statutory instruments (which become law unless there is a vote against them) – felt worth highlighting above other proposed motions because it represents scrutiny of secondary legislation. These motions are technically called ‘prayers’ in the UK Parliament, but we use the term used in the Senedd and Scottish Parliament because it’s clearer. 

Read more about the EDM / open letter changes

Improved political monitoring

We originally created TheyWorkForYou’s email alerts to make it easier to track what your representatives have been saying in Parliament. But as well as following individual representatives, alerts can also be for phrases, and these have proven to be a vital tool that help civil society monitor what is happening in the UK’s parliaments.

To lean into this use, we’ve completely redesigned how you can create and manage complex keyword alerts, making it easier to group multiple terms, see results on the page, and manage a number of alerts across different topics.

With this, we want to make TheyWorkForYou a more powerful free tool for political monitoring —and make it easier for NGOs and grassroots organisations who cannot afford paid political monitoring to not be disadvantaged compared to those who can. We don’t think money should get you better access and want to build tools to level the playing field. 

Read more about the changes to email alerts

Vote annotations

Building on the release of our new site TheyWorkForYou Votes, we have made it easier to reach the new information we hold on voting. For recent votes in an MPs profile, we now link to our new richer analysis, and if MPs spoke in the section before the vote, we’ll also link to those speeches. 

We’re also starting to make some of the extra information we store in TheyWorkForYou Votes visible in MPs’ profiles and voting summaries, such as vote annotations and information about party instructions (whipping). TheyWorkForYou’s publication of voting records has led to more public justifications from representatives about how they vote, and we want to try and get that information back into the site. 

Currently we don’t have many examples of this while we test the system, but we will be picking a few specific votes to add more information and links to. 

Understanding parliamentary debates

We want to make it easier for everyone to understand Parliament, and one way we can do that is by adding context to debates beyond the official transcripts. 

We’ve gone back to features that have been around for twenty years and made improvements. We’ve overhauled our approach to linking words and phrases to Wikipedia to ensure there are fewer false positives. 

We’ve also revived aspects of the debate annotation system and glossary systems to give us the ability to add notes to high profile debates —and will be making more use of that over the next few months. 

A new coat of paint

To hold all this new information, we’ve redesigned our MP profile pages to make it easier to find different sections, and so they work better on mobile. 

We’ve added more explanatory text to different sections, and improved the display of registers of interest to make it easier to see only the new entries (also: see all the wider data we hold on registers of interests). 

Coming up

In the coming months we’ll be releasing some more work as part of our efforts to understand and improve how component parts of UK democracy are working in practice. 

We’ve been running a new survey on WriteToThem to understand more about what people are writing to their representatives about, and we’re going to release a report talking about the patterns we’ve learned from that, and how it’s affecting our thinking. 

As part of WhoFundsThem work, we’re continuing to dig into money in politics, and have two releases coming up. One is a report about the systems of tracking election donations, and the other is our research into MPs asking parliamentary questions about areas they have a financial interest in. 

That’s it for now, and remember if you want to help us go further – please consider making a donation to support our work!

—

Header image: House of Commons

You can subscribe to TheyWorkForYou’s alerts to receive email updates on representatives’ parliamentary speeches and questions — but they’re also strongly used by civil society as a parliamentary monitoring tool, letting organisations know when their topics of interest have been mentioned in debates or votes. Our alerts help the flow of information from Parliament through government and wider civil society. 

Something we’ve wanted to do for a while is make it easier to create these keyword alerts. To cover all variants of a concept or topic,  you previously needed to create a search using operators (‘cars’ + ‘vehicles’), and as a result very few people did this. 

We’ve made a new interface for email alerts. This:

• makes it easier to create more complicated alerts
• can sometimes suggest useful phrases to include
• lets you see recent hits on alerts on the website as well as your inbox.

Creating more complicated alerts

Previously, you would need to do a search for (“electric vehicle” OR “electric car”) and then convert this into an alert. You can still do it that way if you want,  but we have a new interface to make it easier to make more complete queries. 

From the alerts page, you can create a new alert, and add a list of phrases.

When you’ve made an alert, it will give you the option to see the results and any recent matches to check it’s picking up what you want, and if not,  go back and adjust the terms used. 

Suggesting useful phrases

Sometimes you might not know the term that is commonly used in Parliament. We’ve done some data-crunching to try and help out here. 

Using vector search, we’ve created a list of related terms based on common previous searches and matches in the transcripts. For instance, below a search for ‘electric vehicle’ you’ll see suggestions including ‘electric car’ and ‘ev’: other terms for the same concept that have been used in Parliament in the past.  

This is not comprehensive and is initially focused on the most common terms — but is part of our approach to incorporating benefits from machine learning tools in a sustainable way into our services.

  

Viewing and managing alerts

Another thing we have done is make it easier to manage a greater range of alerts — and see recent mentions in the browser rather than purely in emails. 

You can now see, at a glance, any hits that have happened in the previous week, in the alerts management page, and expand it to see the last mention and get a link to the latest results. 

Stay up to date

We’re always working to improve our services. Sign up our newsletter and make sure you’ve checked ‘Democracy and Parliaments’ to hear more.

—
Header photo by Patrícia Nicoloso on Unsplash

The Scottish Parliament and the Senedd are both holding elections in May 2026, and the Northern Ireland Assembly will be holding an election before May 2027. All of these elections will take place on different boundaries to their current constituencies and, in the case of the Senedd, under a new voting system.

As the boundaries don’t take effect until the election itself, but people may wish to use those boundaries before the elections, we have now added the future boundaries to MapIt, our point and postcode lookup tool and API, under different area type codes. This means you can use MapIt to look up both current and future boundaries for a particular location or postcode, depending on whether you are interested in the constituencies as they are now, or as they will be after the next election.

Boundary	Current area type	Future area type
Northern Ireland Assembly	NIE	NIEF
Scottish Parliament constituency	SPC	SPCF
Scottish Parliament region	SPE	SPEF
Senedd constituency	WAC	WACF
Senedd region	WAE	n/a

After the election, the boundaries will move to their normal area type code, as they will then be the actual boundaries, and the previous boundaries will always still be available by using our generation query parameters to access boundaries from previous generations.

Here are some summary maps showing the Welsh Parliament constituencies as they are now and will be next year:

MapIt is used by our own services, such as WriteToThem and FixMyStreet, and is used by many different organisations to help them look up councils or constituencies – perhaps it can help you too!

Please do credit/link to us somewhere if you use this data, to help spread the word of the service we provide 🙂

Mayoral expenses are a big topic in France just now, in a moment that’s reminiscent of our own MPs’ expenses scandal back in 2009.

Chandeliers, luxury TVs and a duck house

The UK’s Freedom of Information Act had only recently come into force when investigative reporter Heather Brooke lodged a request for details of MPs’ expenses. The ins and outs make for a long — and interesting — story, but suffice to say that, with the nation gripped, this may have been the moment when FOI entered the public consciousness. 

When the expenses information finally went public, it caused widespread outrage, and had a long-lasting effect on the nation’s trust in politicians. Today, the scandal is perhaps most often remembered for an MP’s infamous duck house, but the overreach in what had been claimed seemed endless, with payments for chandeliers, swimming pool heaters and luxury TVs all being recompensed. 

mySociety was part of the successful campaign to head off a subsequent attempt from MPs to have their expenses made exempt from FOI. Fortunately that idea was quashed. There’s still a need for scrutiny, though:16 years later with our WhoFundsThem project, we continue to push for better transparency and adherence to the rules around MPs’ sources of income. 

Designer clothing, false eyelashes and a rabbit-shaped pizza

Meanwhile, over in France, expenses are very much in the news. In their case, it’s mayoral use of public funds that has whipped up a frenzy, with FOI requests lodged on the French Alaveteli site MaDada providing the relevant documents. 

Le Parisien covered the story (in French, of course — but Google Translate is handy) and also put out a video (again, if your French isn’t up to scratch, use the translated subtitles): at the time of writing it’s been watched almost 200K times.

In short, Freedom of Information is helping to reveal which mayors have used the occupational expense account to pay for lavish dinners and designer clothing (as well as, quite the detail, a ‘pizza in the shape of a rabbit’) and which have confined themselves to more essential or modest job-related purchases such as train tickets and rainwear for protection when cycling between meetings.

But at the same time, the video shows a citizen being pleasantly surprised by his mayor’s lack of profligacy — FOI can reveal laudable behaviour as well as misconduct. 

Putting FOI into the public consciousness

The story has grown over time. MaDada has many requests about public officials’ expenses, dating back quite a few years. The topic hit TikTok — one mayor’s expenses included false eyelashes, cashmere sweaters, and apparently…fossils for her mother — and then the mainstream news.

In Le Parisien’s video, MaDada’s co-founder Laurent Savaëte explains that this public conversation has brought peaks in usage to the site, proving the throughline from a news story to an increased societal interest in accessing information. 

We admired the video’s clear explanation of the timeline of a response, and what happens if an authority refuses to provide the information requested: all useful intel for beginner request-makers. 

And the coverage continues, with France’s second-biggest regional paper delving into the contents of MaDada (and requesting documents where they weren’t to be found) for a story just this week.

With this level of detail in the mainstream news, as with MaDada’s request for the president’s payslip, the story is quietly introducing to the French public, perhaps even normalising, the act of making FOI requests. Or perhaps we mean the act of demanding transparency from our representatives. Either way, it’s all good stuff.

An international concern

Transparency around representatives’ expenditure is of importance everywhere, and a natural fit for FOI. A recent analysis of news stories generated from information requested across all Alaveteli sites brought up similar questions in Ukraine (where the mayor of Odessa is raising his own salary), Moldova (where people are wondering why a friend was contracted to make repairs to the mayor’s office) and Croatia (where funds designated for road repairs that do not appear to have been made are being scrutinised).

—

Image: Bartjan (CC BY-SA 4.0)

This update to TheyWorkForYou voting summaries brings us up to date as of the end of September 2025 (covering Q2+Q3 2025). 

To learn more about our process for updating MPs’ voting summaries, 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 now powering TheyWorkForYou’s voting summaries. 

This update adds 21 votes and 3 historical votes to expand new and revised policies. We have also started to bring more information we’re gathering in TheyWorkForYou Votes (vote annotations and whip reports) into the voting summary pages of TheyWorkForYou. 

Previous draft policies have been put live for:

• Border Security Bill
• Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Votes have been added to existing policies for:

• LGBT+ rights
• Minimum Detention Requirements
• EU Standards Alignment (this policy is not public yet – awaiting a review for previous relevant votes)

New policies have been created for:

• Increasing local council power over bus services
• Preventing sentencing guidelines requiring offender background reports based on race, religion, culture, or similar traits.
• Creating a new regulator for English Football
• Proscribing Palestine Action, Maniacs Murder Cult, and Russian Imperial Movement as terrorist group

Draft policies for:

• English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill
• Sentencing Bill

Have been created and will be added in the next update after the third stage (approval) vote. 

If your MP voted in any of the divisions feeding into these policies, you’ll see them on their TheyWorkForYou page in the ‘Voting summaries’ tab.

Notes

Annotations and free votes

One of the things we want to do with TheyWorkForYou Votes is gather public statements MPs make about their votes and make this accessible through TheyWorkForYou. 

We’ve completed work to flag when we’ve gathered some statements associated with a policy line, and are testing this with a few statements on the Assisted Dying Bill third reading (the annotations column in the table at the bottom). These are flagged on the MP in question’s summary page. Our next step here will be to crowdsource more statements that were made around this specific vote. 

We are also starting to experiment with recording some votes as free votes and flagging these in in the summary page. This is step one towards gathering and displaying whipping information. Currently we have only included a few votes from the current Parliament to refine the approach. 

Bus powers

When adding new policies we check whether there were any obvious votes in the last decade that should also be included. 

For a new policy around ‘increasing local council power over bus services’, we have added a retrospective scoring agreement for the 2017 Bus Services Act (which was passed without a vote, with explicit cross-party approval in the debate). 

Minimum detention requirements

Here we have adjusted the description of the policy to:

voted for/against reducing (for some kinds of offenders) the minimum detention requirement before release to *reduce pressure on prison capacity*[last bit added]

The original was framed more generally in a way that could have worked as an all-time policy description, this now includes the justification used across these votes currently covered for the change. 

Palestine Action proscription

We’ve created a new one-vote policy line for voting for/against ‘proscribing Palestine Action, Maniacs Murder Cult, and Russian Imperial Movement as terrorist groups’.

This vote passed a noteworthiness criterion for a single vote policy through not only for the continuing impact (leading to hundreds of arrests for supporting the now proscribed group), but the initial circumstances of the vote.

This was the first vote to be held on proscription of a group under the Terrorism Act, with all previous examples having been taken by unanimous agreement. While there were few votes against (which will show as a difference from the party for Labour MPs), there were also a large number of absences and some conscious abstentions from Liberal Democrat MPs (who voted both for and against, which we convert to an ‘abstain’). 

As part of our 2024 scoring changes, absences and abstentions are treated differently. MPs who abstained are recorded as voting, and will have a line for this policy. MPs who were absent will not be given a policy line for this policy (and this isn’t shown as a significant difference from the party).

LGBT+ Rights

As part of this update we’ve renamed the ‘Gay rights’ policy to ‘LGBT+ rights’. In substance this change better describes votes already included in the policy, as relevant votes have generally covered multiple groups (and this fulfils our uniqueness and cohesion criteria better than a new policy line). This wider framing provides a sharper lens on already included votes. For instance, in an already included 2024 vote on a conversion therapy ban, while the kind of conversion therapy being discussed covered multiple LGBT groups, in practice the opposition to a ban in the debate followed from opposition to trans conversion therapy specifically.

This shift lets us capture votes that represent attempts to restrict or expand the rights and status of trans people independently of other groups. In this specific case, an amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill around the definition of sex data, requiring sex at birth to be recorded in official contexts (far beyond settings where it is is practically relevant).

As part of this, we have reviewed if any previous votes should be added to an expanded definition, finding two relevant decisions that would have been appropriate under the original definition. The approval of 2019 guidance around inclusive relationship and sex education has been added as a scoring vote, and the inclusion in the census of separate questions around sexual orientation and gender identity has been added as an informative non-scoring agreement. 

Launch event

This Thursday we’ll be hosting a webinar to talk through a range of recent changes to the MP profile pages and email alerts. We’ll also share more information on our mailing list over the next few weeks. Sign up here and make sure you have ‘Democracy and Parliaments’ checked as an interest if you’d like to receive these emails.

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.

Come to our event

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.