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

The Council Climate Action Scorecards are helping climate officers across the UK to understand which elements of their path to Net Zero are working well, and which areas need improvement.

Marina Ebbage, Procurement Policy Officer at Norfolk County Council, explained the many ways in which Scorecards have helped the authority’s Climate Hub team in their work. She began by explaining how the council came to understand that a council taking climate action is one thing; while communicating that action is something else.

“We first came across the Scorecards following Climate Emergency UK’s assessment in 2021, and through the subsequent publicity which usefully highlighted the areas of work where our actions were not publicly communicated”, says Marina.  

“We’ve found the independent and external assessment of our council’s climate action not only allows us to systematically mark our progress in tackling climate change, but helps us to maintain and strengthen our accountability to the public. 

“The Scorecards have helped us strive for greater transparency and accessibility in our climate action efforts. Following that initial assessment, we realised that a lot of information about the work we were doing was not readily available to the public – hence our initial low score. 

“A key example is our Climate Action Plan, which draws all the information we are doing together on climate-related work and is now publicly available in one place on a dedicated part of the council’s website. Previously, information was in committee papers which are publicly available but often not easy to find, or knowledge was internal rather than shared publicly.

“Since then, we’ve brought together this information and evidence on the council website, making it available and accessible to Norfolk’s citizens and businesses, and indeed more widely.” 

The benefits go more widely than communication, though — they resonate through many aspects of the council’s work, as Marina explains: “We’ve found the Scorecards valuable as a way to check the comprehensiveness of our Action Plan, ensuring that we’re taking a well-rounded approach to addressing climate change. 

“At a senior management level, the Scorecards provide an overarching view of our climate action and comparative performance, which our Climate Board has integrated into its review process, using them to assess our actions and identify areas for improvement.”  

Talking of comparative performance, Marina adds, “We benchmark our performance against other councils. This comparison helps us identify areas where we need to improve and informs discussions with other councils on what further actions we can take.” 

And the bottom line? “Ultimately, the Scorecards have provided a useful means to review and benchmark our climate actions and provided a stimulus to improve the way we communicate what we do to the public.” 

That’s great to hear — and as we near the publication of the 2025 Scorecards, we were gratified to learn that Norfolk see their use into the future: “We plan to continue using the Scorecards as a monitoring tool, ensuring that our climate action remains ambitious, transparent, and effective.”

Thanks very much to Marina for sharing Norfolk County Council’s experience with the Scorecards, which are a joint project between Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.

 

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Image: Nathan Nelson

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

TheyWorkForYou has also joined Bluesky – so follow us there!

Come to the launch of TheyWorkForYou Votes

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

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

Crowdsource APPG information

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

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

Crowdsource MPs’ views on the Assisted Dying vote 

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

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

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

Follow us on Bluesky

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

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

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

Donate

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

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

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

Header image: Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

We’ve built a tool that helps us release a lot more useful information about All Party Parliamentary Groups, but we need humans to help us with membership lists. 

The new stuff

For each new APPG register (which are released approximately every six weeks), we now produce lists of new APPGs, removed APPGs and updated APPGs.

• New and removed APPGs

In the latest edition of the register (published 7 May) there were 32 new APPGs added, including Wine of Great Britain, Snooker and Hadrian’s Wall! In this edition, no APPGs were removed. 

That means the total number of APPGs now stands at 482, which is roughly the same as this time last year (535 in 13 May 2024 register). However, the total remains significantly lower than the 722 figure from March 2024 (the final register before new rules were introduced).

• Changes to APPG web pages

One of the tricky things about keeping track of APPGs is spotting what has changed. Who received money, which secretariats have new staff, which officers have resigned or changed? Our new tool does that for you. Here’s what we found when we compared the newest edition with the previous one:

• Several APPGs have lost an officer leaving them with only three officers, one short of the number required, according to the rules. In the case of the Pro-Life and the SME Housebuilders groups, this has also left the groups in breach of the requirement to have an officer from both the Government and Opposition parties. 
• Some groups have new organisations acting as their secretariats, whilst others have had changes to the people who are the public enquiry point at their secretariat. Devo Agency now provides secretariat services to four groups- Liverpool City Region, North East, Greater Manchester and Northern Culture. 
• Income: More than £70,000 of new financial benefits have been declared in this register, including £20,000 to the Engineering Group and £35,000 to the Environment Group.

As with the Register of Members’ Financial Interests part of this project, we’re coming up against two big problems: bad data and Parliament not enforcing its own rules. First we want complete datasets, but then we’re going to report our findings on the quality of this data. 

Over to you: help us with membership lists

Arguably the most important question about an APPG is: who’s in it? APPG membership lists help constituents and campaigners to understand which policy areas MPs are interested in, and they make it clearer who is benefitting from the resources given to groups as a whole. However, membership lists are not routinely made available.

The APPG pages on the Parliament site list the four officers, but not the wider membership. For a group to be established, it must have at least 20 members – so there’s at least 16 names we’re missing per group.

By the new rules, we should be able to ask for this information. But if groups publish their membership lists on their website, they don’t need to respond to our requests. If they don’t have a website or don’t publish their membership lists, then they do have to tell us.

So we need to a) find all the APPG websites, and b) see if they publish members lists before we can then C) ask the ones without published lists to send them to us.

Alex has built a tool which has got us most of the way there, but we need human brains to check.

We want to find out:

1. Are there websites we haven’t found?
2. Are there membership lists we haven’t found?

Right – over to you!

1. Open up the spreadsheet.
2. Choose a group, then click the link in column D (google_link), which sends you to a Google search result for the name of that group. We’re looking for independent websites run by the APPGs, not the listing on the Parliament page and not the listing on parallelparliament.co.uk.
3. If there is a website for that group, paste the URL of the website into column E (appg_website). For some groups we have found the website already, but we need you to do the next steps. 
4. If there’s no APPG website, please enter NONE for column E and column F (appg_members_page).
5. If there is an APPG website, the next thing we’re looking for is a membership list. If you can find one, enter the URL into column F. If you can’t find any membership info, enter NONE.
6. When you’ve finished, put ‘done’ in column G (review_status) and your initials in column I (reviewer_initials)

Thanks so much – this really does make a difference! No time but still want to help? Please consider donating so we can do more of this work. 

Photo by Frank on Unsplash

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

It’s launching on Monday 19th May, and we’re running an event where you can learn all about it. 

Votes in the UK’s Parliaments determine the laws that we all live by, and we want the information about who voted for what to be as accurate, easy to use and easy to understand as possible.

Whether you’re a data whizz who wants to get into the details, or a citizen who wants to know whether your MP has been paying attention to your emails, we think this new service will be helpful to you. Thanks to TheyWorkForYou Votes, we’ve been able to make improvements to our own websites (like TheyWorkForYou and the Local Intelligence Hub), and also, true to our open source principles, we’re making more data available in more formats that you can use and re-use for your own clever tools! 

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

Register on Eventbrite now to hear from:

• Louise Crow, mySociety’s Chief Exec 
• Dr Ben Worthy, Birkbeck University
• Alex Parsons & Julia Cushion, mySociety’s democracy team

See you in a couple of weeks!

 

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Image: UK Parliament (CC BY 2.0)

Here is our monthly round-up of news from the transparency organisations in the ATI Network. This month, we have updates from Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Croatia, Hungary, Greece, South Africa and Latin America. What a global hum of transparency activity!

Access Info Europe have brought a joint legal challenge against the European Commission’s new internal access to documents rules, arguing that they violate the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), and Regulation 1049/2001. More here.

SPOON in the Netherlands have gained two new members of staff, saying, “These new shining stars are not full-time, but definitely promising. We’re really happy with this addition and feel like we’ve gained a superpower!”

Additionally, they completed a major piece of research this month, investigating eight recurring assumptions in the debate around FOI in the Netherlands. It was the first time someone took the time to actually look at the facts. “And what did we find? None of them are true.”

The results of this research were presented just two days later in a parliamentary debate about the Woo, the Dutch FOIA. Hopefully, this will help counter the looming restrictions on the right to transparency in the Netherlands.

SPOON also advised three journalists on how to hold to account the Minister of Agriculture, who unceremoniously intervened by phone during a court hearing. This case, including the intervention, is now with the judge.

Finally, they helped a local media outlet in Amsterdam with their objection to a FOI decision, with the result that instead of nothing being released, nearly everything became public. Great result!

Sieć Obywatelska Watchdog Polska (SOWP) continued their intensive activities promoting transparency and protecting civic activism.

Together with Article 19, the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, and the Polish Federation of NGOs, SOWP launched the anti-slapp.pl platform, which gathers comprehensive information about Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs).

This website offers access to legal analyses, reform recommendations, educational resources, and media coverage, thereby supporting journalists and activists in countering these threats.

SOWP also became heavily involved in the debate concerning the central register of public sector contracts. Their research across hundreds of local governments revealed that the Ministry of Finance’s proposed changes, raising the contract publication threshold from PLN 500 to PLN 10,000, would result in over 70% of contracts being undisclosed, undermining the effectiveness of the register.

They also re-ran their course “Hope(lessness) of Small and Large Municipalities,” enrolling 60 participants from across Poland, including councilors, local activists, village leaders, and public officials from 12 voivodeships. Over three months, participants will gain practical knowledge on civic oversight tools and local government operations.

Finally, SOWP also released two valuable podcast episodes this month: one addressing SLAPPs and another dedicated to successful actions aimed at protecting forests and local natural environments.

Handlingar, in Sweden, continue to apply for project funding and also looking into applying to be a part of incubators and accelerators. They want to focus efforts on getting Alaveteli much more well documented and easy to run and maintain and especially for the Pro features that can fund the public benefit free version of Alaveteli platforms. They’re looking to collaborate with all platforms and organisations in the FOIA networks! Get in touch at handlingar@okfn.se! 🙂

ImamoPravoZnati attended GONG’s annual Open Data Day conference on March 6 and 7. The event gathered institutional stakeholders, civil society organisations and data enthusiasts in a series of discussions and workshops, including one on digital tools for active citizens, where they presented their Alaveteli site Imamopravoznati.org.

KiMitTud, the Hungarian Alaveteli site, report: “In 2022, following an announcement, that the state had purchased N.S. Média és Vagyonkezelő Kft., the company that publishes the leading Hungarian sport newspaper (Nemzeti Sport), and designated a state-owned company as the entity responsible for exercising state ownership rights, Átlátszó submitted a Freedom of Information request for the contract related to the purchase of the Prime Minister’s favourite newspaper’s publishing company, but to no avail.

“They refused to release the document, claiming it was a trade secret.

“Since no such exemption applies to public funds and publicly relevant data, we took the matter to court. After more than two years of legal battles, we received the 33-page contract. The document revealed that the state had paid 3,479,756,000 forints in public funds for the publisher of Nemzeti Sport.” Read all about it here.

They continue, “Another court win from February, and quite an important one, as the court ruled in favour of the public in our case against a state railway company that hid its contract. The state railway’s maintenance subsidiary tried to withhold a 900 million HUF contract on the grounds that it “contains personal data that is subject to limited disclosure for GDPR purposes, as well as business secrets”. The court ruled, however, that as the company was managing public property and was therefore obliged to hand over the document to Átlátszó.” Read this story here.

Vouliwatch/Arthro5A The Greek organisation submitted two FOI requests this month. The first requested the publication of the members of the Ministerial Cabinet’s 2024 gift registry of (last May, following a successful appeal, VouliWatch had managed to get them to publish the registry for 2023).

The second requested information related to political parties and candidates’ finances from the Parliament’s audit committee, that is update on loans of each political party, election expenses of candidates and political parties, etc. The information in question, according to the law, should have been made public proactively.

Abrimos Info report that Mexico’s National Institute of Transparency for Access to Information and Personal Data Protection, INAI, is finally set to disappear this month, as secondary laws have already been approved.

Abrimos Info has secured a small rapid response grant to make a quick backup of parts of the national transparency platform, and continue to check on whether the data remains consistent after the switch.

They will be participating in the International Journalism Festival in Perugia in April, and participated in the OpenDataDay in México City. You can see a report on this here.

OpenUp ZA South African organisation OpenUp participated in the Africa & Middle East Open Government Partnership Regional Summit. “It was a lovely reconnection between our team and the stalwarts of the African FOI community in organisational partners like the Africa Freedom Of Information Centre, Uganda and the Media Rights Agenda, Nigeria”, they say.

mySociety: And finally, here at mySociety we have been working hard preparing for our TICTeC conference, after the whirlwind of the USA funding freezes – don’t forget to get your tickets!

We’ve also been drafting guidance around exceptions to the FOI act to support users from marginalised groups, and providing advice and support to two cohorts of people who are getting ready to submit their first requests.

 

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Image: Filip Mishevski

These are notes from a recent ‘fireside chat’ held by the ATI Network. For the sake of frank conversation and knowledge exchange, the session was not recorded, but you can read on for the main points.

Laurent and Xavier from the French Alaveteli site MaDada were talking about their learning process from working with Access Info on legal reform of FOI laws in France, as detailed in this post. This is part of the ATI Network project we’re working on across Europe to strengthen ties and skills between European Access to Information platforms.

The work began almost three years ago, when Rachel Hanna, Director of Access Info, and Helen Darbishire, the former Director, mapped all the FOI laws across Europe and organised them with high level recommendations and categorisation against an “ideal” law. From there, Access Info identified four different countries to work in depth with over the lifetime of the project to try and influence changes to laws or steps forward in campaigning.

France, with MaDada as its subject, was one of the countries identified, and there were a number of reasons for this which Laurent explained when we met: “The French context is difficult. The law is old, they tried to do some updating between 2016- 2018 with the internet in mind, but other than that it’s not changed since 1978.” However, one thing that has gained consensus from all politicians and lawmakers is that there is “constitutional value” to FOI in France, which is positive.

Laurent explained how Access Info dissected the law and broke it down into really distinct parts, separating which worked and which didn’t: “It was an interesting thing to see it dissected from the outside and get that perspective.”

They already knew that the law wasn’t a strong one, but viewing it through the eyes of people who work on improving these things really brought home how much work there is to do. For example, France did not sign the Tromso convention, despite being one of the key negotiators of the convention!

The law itself was revealed to be quite partial — there are a large amount of exclusions which are absolute, and no balance of interest is considered for release of information (like the public interest tests we have in the UK, etc). This is backwards compared to most of Europe. They do have an oversight body called the CADA, but apparently that body is weak both in resource and power.

Then, when it comes to implementation, this is even weaker than the law itself. And to compound this, barely anyone knows about the existence of the law either.

So, looking at Access Info’s three tenets of advocacy, lobbying and activism, MaDada set about defining what would be possible for them to work on.

Quickly, they realised that lobbying would be challenging. Right now France is in some political turmoil due to the dissolution of the parliament and subsequent failure of governments — they’re expecting another vote later this year, and this instability really puts a blocker in the way of discussing legal reform with politicians and getting legal change pushed through.

For the activism side of things, you need the movement behind you, and if not many people are aware of the law it’s hard to get together to campaign for this.

So advocacy was the route MaDada chose: promoting the law and increasing access. They had a slight chicken and egg issue with it. They desperately needed to find allies, but to find them, they needed to talk about FOI, and sell the law, which is tough when the implementation is so broken. They started down the training route and completed training with journalists which was positive, but also brought the realisation that this is a long-term endeavour.

They also tried publishing a report — which was met with silence. It’s disappointing but for the team it also felt expected, so they’re looking at the easy low hanging fruit for their next steps.

They came into this process with quite high expectations. They wanted to change something, propose new legislation or make a visible immediate difference, but actually going through the process they have realised that this is a long journey and they’ve taken the first step in a series of continuous action. Now their goal is to look back years from now and say “in 2025 we said this, and look at us now”. The first battle was won in 1789, with the drafting of the constitution, and it’s taken 200 years for it to become law, so MaDada have got to take a long view and set milestones which they can achieve and look back at and say how they’ve got there.

What are the key takeaways from working with Access Info?

A long view is needed, the law will never be “perfect” and will never get there immediately but small milestones and steps are the way to go. Also, you can really break this down and organise it like an engineering problem.

The transnational view was so helpful: they hadn’t realised how much it would be, but it’s good to have the feeling of “we’re in this together”. Finally, they made a list of what documents you can actually request in France and even they were surprised by how many it was!

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Image: Mathias Reding

If you’ve been holding off from booking your place at TICTeC until the full schedule is announced, this is your sign to act!

You can now see all the sessions, together with info on who’ll be presenting and what they’ll be talking about on the TICTeC 2025 page.

We’ve already introduced our amazing keynotes, Fernanda Campagnucci and Marietje Schaake. Now you can enjoy looking through the rest of the two days’ offerings, with a global spread of speakers from US, Nigeria, Hungary, Germany, Lithuania, Thailand and many, many more, representing organisations including  MIT GOV/LAB; Global Data Barometer, OpenUp South Africa, Manchester City Council, Delib, Code for Pakistan, Polis, Mzalendo Trust, Google, Tainan Sprout… and lots more.

Responding to our theme of pro-democracy technology, sessions cover topics as diverse as: tech for better elections; AI-powered deliberation; tracking climate finance to curb corruption; measuring the impact of Access to Information, and much, much more.

The world is going through ‘interesting times’ just now. TICTeC is all the more important in the face of these multiple threats, as we get together, forge new alliances and learn from one another. We’ll return home stronger, with new knowledge about the myriad ways in which civic tech can help us to preserve and further democracy.

Book your tickets for TICTeC 2025 now.

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

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

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

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

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

What’s new

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

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

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

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

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

Register-wide view, showing what’s new

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

Devolved register of interests spreadsheets

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

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

Ministers’ gifts and hospitality

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

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

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

This work fixes a flaw identified by Transparency International: 

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

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

Learn how to use our data

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

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

Help us go further

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

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

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

The Council Climate Action Scorecards were recently mentioned in East Sussex County Council’s Written Questions (see question 12, on the council’s score for mitigation and adaptation). When we spot that the Scorecards are helping to inform councils’ conversations like this, we often make contact to find out more.

East Sussex were happy to fill us in with more details of how the Scorecards have helped them, and how they’ve been able to feed into the process with their own experiences:

“For local authorities, climate change is an evolving area of work with few statutory responsibilities. As a result, we can struggle to see what ‘good’ looks like, both for individual areas of work and holistically across the council. We’ve therefore found the Climate Action Scorecards useful to help identify areas where we’re doing well and those where we may need to pay more attention. The results of the Scorecards have been briefed to senior officers and elected members.

“Officers have also used the Scorecards as a research tool. When we review an area of work (or our Climate Emergency Strategy as a whole), one of the first questions we ask is what other local authorities are doing. The Scorecards provide an easy way to identify leaders in particular fields for further investigation.

“Finally, the marking process behind the Scorecards has encouraged us to look at our website and the information it provides on our climate change work. As a result, we’ve made changes to place important information front and centre and make the climate change pages easier to navigate.

“Climate Emergency UK have taken an inclusive approach to the Scorecards, and we’ve appreciated the opportunity to attend briefings and feedback on scoring through the right to reply. Through this, we’ve explained some of the issues faced by largely rural authorities such as East Sussex, for example in areas such as public transport.

“We’re pleased to see some of that feedback taken onboard in the latest round of scoring. We hope the CE UK will continue to evolve the scoring criteria to make the exercise even more useful for both local authorities and the public we serve.”

Thanks very much to East Sussex for giving us the view from a County Council. Scorecards are a joint project between Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.

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Image: Neil Mark Thomas