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.

 

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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!

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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.

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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).

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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. 

If you’ve ever wondered what your MP is interested in outside of their party alignment, a good place to look is All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs). These groups bring MPs and Peers from different parties together around shared policy interests. 

There’s a real range of causes, of size, and of activity. The groups don’t have formal powers, but they can be influential spaces for discussion and collaboration. This also makes them key sites for lobbying, and for money to enter Parliament. For all of these reasons, as part of our WhoFundsThem work looking into MPs’ financial interests, we’ve been digging deeper into APPGs. 

Alongside our regular output that makes it easier to compare each APPG register to the previous one, there’s now a big new update on TheyWorkForYou allowing you to browse your MP’s memberships for the first time.

Getting the lists

There is no central list of memberships of APPGs. The official Parliament register lists the four officers of each group, but not the wider membership list (each group must have at least 20 members to be constituted). Some APPGs have websites where they publish these lists, but others don’t have public membership lists at all.

Two things have changed in the last few years that made it practically possible to put together a (mostly) comprehensive membership list. 

The big one is that the rules changed so that APPGs need to either publish a membership list on their website or provide it on request. 

The second is that LLM technologies have made more flexible scrapers viable, meaning we can more easily extract membership lists published in lots of different forms on lots of different websites. 

We’ll write up the scraper in a technical blog post,  but by scraping the available websites and requesting the membership lists from the remaining groups, we’ve brought all of this information into one place. 

Theory vs practice

From our previous experiment asking APPGs for information, we knew there was a big gap between the rules that technically everyone has signed off on, and what APPG secretariats understood in practice. This is part of a wider problem where Parliament in principle has rules that in practice are just not strongly enforced. 

For this round we have done the minimal possible request: just asking for membership lists, rather than the wider range of documents we had published previously, and only when both our automated process and volunteers couldn’t find one. Despite this being a relatively clear rule, 94/236 groups didn’t respond to our request for a membership list. 

We also encountered a few groups who did not want to disclose full membership lists for security reasons due to the topic of their group being sensitive, while others were concerned that publishing names could lead to MPs being flooded with unhelpful lobbying. 

We’re sensitive to security concerns and don’t want to strongly argue the point given the small number affected (compared to the much larger number who just didn’t reply), but also there is currently no exemption in the APPG rules for security reasons. If Parliament wants this to be the case, the rules need to be updated to specify the conditions for this exemption from wider transparency.

We will be writing to the Parliamentary Commissioner to report this reasonably high level of non-compliance with transparency requirements of the APPG rules. 

What we discovered

Using the scraper, supported by volunteers’ work, we found memberships for 205 groups online. 

We contacted the remaining groups by email to ask for their membership lists. 140 gave us their membership information, two were in touch but declined to give their lists, and 94 did not respond.

Of the groups we have data for, we found:

• 615 MPs (94%) belong to at least one APPG. Only 35 MPs don’t take part in any at all. This list largely maps onto government ministers, who are not permitted to be a member of an APPG.
• On average, MPs are members of around 10 APPGs.
• Half of MPs are in at least 8 groups, and some are far more active: one MP is listed as belonging to 63 APPGs.

You can view and download the full dataset. 

We also discovered some interesting features about APPGs’ wider memberships  — and that the definition of membership varies between groups. The Guide to Rules states “A member is one who has asked to be on the group’s Membership List” but interpretations of this varied quite extensively. This was especially true about “non-parliamentary membership” (people and organisations affiliated with the APPG, who can be charged for memberships).  Some groups noted that this would include mailing lists with hundreds of individuals so would not share them, while others sent lists of ‘donors’, not all of whom were previously public as they did not meet Parliament’s £1,500 declaration threshold. 

Why it matters

APPG memberships can show what issues MPs care about, and where they might be working across party lines. This matters because of transparency; it’s useful for constituents to know where their MP is spending time and building networks, but also for relationship-building. We think this information can be key to foster common ground both between MPs themselves and between MPs and constituents. 

Explore for yourself

Find your MP’s page on TheyWorkForYou.com or to see their APPG memberships or download the whole dataset. You can also browse this data on the Local Intelligence Hub. Over time, we will make this available on a page per APPG. 

While you’re there, you may spot a few more new features. Join Alex and I on Thursday 23 October for a chatty catch-up on new features, plans for the site, and our vision of a more open Parliament. 

Note: If you are an MP, or on their staff, and our entry is either missing or has incorrect information, you can report issues on this form. 

Photo by Jani Kaasinen on Unsplash

This year, we’ve been working with the End Violence Against Women coalition (EVAW).

We wanted to see whether we could replicate a successful model that we’ve already established in our work with The Climate Coalition, building the Local Intelligence Hub – we had an idea that the same approach could benefit coalitions of other types, and this was a chance to put that to the test with EVAW’s network of 160+ service delivery, campaigning, and advocacy organisations.

EVAW very kindly invited us into their office last Spring, where we showed them how mySociety’s tools (including WhatDoTheyKnow and TheyWorkForYou, as well as the Local Intelligence Hub) are already being used by citizens, campaigners and activists to engage with elected decision-makers. We then had a chance to talk about how EVAW and their members use—and could use—data as part of their work.

On a personal level, after having been steeped in the climate and nature sector over the last few years, it was fascinating to see how different the data landscape is in the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) sector.

A lack of data in the VAWG sector

For example, it looks like sensitivity around personal data and the safety of individuals accessing support services is having a knock-on effect on what data is publicly available. To an outside analyst trying to get a top-level picture, it’s hard to see what’s happening on VAWG at a local level.

Protecting the safety of victims and service users is obviously paramount. But these laudable protections seem to extend into a broader, less necessary ringfencing, with little transparency about spending on VAWG and the provision of services, for example.

This creates a challenge not only for the campaigners and services looking to tell a local story to bring about more commitments to addressing VAWG, but also the public bodies trying to monitor and tackle VAWG across the country.

We’re interested to see how a website modelled on our Local Intelligence Hub could help here, by bringing together safe, already public data, into a single place, so that it can inform more constructive conversations with and between public bodies.

This work is also timely given that the government has committed to halve VAWG in a decade, with only limited information about how it intends to measure its progress.

Sharing data already collected by authorities

Another approach we’ve taken to this deficit of data is by using Freedom of Information (FOI). Everyone in the UK has a right to request information held by any government or public body, and over our many years of running the FOI website WhatDoTheyKnow, we’ve seen lots of examples of how people have used this right to highlight and campaign around all sorts of social causes in the UK – from contaminated blood, to modern slavery, to disability rights.

This Summer, with EVAW, we’ve been investigating how we could use FOI to open up better data on the handling of safeguarding concerns in schools.

EVAW research has shown that schools are a critical site for tackling violence against young people, and especially girls. And yet much of the data that would help them track the scale of VAWG in schools is either collected by schools or local authorities but not then published, or published but in subtly incompatible ways between the four separate countries of the UK.

And so we’ve used WhatDoTheyKnow Pro’s batch and projects features to send FOI requests to every local authority in the UK.

We’ve asked how many safeguarding referrals they receive from the schools they manage. While we’re still processing the responses, the disparity of data (and data unavailability) between different authorities in different areas is eye-opening. Not to mention the variety of formats we’ve received data in – plain text, PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, CSVs… it’ll be fun extracting data out of them all!

Our aim is that, through experiments like this, we can build a replicable pipeline to feed more data from public authorities’ internal records, through FOI requests, into a tool modelled on the Local Intelligence Hub, for activists, VAWG services, elected representatives, and the wider public to benefit from.

Header image: Jess Phillips, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, attends the Women’s Aid 50th anniversary conference in 2024. Photo by Andy Taylor – Home Office, CC BY 2.0.

mySociety was founded on one seismic technological change: the arrival of the internet, bringing radical new possibilities to the ways in which we engage with democracy.

Now we’re seeing a second upheaval, just as potentially explosive: the wide adoption of generative AI and machine learning tools — particular kinds of artificial intelligence — not least by the UK government, who have made a commitment to see AI “mainlined into the veins of the nation”. 

From the visible and novel, like ‘AI bot’ MPs; to the hidden and less-interrogated, like the algorithms that drive decision-making around benefits; to the new capabilities around working with large text datasets that we ourselves are experimenting with at mySociety: artificial intelligence is changing the way democracy works. 

We’ve been thinking about AI for some time, as have our colleagues around the world — TICTeC 2025 had a strong strand of pro-democracy organisations showcasing how they are using new technologies to hold authorities to account and support public engagement; alongside developers showing the tools that aim to make the government more responsive. 

AI is coming to democracy, whether we like it or not. In many places, it’s already here.

But there are implementations in which it can be highly beneficial to us all; and ways in which it can present a clear and present danger to democracy. 

It benefits everyone if there is a high level of understanding of both the challenges and the opportunities of AI in government. Democratic decision makers need to understand digital tech in order to legislate effectively around it, to develop and procure it effectively.

This is not just so that they can deliver services more efficiently, but also to ensure that they retain the legitimacy of democratic government by using tech and AI in a way that ensures transparency and accountability, preserves public trust and allows the public to understand and participate in the decisions that affect their lives. 

Reflections for our time

Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing our own thoughts and experience — alongside invited guest writers who are thinking about how AI interacts with democratic processes and institutions, and how to make that better — in a series of short pieces.

These will examine the different ways that AI is affecting the things we care about here at mySociety: 

• Transparent, informed, responsive democratic institutions 
• Politicians and public servants who work for the public interest 
• Democratic equality for citizens: equal access to information, representation and voice
• A flourishing civil society ecosystem
• The effective and principled use of digital technologies
• Action from politicians to match the evidence of the climate crisis and the level of public concern 
• Better communication between politicians and the public, creating space for climate action. 

Stay informed

If you’d like to get updates in your inbox, make sure you’ve checked ‘artificial intelligence’ as an interest on our newsletter sign-up form (if you already receive our newsletters, don’t worry – so long as you use the same email address, this will just update your preferences. Just make sure you’ve ticked everything you’re interested in).

By also completing the ‘how do you identify yourself’ section, you’ll help us send you the most relevant material: that means guidance if you work in government or build tech; data and our analysis if you’re a researcher; tools for holding authorities to account if you are an individual or work in civil society, and so on.

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Image: Adi Goldstein