The Council Climate Action Scorecards project, which assesses local councils on their climate action, is only possible thanks to a large number of people who give up their time to volunteer. Their job is to source and analyse data from a variety of places, analysing more than 40 different possible pieces of climate action that councils should be taking on their path to Net Zero. 

It’s very worthwhile work, and the project has tangible results (just see our previous case studies) — which is obviously a great motivator for volunteers to get involved. But going through the process of training, and then the actual marking, has other benefits too: it adds to their knowledge, giving them a new, comprehensive overview of the climate sector and its many component parts.

We spoke to Scarlette, who volunteered as part of the 2025 cohort. Scarlette told us how she got involved, and how it took her down a new avenue.

“I’d been looking for a job in the environment sector following my Masters,” explains Scarlette, “and since this had been a long and slow process, I decided to look for volunteer opportunities to do alongside my temporary job. 

“I came across the advert for the Scorecards and felt it really aligned with my interests, particularly in the area of transport.”

While helping to assess councils’ action on transport, Scarlette came across a novel concept. Question 2.3 in the Scorecards asks “Does the council have enforced school streets across its area?”, with points awarded to councils with more than ten such streets year round, and bonus marks available for those with more than 30.

A school street is a road outside a school that is effectively closed to motorised traffic at drop-off and pick-up times. As the School Streets website notes, such schemes help tackle air pollution and road danger, encourage a healthier lifestyle and active travel to school for families, and lead to a better environment for everyone.

Once Scarlette found out about them, she was keen to get involved:

“I started volunteering as a School Street Marshal at a local school for a six month trial period. Prior to volunteering on the Scorecards I had never heard of the School Street initiative, and certainly wasn’t aware of any near me. The Scorecards led me to seek out this new role, and has encouraged me to get involved further with local campaigns.

“Volunteering with the Scorecards and the School Streets initiative has further cemented my passion for working in the environmental sector. I’ve been able to build on my academic knowledge within environmental law and have had the opportunity to gain more experience working in my local community with an environmental charity. I continue to look for further volunteering opportunities elsewhere to build on these experiences.”

We’re really glad to hear this, and wish Scarlette all the best in finding a permanent role in the environment sector: it certainly sounds like she’s acquiring some really relevant experience.

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

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Image: Hammersmith and Fulham Council (CC by-nc-nd/2.0)

Our front-end designer Lucas Cumsille Montesinos highlights some of the work he’s been doing recently to make FixMyStreet and all integrated co-branded versions of the service running on FixMyStreet Pro more accessible – a crosspost from the SocietyWorks blog.

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Over the past year we have been collaborating with users of FixMyStreet and FixMyStreet Pro to enhance the solution’s accessibility, making improvements to the user experience for people using assistive devices. 

One of our clients, Transport for London (TfL), shared an accessibility audit of their installation of FixMyStreet Pro with us. The document listed issues detailing information regarding the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and some improvements that could be applied.

Here are some of the points they shared with us:

• Description of the issue.
• Level success criteria using the WCAG standard: Level A (lowest), AA, and AAA (highest).
• A link to the page and location of the component where the issue can be found, along with instructions for replicating the problem if necessary.
• Status of the issue: Pass, Pass with comments, N/A, Fail.
• They also provided recommendations made by the auditor.

What improvements did we make?

The report from TfL allowed us to work on different areas of improvement, for example:

• Meaningful Sequence: We focused on making the order in which assistive devices present the information match the order in which the page is visually presented.
• Non-text Content: We hid purely decorative elements from screen readers, reducing unnecessary clutter for users when navigating the site.
• Info and Relationships: We improved and updated the role and attributes of some HTML elements so assistive devices can better understand the context and how to use those elements.
• Focus Order: When someone is tabbing through a website (using their keyboard instead of a mouse), everything should flow naturally and make sense. It’s making sure that when you hop from one thing to the next, the order matches how you’d understand the content – no jumping around to random spots that leave you scratching your head.

What did we learn?

• Include the WCAG conformance level (from A to AAA), where level A is the minimum. Ideally, you would like the website you are working on to comply with all Level AA success criteria. Using the conformance level makes it easier for you to prioritise which issues should be tackled first and which ones can be done later.
• Some issues won’t require a lot of time to fix. This can be your second factor when it comes to prioritising which improvements to make first. For example, easy fixes like adding aria-labels or increasing the contrast between the text and the background colour can be done in little time and greatly improves the user experience of your website.
• If you find an accessibility issue, always try to provide as much detail as possible, especially if someone else will be doing the work to fix it. The TfL document made solving the issues much faster and minimised any back-and-forth. Even sharing which browser you were using when experiencing the error can make a difference.
• One of the most interesting experiences was solving issues that didn’t seem like an issue (at the time), but once you deprive yourself of literally looking at the screen and using an assistive device, then the problem starts making sense. For example, the action of a button can make sense when you are looking at the screen and the elements that are surrounding it, but if you can’t see the context, the elements around the button, then the button might not make much sense. Adding further instructions like an aria-label that provide the context that the eyes are missing can help users understand where they are and what they can do much better.
• Finally, it is a great exercise to be more conscious when designing a website. Yes, a certain text, link, or button colour can look great, but can it be read easily? What about colourblind users? You can install plugins in your browser to help you see the page the way they would see it.

Our accessibility improvements were rolled out to the national FixMyStreet site and all co-branded FixMyStreet Pro sites. However it is worth noting that FixMyStreet Pro is designed to accommodate the branding and styling of each authority that uses it, which can mean that some of our accessible default settings are overridden. This is why we always recommend that authorities carry out an accessibility audit on their own services.

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Thanks for sharing, Lucas!

Read more about how we design accessible digital services, or browse more posts from the SocietyWorks team.

Last year we undertook a major overhaul of our approach to the voting record summaries on TheyWorkForYou. This was aimed at creating a sharper and clearer throughline to the summaries, supported by updated explanations of parliamentary voting.

We have just made the first update to our voting summaries of the new Parliament, with the information now covering votes up to the end of 2024.

Our goal is for these updates to be at least quarterly: this update has been delayed in part because we have been doing work on the underlying infrastructure.

In April we will launch a new votes explorer website, which is our replacement for the Public Whip website. This includes a new range of tools and analysis we’ve been using to understand votes, and is part of our general goal of creating better public information and understanding about parliamentary processes.

For more on what we’re doing over the next few months, see our list of upcoming new features — or subscribe to our mailing list to hear about updates.

You can view summaries for your MP on TheyWorkForYou.com – where you can also view registers of interest, and sign up for email alerts when your MP speaks.

What we’ve changed

We’ve added new policy lines for:

• Increasing windfall tax on oil and gas
• Increasing stamp duty
• Reducing minimum detention requirement before release from custody.
• Means-testing/removing universality on winter fuel payments for pensioners
• Creating a publicly owned energy investment company (Great British Energy)
• Employment rights
• Raising Capital Gains tax

And added votes to these existing policy lines:

• Assisted Dying
• Environmental Water Quality
• Publicly Owned Railways
• Tougher On Illegal Immigration
• An Elected House Of Lords
• Removing Hereditary Peers From The House Of Lords
• Proportional Representation When Electing MPs
• Taxes On Alcoholic Drinks

We have retired:

• Lowering Capital Gains Tax (this has been replaced by a raising Capital Gains tax, which is more consistent with our other policies around taxes).

Additional notes

Greater range of new policies

Previously we’ve had a conservative approach to adding new policies, as in doing so created a mix of old and recent votes for long-standing MPs, making their positions in the present moment harder to understand.

Our new technical approach calculates voting summaries for the current Parliament as well as an ‘all time’ calculation. Although this is not yet visible in TheyWorkForYou, we are in general adding a higher number of new policy lines in anticipation of being able to show both (we want to reflect ‘here are live issues’ but also just because a vote was a long time ago doesn’t mean it’s not still important).

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

There is an existing policy line that we have added the second reading vote to.

Because what is being voted on can be become clearer after revisions between the second reading vote and third reading vote, we prefer to include third reading votes if voting patterns are significantly different. We might sometimes include both when there’s not much difference (so we cover MPs who might be absent from either).

As a high profile vote it felt like it would be a notable absence not to include the vote as of this stage. Our expectation is that when the third reading vote happens, we may retrospectively downgrade the second reading and lead with the final vote being a clearer indication of where MPs stand at this stage.

Generally, the vote broke down mostly along party lines, but with a significant minority of Labour MPs voting against the second reading. As we class a significant difference from the party as anything more extreme than a 60/40 split (which this just was for Labour MPs), a number of MPs now have this highlighted on their voting record page as a new significant policy.

We also note that a lot of MPs made public comments about the reasons for their vote (part of a wider trend of greater visibility of votes leading to more public justification).As part of our new votes site we want to make it easier to collect and share comments that MPs make publicly about their voting.

Renters’ rights

The Renters’ Rights Act is not included in this round, as the third reading was in January 2025. The second reading passed by consent, but with a reasoned amendment beforehand. As such:

• It is inaccurate to say consent reflected cross party agreement: an attempt to stop the bill immediately preceded it.
• It would be confusing to present the only vote as the reasoned amendment.
• We are waiting for the Third Reading before including that and the reasoned amendment as scoring votes.

This will be part of the next release.

Ten minute rule bills

By focusing on votes affecting parliamentary powers, we exclude a range of votes that could never be impactful, but ten minute rule bills are in an ambiguous position.

In principle, as seen with the vote on proportional representation (which won, but possibly as an oversight), they are a vote to start the process of legislation. However, even when this vote is won, since parliamentary time is not allocated, it does not go anywhere.

Our policy for the moment is to continue to include ten minute rule bills where we have existing policy lines.

Anything we’ve missed

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

What else we’ve been working on

Last week we released a major new report and several new datasets onto TheyWorkForYou as part of our WhoFundsThem project.

We’ve been looking through the MPs Register of Financial Interests with a group of volunteers, and have published what we’ve found along with recommendations for change and what we think we can do next.

Over the next few months we’ll be making more improvements to our registers of interest, voting records, and political monitoring.

If you would like to support our work – please consider donating.

If you can’t make a donation now, you can still help by telling us what you value about our work. If you’d like to do this, please take our supporters survey.

Image: Paul Buffington on Unsplash.

Over the next few months we’re making some major updates to TheyWorkForYou improving our coverage of registers of interests, votes, and the email alerts system.

If you’d like to be updated as things are released, please sign up to our newsletter.

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What do you value about TheyWorkForYou and our democracy work?

We want to understand what you value about our work, to better shape our plans. If you’d like to help us out, please take our supporters survey.

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March

March is Register of Interests month.

At the start of the month we released a major new report and several new datasets onto TheyWorkForYou as part of our WhoFundsThem project.

We’ve been looking through the MPs Register of Financial Interests with a group of volunteers, and have published what we’ve found along with recommendations for change and what we think we can do next.

You can rewatch the launch event here.

Later in the month, we’ll be adding the Registers of Interests for the UK’s other parliaments to TheyWorkForYou and creating spreadsheet downloads.

April

April is Votes month.

We will be launching our new votes site to provide better resources on understanding parliamentary voting.

This new approach builds on the official data to provide:

• Automated party breakdown analysis and party alignment (“rebelliousness”) stats.
• Quick descriptions of parliamentary dynamics (which side proposed, strength of conflict) powered by a clustering approach.
• Links to motions that clarify what is being voted on (and power some additional analysis of motions)
• Detecting ‘agreements/consents’ when decisions are made without a vote.
• Tools to supplement official data with annotations (by division, or by MP’s vote) and recording of whip reports.

Sign up to our mailing list to hear more about when this launches.

May

May is Monitoring month.

A major use of TheyWorkForYou is as a political monitoring tool, helping civil society keep up to date with Parliament, and keeping information moving around Parliament and government itself.

We have been working on a set of changes and guidance to make it much easier to use TheyWorkForYou to monitor areas you care about, helping you set up better alerts with a wider range of keywords, and manage a wider range of alerts.

As part of this, we want to improve our coverage of APPGs — building on our earlier lessons about how best to gather information.

Sign up to our mailing list to hear more about when this launches.

June

June is TICTeC!

Our global pro democracy tech/civic tech conference will be held in Mechelen & online on June 10-11th, and we’re excited to share our work with, and learn from, fellow pro-democracy technologists and thinkers from around the world.

Full schedule to be announced soon, but our keynote speakers are:

• Marietje Schaake – former Member of the European Parliament, Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and the Institute for Human-Centered AI, columnist for the Financial Times and author of The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley – read more about what Marietje will bring to TICTeC 2025 here
• Fernanda Campagnucci – Executive Director of InternetLab, global specialist in data governance, digital transformation, and open government. Read more about Fernanda and TICTeC 2025 here.

Learn more about we mean by pro democracy tech, and buy tickets now!

 

Second half of 2025

In the second half of the year, we’ll be overhauling the WriteToThem experience, with improved guidance, and the addition of questions to help us build a better systematic picture of what’s important to people in different areas, and when writing to different kinds of representatives.

We will also be revisiting TheyWorkForYou’s annotations feature, to explore ways we can make important parliamentary debates more understandable through better glossaries, annotations and explanations, either working alone or in partnership with other organisations.

We can make a difference together

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

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

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

If you can’t make a donation now, you can still help by telling us what you value about our work. If you’d like to do this, please take our supporters survey.

Image: Matt Foxx on Unsplash.

February has been a whirlwind but we’re back deep in TICTeC organisation and looking forward to the sunny summer sun in Belgium in June. Let’s see what the network have been up to this month!

FragDenStaat: are promoting the use of FOI to counter the activities and disinformation spread by the far right movement in Germany

mySociety: have been presenting their work at various UK conferences, working on funding bids, writing documentation to support people who receive exemptions around commercial interest protection and helping organisations working with marginalised groups in the UK. 

Access Info Europe: and MaDada (OKF France) in France created recommendations on how to improve the national access to documents law to align it with international standards (see here). Open Knowledge France sent the recommendations to the French government calling for the signature and ratification of the Tromsø Convention, a step strongly recommended by GRECO in its Fifth Evaluation Report on France (see here);

SPOON: Old EU ruling, new possibilities!

 The highest court on public law in the Netherlands used on an ‘old’ European Court of Justice Fish Legal ruling from 2013 – about an information request from a British NGO to several water companies – to rule that certain kind of environmental information can be requested from (semi) private enterprises on which the state has ‘decisive influence’. This applies to environmental information that is related to ‘public responsibilities or functions concerning the environment’ or ‘public services related to the environment’ where this decisive influence exists in a way that the enterprise cannot carry out its environmental tasks ‘in a genuinely autonomous manner’.

 This could mean that, for example, water quality measurements conducted by or on behalf of water companies can be requested. Also companies such as KLM, Schiphol, Gasunie, the Port of Rotterdam, and Urenco where this kind of decisive influence exists. If the Port of Rotterdam or Schiphol checks whether ships or airplanes comply with energy efficiency and emission regulations, are they performing an environmental task? The ruling by the Council of State does not provide clear guidance on this question, but it is certainly worth a try.

Save our right to ask for government information 

On Thursday, February 13, Tim, on behalf of SPOON and investigative journalists, was asked to participate in a roundtable discussion in the House of Representatives to inform Members of Parliament about the practice of the Dutch Open Government Act. Along with other representatives from journalism he advocated for preventing any restriction on our right to ask for government information, which is what government authorities otherwise might propose as a solution to the poor implementation of the law.

Sieć Obywatelska Watchdog Polska: After nearly two years of legal battles (which, in our circumstances, is relatively fast), we have managed to compile information from all Regional Directorates of State Forests regarding their expenditures on promotion and media advertisements in 2022. After four years, two court rulings in our favor, and a change of government along the way, the Ministry of National Defense has finally responded to our request regarding the author of a certain opinion posted by the ministry’s official profile on a popular social media platform—unfortunately, the ministry does not know.

We continue our advocacy efforts to repeal Article 212 of the Penal Code, which, due to the disproportionate severity of its penalties, significantly restricts freedom of speech in Poland.

We have sent information requests to all 135 public universities in Poland regarding the holding of multiple positions by university authorities (potential conflicts of interest), purchases and vehicle usage policies, salaries of university authorities, legal proceedings, and procedures for handling complaints (such as those related to mobbing, discrimination, etc.).

Other requests aim to determine how the Ministry of Justice is implementing the European Commission’s recommendations on combating SLAPPs and what exactly is happening within the Polish Hunting Association following recent revelations of serious irregularities.

Additionally, requests have been submitted for information on recent government meetings with representatives of various international corporations (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, TikTok, Huawei, Uber) and their outcomes (e.g., the content of signed agreements).

InfoProVsechny:

Ma Dada: Our focus has been on looking for funding, as we are reaching the end of our current grant. We are trying to build bridges across borders, mostly in the EU for now, as we think it’s our best chance at doing more than just surviving.

Handlingar: We are looking into using the technical setup from Madada.fr with Ansible technology. We want to gather the Alaveteli network to develop the Alaveteli platform and make it be possible to run without simple flaws or downtime – and without dependence on MySociety or any specific supplier or developer. We believe the time has come for Alaveteli to become a well-organized open source project, including having better documentation, regular release cycles, and a 5 minute process to setup a fully functioning Alaveteli platform in a new country or jurisdiction. All according to best practices within open source software development such as the OpenSource.guide from GitHub. We want to do great work together with MySociety, the Alaveteli network and FOIA community to get funding for development in order to make the Alaveteli software simpler to run, safer to run, easier to maintain and easier to customize. All without issues and dependence on MySociety. We want to reduce the burden on us, our network friends and on MySociety and increase all our chances for collaboration and success with Alaveteli – and of course the Right to Know.

ImamoPravoZnati: Gong is continuing its national “FOI tour”, providing training on strategic usage of FOI for civil society organisations. In February, a workshop was held in Split, with preparations underway for Pula and Karlovac. 

Abrimos Info:  As the INAI is sunsetting we are doing an automated distributed backup of a few of the data files that we can access via a collaborative effort across the Mexican civil society. We are asking for a rapid response fund for this work. The secondary laws creating the new “Transparencia para el Pueblo” institution have been submitted and are on the fast track to be approved. We have promoted a press release demanding changes. A second release today: https://x.com/article19mxca/status/1896363257008652507

We will be presenting on Pidala.info at Open Data Day in Mexico on March 1st.  And of course we will be participating and talking about these efforts at TICTeC 2025. 

OpenUp ZA: OpenUp has been collaborating with the KiMitTud team to co-develop impact measures and reports for the Hungarian FOI platform ahead of the TicTec festival in June!

CITAD: In our efforts to promote protection of digital rights in Nigeria, we are holding a two-day training for judges and lawyers on prosecuting and adjudicating on human rights abuses. The training will be held from 10-11 in Abuja and then 17-18 in Lagos. This would be followed by a series of advocacy meetings with  members of the National Assembly whose objective is to entrenched respect and protection for digital rights in the country. .   

 

Yesterday we had a launch event for our new features on TheyWorkForYou and report on money in politics.

We didn’t get time for all the questions,  so we’ve answered a few now.

You can also a look at the report, the new features on TheyWorkForYou, and donations are appreciated if you like this direction for our work.

Information questions

Is access to all your data available via CSV or APIs?

All the data we make available is currently listed on the registers page of TheyWorkForYou. This includes reworkings of the published registry into spreadsheets and json. We’re not yet publishing our extra information as a spreadsheet, but will be in the coming weeks (working on some additional spreadsheets we’ll release at the same time).

Are there public lists other than the MP list of members’ financial interest available from the Parliament website please?

So Parliament publishes a few different registers: MPs, Lords, APPGs, MPs staff, journalists. 

Of these, the MPs has been the one most recently looked at and is in the best condition to access data-wise. 

As we understand it, PDS are currently looking at the staff register list (and we have some recommendations around that in the report). 

On APPGs, some things need to be released in the register, but also APPGs are supposed to provide these on request – we’re having some trouble with that. Ongoing work!

Do you track donations to constituency parties as these may be a way to donate to Members indirectly?

In principle, the register of interests has passthrough rules for donations to local or national parties, that mean the original donor should be declared in the register. The ones to be more concerned about are unincorporated fund-raising clubs or other intermediate organisation that are *not* parties as these are not covered by the rules. We think they should be. 

We did some digging to see if we could detect problems in party donations by comparison electoral commission data to the registry – but the data and time period are either covering different things,  or the EC data comes *from* the registry in the first place. 

Systematic reform

Will the new ban on MPs doing consultancy/providing advice on Parliament make a difference and clean up politics?

For background on this change, when the new reforms take effect they will not substantially ban second jobs – but further restrict MPs giving advice on public policy or how Parliament works as part of paid employment. 

This is a good change, but the concern is that this was not actually what the exchange was for, just one of the more plausible reasons to have them on the payroll – and that other semi-plausible ways to extend credit to MPs remain.

We’ve made two recommendations to double down in this area:

• The first is that currently the parliamentary commissioner can ask for the MP’s contract (or similar) to ensure it aligns with this rule. We see no reason this shouldn’t just be required to be made public.
• The second is creating more disclosure around the nature of the organisation rather than the role. For instance,  if MPs need to declare “does this org lobby parliament/government” or “is this organisation a government contractor” – ‘yes’ to either question really shifts the evaluation of corruption risk regardless of what is on paper is the specific role. 

Direct corruption has given way to a “you scratch my back” culture – the reciprocal “favour” coming years later & benefit associates. How can this be monitored?

We talk a bit about this in the original literature review, where the UK as a high trust society makes these kinds of deferred rewards more possible. MPs and officials don’t need to be explicitly told about job prospects (and the kind of actions that would make them less eligible for those job prospects), but understand the system as it has been modelled to then. There are few brown paper bags (but not none) – in general there is more of a series of ambiguous events where money changes hands for individually semi-defendable reasons.

That doesn’t mean we can’t make progress. We have longer (and actually enforced) periods where people who have worked in senior jobs can’t accept jobs in relevant industries. ACOBA currently makes recommendations on whether appointments break the government’s rules, but doesn’t have strong powers. They have themselves recommended some improvements that don’t require new laws. We could build some more scrutiny here – linking to relevant ACOBA reports from the register. 

Institutions

Should an appropriately funded arms length organisation be created to pursue this scrutiny job more systematically and thoroughly?

Yes, transparency in this area has always been trying to head off calls to create strict rules enforced by real regulators – because once a scandal concedes there should be rules other than what Parliament itself sets, that’s a big shift in how our democracy works. 

The question is “is putting restrictions on elected representatives democratic?” and I think the answer to that can clearly be yes. There are arguments made that given the electorate elect with second jobs, the electorate is fine with this. But in reality, we can, and do, ask the electorate if they have opinions about ethical standards for MPs, and they come back with nuanced opinions about what those standards should be, and support for processes outside elections (like enforced codes of conduct with independent regulators) that ensure the standards are met.

MPs work for the public, other organisations can also work for the public to make the overall system work. 

If funded, would mySociety run its own citizens assembly on the reforms needed?

Would definitely be happy to be part of a consortium supporting one – although we’d leave running it to others. In general, we think anchoring our work in deliberative approaches would help make us more effective, and help participants in seeing results from their work that isn’t “does the government accept this or not”. 

In this project we’ve tried to stick close to principles we can identify in existing polling and research, but building a better picture of public expectations (and especially considered trade-offs) would help align our work to a civic agenda. Joining civic power to deliberative democracy provides power in one direction, and legitimacy in the other — a powerful force to engage with conflicts within Parliament to shift official rules and responses.

Going further

Can you also include the Mayors of combined authorities in any later editions of WhoFundsThem?

One of our questions at the moment is how to best approach devolution in England. Longer blog post about one of our funding attempts here.

One of the areas we think we can add value is just bringing together all the local authority registers of interest, but there are lots of these. Doing this in waves by combined authority would be a good approach – and as always interested in anyone who has an interest in local government scrutiny to help find funding for this (it’s one of those “very possible, just tedious” projects). 

Does Tortoise’s recent piece of work, the Peer Review, relate at all to your work?

So I’ve been interested in the wave of work looking at Lords conflicts of interests (Tortoise’s series and some recent work from the Guardian).

We don’t currently have the Lords register on TheyWorkForYou, we’re loosely waiting to see if it’s going to be migrated to the same format as the Commons because then it’d be really easy to copy our existing process. We can do it without that, but we don’t have unlimited funds (in fact, we have quite limited funds) so trying to work out what are the easiest approaches, or where we should try and build funding for a strong move.

In general, we want to have a good think about the House of Lords. We’ve got a document of potential ideas, but we need a different approach to how we approach elected chambers. A key feature (and reason for stalled reform) is its several kinds of chambers fused into one. It’s a technocratic revising chamber, it provides a deescalation venue for bad ideas in a less partisan setting, it’s an underpowered talking shop, jobs are hard won by expertise, and given as political gifts. Depending who you’re looking at, it’s either incredibly functional or incredibly not. 

And really neither house can be understood without the other. Effective manoeuvring in the Lords depends on understanding where there are openings in the Commons. Similarly, poor scrutiny in the Commons makes more sense as part of this dance between the two chambers. 

Much more than the Commons, conflicts of interests are just part of the fundamental design (and that’s bad). How we scrutinise it from the outside needs to be different to how we look at MPs, because there are questions about “judging it by its own (odd) standards” versus “the point of scrutiny here is to show it shouldn’t exist”.

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That’s it for event questions – but please take a look at the report, the new features on TheyWorkForYou, and donations appreciated if you like this direction for our work.

Has your local authority declared a Nature Emergency? – Find out with a new service from the Woodland Trust, Climate Emergency UK, and mySociety!

The UK nations are among the most nature-depleted in the world. But there’s hope! Just as we’ve found with climate action, the UK’s local authorities hold the power to drive the change that our natural environment urgently needs. And that starts with declaring a Nature Emergency which commits the council to act.

So today we’re excited to launch Nature Emergency UK. This new website brings together the latest crowdsourced data on which UK local authorities have declared a nature emergency, alongside three metrics of the ambition of those declarations, plus case studies and model motions from the Woodland Trust, to help local councillors and local authority officers push for better.

For each local authority in the UK, our long-time collaborators Climate Emergency UK collected not only the exact wording and date of the council’s nature emergency declaration, but also the presence of three priority actions identified by the Woodland Trust, that mark out the councils with the most ambitious plans for nature recovery:

On top of that rigorous database, we’ve built a clean and simple interface that lets you quickly find your own council’s information, compare it with similar councils elsewhere in the UK, or look for patterns in nature emergency response amongst councils of the same type, population, and more.

Our Climate Programme lead, Zarino Zappia notes: “Through our work on both the Council Climate Scorecards and the Local Intelligence Hub, we’ve seen first-hand how important nature and biodiversity are as issues for local communities around the UK. We hope this new website will help citizens and community groups have informed discussions with their local representatives about the pace of action to restore nature near them, and then help those local councillors and council officers to discover and share best practice, in response to that democratic voice.”

If you’d like to see whether your local authority has a plan to restore nature in your area, check them out on Nature Emergency UK!

To rebuild public trust in our political system we need better data, stronger checks, tighter rules and ultimately, systematic reform.

Over the last few months, 50 volunteers helped the TheyWorkForYou team go through the Register of Members’ Financial Interests (RMFI), line by line, for all 650 MPs. We were looking for specific bits of information, but also to more generally understand the state of the Register and how rules on transparency are working in practice. 

• Read the report here
• Join us for the launch event at 1pm today

We have many ideas on how to improve that transparency, but the goal is not ‘just’ good documentation of office holders’ conflicts of interest: rather, the minimisation and elimination of those interests in the first place. To better align politicians’ behaviour with public expectations, there is no substitute for a stricter set of rules around MPs’ financial interests. 

As such, we are making four categories of recommendations, stepping from incremental change to improve data collection, to systemic reform of the funding landscape. 

1. Better data collection to achieve more accurate interests information
2. Stronger checks to make sure the interests information is reliable
3. Tighter rules so there are fewer unacceptable interests in the first place
4. Systematic reform to decrease the role of money in the political system.

As part of this project we have also added two new features to TheyWorkForYou:

• Election registers – adding more details and summaries to disclosures made after the last election.
• Highlighted interests – bringing together interests related to industries with low public support and governments of not free countries and offering MPs opportunity for additional context.

Over the next few months, we will release follow-on work from this project, including adding Registers of Interests for the devolved parliaments to TheyWorkForYou, releasing more information on APPGs, and a blog series on conflicts of interest declared in Parliament. 

For now, do read the report. We’ll also be discussing our findings with Chris Cook of the Financial Times and Rose Whiffen from Transparency International today at 1pm: reserve your spot here.

We spoke to Martin O’Brien at Lewisham Council about the Climate Council Action Scorecards, and the ways in which he’s used them to support his role as Head of Climate Resilience.

The Scorecards assess all UK councils across a large variety of different climate actions, publishing the final marks online, for both councils and the public to see.

So, how do all these numbers actually help a council in their work towards Net Zero? Martin told us that there are three distinct ways in which they’re useful.

“Firstly, I use them to build a sense of what’s going on around climate action, across all local authorities. They help me identify areas where we have gaps in our own action, and the places where we might pick up useful insight, tools and advice from other councils.

“Then they’re also useful for our engagement across the council’s service teams, to spell out and reinforce the connections between what they do and our ambitions on climate action.

“And then finally, they help with our communication and engagement with residents, particularly local activist and environmental groups. They encourage a conversation that acknowledges we can’t do everything, that there are some areas where we are taking meaningful action — but also, areas where we are keen to learn, to expand and improve how we work and what we can achieve.”

Can Martin put any measures to the impact the Scorecards have had for Lewisham?

“It’s hard to translate the benefits into hard facts and figures, but I feel that they’ve given us, as a council, confidence and pride in some of the things we have achieved. They’ve shown that while the scale of the challenge might sometimes feel overwhelming, it’s possible to break it down into achievable steps.

“I don’t always agree with the scoring.  If I’m honest there are times I’m surprised we get a mark (I won’t tell you which ones) and there are other times I’m outraged we don’t (happy to share information about this).  But more often than not when I look at the methodology and the assessments, I can see there’s a potential opportunity to reshape the way we do things for the better.”

Thanks very much to Martin for sharing these insights — it’s always helpful for us to understand exactly how the Scorecards are proving useful. The Climate Council Action Scorecards are a joint project between Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.

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Image: Robin Inkysloth cc by-nc-nd/2.0

We are glad to say that TICTeC (The Impacts of Civic Technology conference) will be going ahead as planned, in Mechelen Belgium and online, on June 10-11.

So, if you were holding off on reserving your place, booking accommodation or travel, you can now do so with confidence — and we very much look forward to seeing you in June.

What happened?

Part of the funding for TICTeC was provided by NED, the National Endowment for Democracy. Unfortunately, NED has been affected by the Trump administration’s federal funding freeze, and so can no longer commit to providing the funds that they had pledged. 

However, we have now secured alternative funding to fill that gap.

We’re aware the US funding freeze also affects some of our potential attendees. The event was always going to be both online and in person, and we will be working over the coming months to make sure that we bring together a diverse range of projects and approaches from around the world to share and shape what happens next in pro-democratic tech. We’ll be sharing more about how we want to use TICTeC to provide a forum to respond to the urgency of the current moment. 

What’s happening at TICTeC?

We’re excited to have two amazing keynote speakers: Fernanda Campagnucci and Marietje Schaake, both of whom have really pertinent insights and experience that will ignite the two days of conversation at TICTeC.

The full schedule will be published soon, but you can be sure that it will be as full as ever of presentations that are relevant to the present moment for the civic tech community. Meanwhile, if you book your ticket before 3 March 17 March (we’ve extended the period in recognition of this period of uncertainty), you can secure them at early bird prices.