The new House of Commons Modernisation Committee has made a call for submissions to reform House of Commons procedures, standards and working practices.

We’re going to make a submission to the Committee, focused around a set of practical fixes. But there are also bigger issues that will take longer to work through. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to publish blog posts on long running issues where deeper changes would improve how Parliament works.

Previously we’ve written about how it should be easier for MPs to vote, how giving MPs more power over the timetable helps them keep promises to voters, and stand-in (or locum) MPs.

This week our pitch is that Parliament should commission a Citizens’ Assembly to write a job role for MPs and consider how Parliament, MPs and MP support staff should relate to each other.

A unique role

We think that being an MP should be a more normal and understandable job — and that creating more clarity and structure around the role is good for both MPs and their constituents.

The role of ‘Member of Parliament’ is, for legal and historical reasons, odd. MPs are appointed by 650 elections to 650 separate positions, with a legal status similar to being self-employed. There is no formal connection between an MPs employment and their party, and at the same time no formal idea that they’re supposed to be independent of their party.

While the devolved Parliaments have a requirement that representatives should ‘be accessible to the people of the areas for which they have been elected to serve and to represent their interests conscientiously’, there is no such rule for MPs. This gives a great amount of freedom to MPs, but is in its own way, a trap. In the absence of a clear direction on what they should be doing, it is easy for MPs to be squeezed between party leadership and constituent demands. A clearly defined job role helps evaluate and manage conflicting pressure, and defines the support necessary for the role.

The premise of TheyWorkForYou is in the name — representatives should, in a meaningful way, be understood to be working on behalf of their constituents as a whole, and society in general. But it’s also true that if we’re collectively MPs’ bosses, there are not the structures in place for us to be good employers. If we want to come to a clearer settlement on this, we need a constructive dialogue that goes further than infrequent elections and public polling. We need to meaningfully engage citizens in thought and deliberation about how we can have the best system of representation possible.

Setting standards

We need a way of involving a wider group of people in setting the standards and expectations for what an MP does. One way of doing this would be a Citizens’ Assembly, that brings together a diverse group of people from every part of the country and different ways of life. UCL Constitution Unit’s Democracy in the UK assembly provides a number of useful directions about ethical standards set by MPs (with solid support for a stronger code of conduct); we can go further down this route to explore different ideas of what MPs are supposed to be doing, and give them support to do so.

As a basic task an assembly could be used to define a job description for MPs. What evidence we have suggests this is unlikely to be hugely prescriptive (there is recognition that MPs need to slide between multiple modes of representation) but would be informative about how that better defined role can be supported – and a wider set of questions about the MPs’ role that we could clarify at the same time. Involve have argued that a citizens assembly should play an important part in setting the roles and standards for MPs’ behaviour, and potentially as part of the way that MPs are judged. Introducing deliberative democracy into this process helps fix processes where MPs both set and mark their own homework (seeing deliberation as part of the anti-corruption toolkit rather than a replacement for MPs).

Creating a new conversation

There are wider questions where there are different schools of thought on how Parliament should work. Having citizens weigh in on the balance would help advance arguments and unlock reforms. How much should the government control Parliament? How should MPs fit into that? What is the appropriate scope of casework? What should MPs be spending their time on? How do we make sure they have the resources they need to do that? How can we provide decent working conditions to the representatives and their staff who work on our behalf?

This last point is especially important. While the MP is the only office holder, they have a wider staff to help them support their work. While thousands of people are collectively employed by MPs, they are all employed by individual MPs in small groups. This makes it difficult to impossible for MPs’ staff to raise bullying or abuse issues. Staff groups have proposed staff should be employed centrally, rather than by MPs, but this was rejected by a Speaker’s Conference.

This is a dispute it’d be useful for MPs’ employers collectively to weigh in on. The Democracy in the UK assembly found strong support for the idea that “In the workplace MPs should be subject to the same sanctions as other employees regarding the treatment of staff. Bullying or harassment should not be tolerated.” A Citizens’ Assembly focused on the job role and structures of support would provide direction from the level above MPs on appropriate structures to both be supported and support their staff.

Healthier democratic conversations

For MPs who feel constrained, this is a forum to make the case on how they could be supported to do their job better. For those MPs who use the idea that they are accountable to “the electorate” as a justification that there should be almost no restrictions on their behaviour, citizens’ assemblies are a vital guide to the kinds of standards that citizens will and won’t accept from their representatives.

From our point of view, this would help clarify the approach TheyWorkForYou should take in holding MPs to account — but this would also be helpful as a reset in democratic relations. This debate is often put in “public versus elite” framings that lead to a number of unhelpful attitudes. Views from “the public” of what MPs should do are framed as incoherent and uneducated, in a way that elite discussion almost becomes resentful of the idea that the public are part of the discussion at all.

The ghost of the public is used to justify both underinvestment in democracy, and detachment from the idea the public have anything useful to say on the subject. At the same time, the public has no actual power here. Reforms stall, not because they are popular or not, but because of opposition from those who already have power.

Creating structures to meaningfully involve citizens in this discussion provides a way out of this problem, and could lead to a more constructive discussion on the relationship between citizens and representatives.

Image: Deniz Fuchidzhiev on Unsplash.

A key part of my job is to think about problems that exist in the UK, understand where technical approaches can make a difference, and help make pitches to funders who care about those problems (or who like technical solutions), that we’re a good place to spend their money.

A big part of that process is being turned down a lot! There are far more good ideas than there is funding. But as a result, a big chunk of my work is probably best described as “writing sci-fi for a small audience of grant managers”. I’d like to change that by talking a bit more publicly about the problems we think are important, and how we can make a difference in solving them.

In this case, we (working with brilliant partners in Democracy Club and The Politics Project) were putting together a bid for Google’s Impact Challenge around more resilient democracy. This was unusual in being a potentially large grant of €1 million, which both meant it was enough money to pick off a big problem and that there was a lot of competition. 340 organisations applied across Europe and there was only €15 million to go around. It was always unlikely we’d win – but I think the idea was good – so here’s more about that!

Improving civics understanding in the UK

The quick summary is that we were going to make better information about who is responsible for what in this country, and we were going to make sure it was available where it was needed.

If you think devolution is essential to the economic and democratic future of the UK, worried about youth engagement with democracy, or concerned about abuse in public life, a lack of civic knowledge is a common problem. We think it is possible with a relatively small amount of money to make a real impact on this problem.

A key benefit of devolution isn’t just making better decisions locally, but freeing up inherently limited capacity at the centre to deal with truly national issues. But the problem with spreading responsibility around multiple levels of democracy is that you make it harder for people to know the right place to go to when they need help. Part of MPs’ offices being overwhelmed is because they receive messages that need to be sent on to local government, and the Jo Cox Civility Commission highlighted that people being bounced around a system they don’t understand is a specific cause of frustration which results in abuse towards MPs and their staff.

This is a problem we can fix. We’re already one of the best approaches to this problem by accident — a big use of WriteToThem isn’t to write messages but just to find out who the local councillors are for your ward (see also Democracy Club’s Your Area tool) . We want to build a system that gets this information everywhere, and supports a much wider range of uses.

Our plan was a set of interconnected technical and educational approaches, working with partners Democracy Club (who are responsible for getting election information everywhere), and The Politics Project (a leading democratic education organisation).

Getting the data right, and getting it everywhere

At the foundation of this approach is better data. Democracy Club would build on their existing elections database to create a representatives database that could feed a “WhoDoesWhat” API.

We’d then use this centralised resource to improve information on our existing high traffic services. But that’s not how we solve the big problem. We need this information everywhere.

We don’t want WriteToThem to be how people get to the right place: we want every single MP’s website, local council, and news site to be able to say who is responsible for what based on where you live and how you get in contact. We’d do this following the Democracy Club model, of producing APIs and widgets that make it easy to put this information everywhere it’s needed.

(If you would be a potential user of this database – Democracy Club has a mailing list you can sign up to for more information if we can make progress on this in different ways.)

Get the right information to people who need it

There are lots of organisations working to get civics education where it’s most needed. We want to make every single one of them more effective, by creating tools that help make online and offline materials more responsive to local circumstances.

At the moment, if you’re The Politics Project, going into schools across the country, you need to adjust materials all the time. Does this area have a devolved parliament? Combined authority? Two tier council? When’s the next election; who’s currently running the council? Everything either needs hedging, or customisation.

One of the ways they customise their work is by using WriteToThem — but we can make something better! Our plan was to create a templating tool that builds on the WhoDoesWhat database to make it easy for educators and civics organisations to make materials that are instantly customisable — saving time and making materials more relevant to the communities they’re working with.

We were going to work with a range of organisations to design and test this tool and move huge amounts of existing materials across to this approach — creating a fantastic “last mile” tool for civics education.

Improved systematic information and signals

Once we’ve made WriteToThem less useful by scaling up a key feature, we’re going to reinvent it.

People should use WriteToThem not because it’s the best way of finding out who your MP or councillor is, but because everyone agrees communication using it is better than just sending emails (to the right person, clear, non-abusive). We want to have a big think about how we can best adapt WriteToThem to the problems of today.

We also have a unique position sitting between many people writing and many representatives receiving. We want to make more use of this: we want to understand more about the content of messages, where they’re coming from, and where they’re going, creating a ‘Zeitgeist’ view on constituent communication (without processing the text of messages).

This helps create more visibility of issues over multiple representatives (and different layers of government), but also helps highlight where the mailbag is systematically missing areas and groups. We know MPs use mailbag as a metric of constituency opinion — but also that they probably shouldn’t. We want to create tools that help understand distributions in the messages coming in, and create more interest in other ways of gauging constituency opinions.

Please give us £1,000,000

Google said no — but if you happen to have a lot of money and think any or all of this sounds like a good idea, please get in touch! (Always happy to share the longer concept note).

If you have less than this (say £10), this is also useful and helps keep the idea factory churning!

If you support our work and want to set up a regular payment, in the long run this helps make us more independent of big funders, and more able to make steady progress. Every little helps.

The new House of Commons Modernisation Committee has made a call for submissions to reform House of Commons procedures, standards and working practices.

We’re going to make a submission to the Committee, focused around a set of practical fixes. But there are also bigger issues that will take longer to work through. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to publish blog posts on long running issues where deeper changes would improve how Parliament works.

Previously we’ve written about how it should be easier for MPs to vote, and how giving MPs more power over the timetable ultimately helps them keep promises to voters.

Today we’re publishing our research into Stand-in (or ‘locum’) MPs. This is the idea that when MPs have a substantial period of absence (e.g. parental or long-term sickness) there should be a process to appoint someone who can temporarily fulfil the duties of an MP.

The need here is to find an approach that starts with the fact that MPs are people, and we need to be able to handle prolonged absence well —both for constituent representation and the wellbeing of MPs.

The idea of replacing absent representatives with stand-in MPs is (if not universal) certainly something that happens in other Parliaments. Generally these are in Parliaments elected by party-list proportional representation, and there is a good ‘next person’ on the list to appoint. We need an approach that works for the candidate-based system we use in the UK.

Our pitch is creating a new role with speaking rights in Parliament, while voting continues to be handled by proxy vote (over an extended period). But other approaches are possible, and what’s important at this point is trying to draw out objections and views, and trying to find ways forward.

The research is consciously not comprehensive, but we’ve sign-posted what we think the next set of questions is, and how it’s possible to get more answers.

You can read the report online.

For feedback, please email me at alex.parsons@mysociety.org.

Image: Yaopey Yong on Unsplash.

Citizens Assemblies are processes that bring together a representative group of citizens from different walks of life to discuss problems. These can be used to overcome political gridlock and to use diverse perspectives to improve policy approaches. 

Assemblies in the UK have been held by several of the UK’s Parliaments, by local authorities, NHS Trusts, and by academic institutions. 

To help us add citizens assemblies to CAPE, we have done upstream work in making it easier to find and keep track of citizens assemblies. We have:

• Created a dataset to keep track of assemblies
• Updated our guidance on publishing citizen assembly reports to reflect this archive, and guidance around licensing reports.

An archive of Citizens Assemblies

Because citizens assemblies are not standardised processes, there isn’t one place where you can see all the assemblies that have been held, or read what they concluded. Involve has maintained a tracker, but this has fallen a few years out of date.

To add information about local citizens assemblies on climate change to our CAPE website, we needed to create a good up-to-date dataset.  To do this in a sustainable way, we now host a register that aims to cover citizens assemblies held in the UK.

Using an automated trawl of all local authority websites, which we then reviewed to remove false positives, we identified ten new citizens assemblies in addition to the one’s Involve had already collected.

But that turned out to be the easy part. The bigger problem was due to local government website changes, many of the links that had worked a few years ago were broken, and needed to be added manually. 

We’ve found updated links, and where possible links directly to the PDF final report. We have added a cache of these PDF reports to our registry – meaning we’re preserving a record of reports, and that services using our register can fall back on our backup if a future re-organisation breaks the links again. 

(This may have fallen out of date by the time we publish the blog post – let us know if we’re missing yours!)

Licencing democratic documents

Citizens assemblies as new democratic processes do not have standardised forms for publishing recommendations or reports. Part of that lack of standardisation is inconsistency on how the final report is licenced (meaning the terms under which someone can reuse or share the report).

Our view is that for Citizens’ Assemblies held by public authorities, or funded with public money, the results of the assembly should be released under either the Open Parliament/Open Government licence – or the equivalent Creative Commons licence (CC BY 4.0).

This wouldn’t just clarify “it’s fine to rehost in a cache or archive” but would allow explicit re-use and re-publication in other forms. Most reports are only published as PDFs, meaning there would be added value from a site that did for Citizens Assemblies what TheyWorkForYou does for Parliaments – bringing all the information together in one place.  It would also be permissive to translations of citizens assembly reports into other languages, or for re-publication and compilations of recommendations on similar themes. 

Reviewing the 39 reports we have in our database: 24 had no information on copyright or licensing, 4 were published under Open Government/Equivalent CC licence, 7 were published under a slightly more restrictive CC licence (not allowing commercial usage), and 4 explicitly claimed general copyright in some shape or form. 

These differences are generally explained by different facilitator organisations writing reports. Shared Future’s template report consistently uses the same CC licence. Organisations that work with a mixture of public and private clients may retain copyright boilerplate sometimes without thinking about it, and for smaller organisations, there may not be awareness of the benefits of permissive licensing of democratic documents.

In other cases, there may be an attitude that licensing is something that is none of the facilitator’s concern – they produce the information for the client who should release it themselves however is appropriate. As a result, the document itself is silent on the copyright status. In practice authorities will just rehost the file that the facilitator provides; so what is eventually published is similarly silent on the status of the document. 

GIven this, our recommendation is that  facilitators should establish a standard view on a default licence for public sector clients, and have that conversation with the public authority. 

Due to the public benefit in maintaining an archive of the results of citizens assemblies, we include the complete set – including those that are explicitly copyrighted – in our cache.

The explicitly copyrighted entries are:

• Oxford City Council 2019 Climate Assembly – 2019 Ipsos MORI – all rights reserved.
• City of Wolverhampton 2020 Climate Assembly – Marked “Private and Confidential” by BritainThinks
• Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council 2021 Climate Assembly – Marked copyrighted by Cynnal Cymru – Sustain Wales, 2021
• UCL’s Constitution Unit – Democracy in the UK – Copyright – The Constitution Unit and Involve 2022

We are happy to have conversations with any of the organisations involved.

Updating our guidance

In 2019, we published a set of guidance on useful possible features to host on a website for a Citizens Assembly before, during, and after the assembly. We have updated this with clearer sections on licensing approaches, and inviting depositing a copy in our dataset as a long term archive.

Header image: Photo by Glen Noble on Unsplash

In how we’re framing TICTeC and our wider work, we’re talking less about civic tech and more about what we’re calling Pro-Democracy Tech (PDT).

The reason for this is we’re finding civic tech is a less helpful term for the kind of convening work we want to do. It won the argument of its time, and there is much less need to make the basic case for technology as part of the civic tool kit. But as a result, it has less to say about the situation we’re in now. Instead, we need framing that better talks to the range of people and institutions who are doing civic and democratic work with technology today. 

What is Pro-Democracy Tech?

Pro-Democracy Tech describes digital tools aimed at realising and defending democratic values. 

A key motivation of this approach is that authoritarianism isn’t standing still – and is learning how to use technology to extend its surveillance and control over people. Democracy’s reaction to this needs to be not to reject technology but to use it to evolve and compete. Democracy needs to be fast, effective and popular, while not conceding that the only way to do this is by becoming more centralised and authoritarian itself.

Within this, there are two key activities:

• Defensive democratic tech –  defending the open society: anti-corruption, anti-misinformation, etc.
• Constructive democratic tech  – empowering technologies that build democratic fibre and capacity: participation and deliberation, community tools, civic response tech. 

These are interconnected, and not hard divides. Defensive approaches safeguard the openness which democracy needs to function, while constructive approaches build the capacity of the engine of democratic progress. 

There are tools and approaches that apply to both. Access to Information laws are both vital anti-corruption tools, and part of capacity building through lowering costs of accessing information. Democratic transparency organisations (PMOs and similar) are both about increasing anti-corruption surveillance, and transforming the capacity and connections of democratic institutions.

Where they differ is in their approaches to new technological tools. Defensive democratic tech is in an arms war with anti-democrats. We have to keep moving and innovating to stay in place.  It is reactive against a well-financed opponent, and needs to understand how to bend tools (often developed by those with deep pockets and their own motives) to democratic purposes.

Constructive democratic tech is less of a zero-sum game. Just as there are technological approaches that make authoritarianism much more effective, there are approaches that make democracy much more effective. Here the enemy is less organised but omnipresent: inertia, low expectations, and a belief that things can’t be better. The goal of this approach is developing civic capacity, and taking us on the path from “citizen sensors” to “citizen thinkers” – where the extraordinary capacity and cognitive diversity in a democracy are fully enabled to work together to solve the big problems of the age (such as climate change). 

Why do we need this shift?

Going back twenty years (or even just ten years to the first TICTeC), what the “civic tech movement” is trying to get across is that there are civic-minded people who are using technology to create new kinds of organisations and services. Civic tech is a term to describe this novelty, make the case to funders, and advocate for this idea that technology isn’t just about online shopping, but can help people work together to improve the society they’re in. 

The good news is that these people mostly won. Governments, journalism and NGOs have generally taken on the lessons of the early civic tech movement. A wider range of governments and organisations understand the value of technology in helping them achieve their purpose, and there are more outlets for the kind of people who originally would have founded civic tech organisations. 

As a result, when we look internationally, we see very few organisations where the core identity is “civic tech” and that run a range of services in the same way that mySociety does. Instead, we tend to see organisations more tightly focused on an area of work (like access to information), and tech is one of a range of skill sets represented, or where civic tech-like work is part of a broader portfolio of more traditional research and advocacy work.

As civic tech is speaking to problems that no longer exist in the same way, the phrase doesn’t apply well to the problems we have now.  We need language and terms to bring together people who are using tech as part of the work to defend and enrich our democratic societies. 

Putting this into practice

The purpose of this framing is to create practical language. At TICTeC 2025, we’re exploring how we’ll use constructive/defensive framing to structure the conference – across specific areas of work we have a focus in: democratic transparency, access to information and climate change. We also want to use it to be clearer about the broader range of organisations and projects we ‘d like to see there. 

Pro-Democracy Tech reflects both the purpose of the technology, a general attitude that pro-democracy tech is possible, and a recognition that there is anti-democratic technology out there. It was really helpful putting this together to see some similar language and divides in this NED/IFDS essay collection.

Leaving the tech aside, the spirit of civic tech is about challenging low expectations of how things are, and demonstrating that things can be done better.  As mySociety, we still see ourselves as a civic tech organisation, and the idea of a civic tech movement as important to understand ourselves and our history. But we also need language that helps us understand how we relate to others that don’t share that history.

A feature of the current moment is that ideas of democracy are under attack, and authoritarians have embraced and made technology core to how they work. What is up for debate is the orientation of the pro-democracy side towards technology. We think ceding the ground would be a mistake and through TICTeC we want to incubate the best version of the pro-democratic tech argument. At the same time, we want to stay true to an important value of the civic tech movement: that the best advocacy is the demonstration of what’s possible.

Header image: Photo by Bhushan Sadani on Unsplash

In our WhoFundsThem work, we want to make MPs’ financial interests much easier to understand and more transparent. One of the ways we think our work can make a difference is in highlighting processes that don’t make sense, and prodding Parliament to see what happens.

In this case, we’ve noticed an issue in how declarations of interests by MPs on Written Questions are handled — and raising this has triggered a review of the process.

We have also released a new dataset of Written Questions where an interest has been declared.

What’s the problem?

When submitting parliamentary questions, MPs should say if they have any relevant interests, and if so what they are. In the guide to submitting Written Questions online, MPs are told “If you have an interest to declare, click the box saying ‘yes’ and explain what the interest is.” Similarly, on the offline form, members are told to email the Table Office to say what the interest is.

However, only the ‘yes/no’ bit of this gets onto the Written Questions section of the Parliament website. The actual interest being disclosed is never released. The problem is this is a lower level of public disclosure than contributions to debates, where the standard is now (in theory) that it should be clear what the interest is as well as the fact that it exists. For oral questions, that interests need to be declared on the form is explicitly given as a reason there is no need for further declarations in the chamber. This would be reasonable if the information was available to be added to Hansard later – but as stands it is not.

Both in the chamber and on the form, MPs may refer to interests they have already declared, or raise something with a closer connection to the topic that doesn’t otherwise need to be disclosed. As well as financial interests, this might represent more personal interests (for instance, a health issue they have an interest in because of their own experiences).

Because we only have ‘an interest has been declared’, different types of disclosure are lumped together. This requires more work from anyone who wants to understand whether a declaration has further financial implications, or simply added context/personal background. In this case, it’s not even that the MPs are at fault: they’re disclosing information, but the process means that it’s not going anywhere.

Asking for more information

To see what would happen, we made a Freedom of Information request for this information that’s being recorded but not released.

As we mostly expected, this was withheld under the exemption that gives Parliament control over publishing its own proceedings (we can’t compel extra information to be published even if it exists). However, there was a recognition that this gap was a problem and as a result the process is being reviewed:

Nonetheless, while there is no statutory right to this information, Mr Speaker considers greater transparency would be desirable and has commissioned an urgent review of the publication policy. The review may well lead to the information you seek being provided on a non-statutory basis, but it will take a little time to carry out.

This is great news, and better future publication would help make disclosure more uniform and effective.

This response also confirmed that the current process is a bit of black hole, with it being inappropriate for officials to screen questions as a result of interests declared:

It is Members, not officials, that are responsible for deciding what to register or declare, and deciding whether or not their interests are of a sort which should prevent them asking a particular question or taking part in a debate.

As such, the disclosures MPs make as part of this process are functionally going nowhere (except as an honesty exercise for the MPs involved): they have no public visibility and no internal decisions are made as a result of information disclosed.

Why this matters

We’re interested in Written Questions because they’re both an important part of how Parliament holds the government to account, but also a potential way that MPs can use their public position for private gain.

MPs have privileged access to government information. Written Questions are both faster than Freedom of Information requests (normal reply of five days rather than 28 days), and can ask questions that might require producing new information (while FOI only applies to data and information that already exists).

In the 90s, there was a Cash for Questions scandal, and there is reason to suspect that some version of this continues. Simon Weschle found a statistical connection between a group of MPs with second jobs (especially those in the “knowledge sector”) and increased numbers of questions asked. Looking at the content of these extra questions, he found these MPs asked more questions about internal department policies and projects. While Weschle is careful to avoid suggesting impropriety by any single MP highlighted, this suggests a slightly less immediately transactional version of cash for questions. Companies that can hire MPs have the ability to extract more information about government work, that may enrich the company, even if the MP’s formal role is tangential to this work. In general, MPs should strive to avoid even the appearance that this is what is happening.

What can we do in the meantime?

We’re going to keep an eye out for changes made as a result of this review, but there’s more we can do in the meantime.

The first thing we’ve already done is make the dataset of questions with declared interests more accessible. Using the Parliament website’s Written Questions service, you can’t easily pick out just those with a declared interest. We’ve set up a process to republish Written Questions with declared interests as a spreadsheet and through a data explorer.

If we decide to start weekly summaries of interests declared in debates, we could similarly keep track of new questions with declared interests and try and reconcile them to information elsewhere. The volume is low enough we could email MPs to ask what they’ve declared if unclear.

Something we considered was categorising questions with interests disclosed as part of our crowdsource of the register of interests, but we left this off to keep the scope of the exercise manageable. However, the real issue to dig into is not the relatively small number of questions with interests disclosed (around 256 last year), but understanding whether there are interests undisclosed in the 40,000 other questions submitted.

This is too great a volume to easily crowdsource, but we’d like to explore whether we can pair the task with a machine learning approach to narrow the problem down to a smaller list of entries for manual review. As part of the current crowdsource, our volunteers are collecting information about associated companies. This might be a first step in exploring this problem.

Help us go further

This is part of our wider WhoFundsThem project – where we are building new datasets and crowdsourcing information about MPs’ financial interests to improve what we list on TheyWorkForYou.

Under pretty much every rock we turn over, we find something that needs more attention. We would like to do a lot more work like this: finding ways to apply new technology to make parliamentary monitoring more comprehensive and sustainable.

If you’d like to help us do more, please consider supporting us with a one-off or monthly donation.

Image: Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

During debates in Parliament, if an MP has a conflict of interest, they are supposed to disclose this as part of their speech.

In practice, many of these disclosures don’t have detail on exactly what the conflict is. 

As part of our WhoFundsThem work, we are experimenting with a machine learning approach to detect these disclosures (technical details at the bottom of the post).

For the moment, this project is just monitoring to understand more about how declarations are made in practice. In time, we will consider practical options to encourage better disclosures and remedy incomplete disclosures. 

To support our work, and help us go further please consider donating. 

Disclosures

There are roughly three kinds of declarations that we’re regularly seeing:

• Formal and full: clear indication of what the potential conflict of interest is
• Formal and incomplete: refer to an interest without being clear on the nature of the disclosure.
• Rhetorical: An interest is declared rhetorically to indicate special expertise or experience relevant to the debate.

Formal, full

In several debates, we saw example of good full disclosures:

• Natasha Irons – Clear interest is Channel 4 is previous employer. 
• James Naish – Clear interest is rental income. 
• Rachel Blake – clear on source of interest – husband works for a funder who has given money to Renters Reform Coalition (in this case, a disclosure beyond that required for the register). 

And the following satisfy the idea that it should be clear what the conflict is – but could be have a little more detail:

• Richard Tice talked about his interest  “as someone who has been involved in the commercial and residential property sector for over 35 years”. Which is clear about the nature of the interest (could emphasise shareholdings in property companies).
• Gideon Amos said in the renters’ rights debate he has been a landlord of registered social housing. Clear about the nature of the interest (but also could be clearer that the interest is current).

Formal, not enough details

In this category, we’re looking at formal language declaring an interest – but where the exact nature of the conflict is unclear from the speech, or even when looking in the register.

The Rules for MPs are clear that “a reference will not suffice on its own, as the declaration must provide sufficient information to convey the nature of the interest without the listener or the reader having to have recourse to the Register or other publication.”

In practice, there is a norm where MPs will simply refer to the register – which reflects an older version of the rules. MPs learn how to talk in the chamber by watching other MPs, and this leads to a mix of old and new behaviours (especially when nothing enforces the newer rule). 

Here are some examples. 

In a debate about TeamGB and ParalympicsGB:

• Toby Perkins refers to an interest but doesn’t say that it was hospitality from the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) – highly relevant given a substantial part of the speech is about LTA projects. (more on that below)
• Vicky Foxcroft declared an interest in having been able to attend the Paralympic games – which is mostly rhetorical in this context – but the key information in the register but not in the debate is that this was paid for by Allywyn Entertainment Ltd (operator of the National Lottery). (It is debatable whether it’s a *problem* in this debate, but worth tracking).
• Nigel Huddlestone referred to his register and declarations made when he was a Sports Minister (2020-2022). There isn’t anything obviously relevant in the current register – so this may refer to now expired interests, or hospitality received while a minister.

In the renters’ rights debate:

• Ayoub Khan said he registered an interest – but not what that interest was (stake in three rental properties)
• Desmond Swayne declared an interest when talking about how the ability of a tenant to end a tenancy early was a risk to the landlord. This *is* guessable from context but is not explicitly stated – the interest is rental income from two properties. 

In some cases, it’s just unclear what MPs mean. In the renters’ rights bill debate, Steve Darling referred to his register, but on reviewing it is unclear what the conflict of interest is (could be being a member of the Torquay Town Deal Board, or a specific donation). In the VAT for Independent Schools debate James Firth’s declaration isn’t explicit, but is probably about shares in an education recruitment company.

Rhetorical

A key way in which MPs use ‘I must declare an interest” is to indicate that they have expertise, or that they belong to a group they are acting on behalf of. It’s a claim that, contrary to the idea that MPs should float free of all attachments, they have a hinterland that is a vital part of their work. 

For instance, Joe Powell declares an interest in his background at the Open Government Partnership in being part of government register projects to talk about what needs to be got right with a landlord register.  Matt Rodda declares an interest because he and his family have benefited from local grassroots sports. In the debate on the VAT status of private schools, Ben Spencer, Caroline Johnson and Mims Davies (loosely) refer to their children’s private education as a personal interest, but one that connects them to a wider group of parents. 

Allison Gardner mentions her declared interest of having worked for a university in a debate about higher education. There is also a pattern of MPs with a union background or donations, bringing this up as disclosure *and* expertise. Some examples of this: Mark Ferguson, Laurence Turner. 

Interests not declared

There’s an argument that paying more attention to bad disclosures is detracting from a bigger invisible problem – when MPs have interests, but *don’t* mention them in debates.

This is a harder issue to deal with automatically – but a debate on renters’ rights makes it a bit easier to check for speeches by MPs who declare rental income in their register of interests, but didn’t disclose it when speaking. There were four in this debate: Nesil Caliskan, Shaun Davies, Danny Kruger and Andrew Griffith.

This set needs to be seen as an example of disclosure norms rather than saying anything particular about this debate. What these have in common is that they are short interventions rather than long speeches. By the letter of the rules, these should still contain declarations that are relevant, but in practice, if we keep looking at this I think we’ll find an effective norm that this isn’t the case. 

In more depth: freebies and lobbying

The example I want to think about a bit more is Toby Perkins’ incomplete disclosure of the Lawn Tennis Association gifts in his speech – and why expressing what the conflict actually is in the speech matters. 

Perkins has over the last five years received about £5k worth of tickets from the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA), and he’s not the only one. 45 MPs have made a declaration they have received a gift from the Lawn Tennis Association since 2020 (see spreadsheet).

So on one level, Perkins clearly enjoys tennis, and might well advocate for it anyway. But as mentioned in Perkins’ speech, the LTA receives government grants to refurbish public tennis courts. They would presumably enjoy more grants and subsidies for tennis. They run the APPG for Tennis, giving regular access to Parliamentarians who are disposed to like tennis, and have a history of giving MPs free tickets. I don’t think it’s too cynical to say these facts might be related. 

There are lots of people who like tennis, there’s nothing *inherently* wrong with lobbying on tennis’ behalf (or providing useful stats or information for MPs to use). But when gifts are changing hands – the least we’re owed is transparency.

Perkins’ speech would be less effective if he had disclosed gifts from the LTA at the start. But this is the purpose of the rule – to make your intervention be taken with a bit of caution because you have to preface it with “I’ve had a lot of gifts from these people I’m about to talk about positively”. And if you’re not willing to bear even this small cost of freebies, you definitely shouldn’t accept them.

Technical notes

This is part of our work exploring how machine learning can be applied to our democratic transparency work. 

In this case, we’re doing a normal search for words ‘declare’, ‘interest’, ‘register’ and then using a vector search approach to rank and list items that are likely to be declarations of interest. 

A vector search uses a language model to express the meaning of a sentence as numbers. When language models are trained on large amounts of text, this changes the internal shape of the model so that text with similar meanings ends up being ‘closer’ to each other inside the model. A vector is a series of numbers that represent this location. By looking at the distance between vectors, we can identify groups of similar terms with similar meanings. While a more basic text similarity approach would say that ‘bat’ and ‘bag’ are very similar, a model that sorts based on meaning would identify that ‘bat’ and ‘owl’ are more similar.

This helps us pick up (without huge amounts of false positives) a range of different ways interests can be declared. From there, we can cross-reference with the register of interest as republished on TheyWorkForYou and our spreadsheet export. 

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Support our work

This is part of our wider WhoFundsThem project – where we are building new datasets and crowdsourcing information about MPs’ financial interests to improve what we list on TheyWorkForYou.

Under pretty much every rock we look, we find something that needs more attention. We would like to do a lot more work like this – finding ways to apply new technology to make parliamentary monitoring more comprehensive and sustainable. 

If you’d like to help us do more – please consider supporting us with a one-off or monthly donation.

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Image: UK Parliament (CC by-nc-nd/2.0)

Ok, doing these regularly fell apart at *about* when the election happened – but let’s get back on track!

WhoFundsThem

On the WhoFundsThem work, last week we inducted the 50 volunteers who are going to answer 32 questions for 650 MPs. We’re using the crowdsourcing software we developed for the Council Climate Scorecards with CE UK (and taking big inspiration from their general approach). We’ve also released the underlying research we’ve based the questions on. 

It’s been really exciting to meet the volunteers, and getting to grips with the fine detail of what’s in the registers. This is the reason we wanted this to be a volunteer project, because while you can get good aggregate stories through data analysis, to get good analysis on an individual level, you really have to go through it by hand. 

Over the next six weeks we’ll be going through that process, then reviewing the results and making a right of reply available to MPs, before a launch in the new year.  

On our “ask the APPGs for the information they have to give out on request” project. We’ve made our first information request to the APPGs, getting some resistance here (eg APPGs who say all the information is on the website when it’s not) but waiting to see what we get back by the deadline later in the week. Depending on the level of disclosure, we might stagger the questions we ask to balance “the rules say you should know this and make it public” with “in practice, awareness is low and these are run by small organisations”. But we’ll see what happens. 

One of the things we’ve started to pay more attention to is written questions, given reasonable suspicion that there has been some cash for questions happening. There’s something odd in that Parliament seems to ask what the conflict of interest might be, but doesn’t publish it (just says it exists). We’ve got an FOI request in to see if there’s some more information we can get Parliament to publish (or flush out what’s happening in the processes there). 

Julia’s been down the rabbit hole of trying to understand the different donation disclosure systems (visiting her local council to see what the disclosures look like there). We think there’s some under-disclosure nationally, so we’re checking in on ways we can validate that. 

Across these areas, there’s basically a set of things where there are “rules” that exist, but in practice no one is actually monitoring them to enforce  — and we might get some improvement just by paying attention and trying to kick other processes into motion. Along these lines we’ve got an experimental machine learning approach going, to feed possible “conflict of interest” disclosures in debates to our volunteers, but we’re also thinking about doing a weekly blog post about the number and quality of disclosures that week (there’s in general something interesting about how MPs rhetorically use ‘I declare an interest’ to speak to personal experience). 

Previously: 

The new Register of Members Financial Interests is out and we have thoughts (and spreadsheets) / mySociety

New register of interests spreadsheet – with much richer data / mySociety 

Monitoring and voting updates

The stars (and funding) have aligned to get Struan to spend a month on a range of TheyWorkForYou updates we’ve had planned. The key work here is to improve TheyWorkForYou as a political monitoring platform.

One of TheyWorkForYou’s most impactful features is the email alerts – we’re going to make it much easier to manage ‘keyword’ alerts (for people interested in topics rather than people). 

Alongside just making it easier to manage, we’re planning to use the same approach we used in CAPE, to help people search for the right things by offering related search terms (based on a vector analysis of the TheyWorkForYou corpus). 

Something that came out of our previous research was how helpful it was that TheyWorkForYou converts written answers into email alerts. We want to do the same for devolved Parliaments by adding three new scrapers for written questions, so that all answers published are searchable and alertable through the same platform, giving a common toolkit to organisations working across the UK. 

A new coat of paint

Lucas has refreshed the TheyWorkForYou homepages and made a suite of colour changes for better accessibility throughout the site. 

In general, on TheyWorkForYou we’re trying to pick off design improvements as we go through related projects. On the MP profile pages we’re gradually moving elements out of one long page and into their own pages with supporting content. This also, in the long run, will help a bit with the display of people who are in multiple parliaments at the same time (or who move between them). 

Machine learning

We’ve been doing a big set of experiments exploring how vector searches (which use some of the more basic bits of large language models) might fit into our future plans. 

In general, I’m much more comfortable with uses of machine learning that are enabling better search or discovery rather than summarisation at this point. Obviously there’s some good proof of concepts already out there in terms of summarising debates — we just feel there’s a big space to use these new tools to speed up old approaches (improved linking to glossaries rather than creating glossaries, for example) without getting too into generated content. 

TICTeC

As part of our community of practice around Parliamentary Monitoring Sites we had a good session on subnational PMOs with some organisations focused on municipalities. I’ve got a longer write-up coming from this because I think it’s a related but different problem to parliamentary monitoring where we need a slightly different toolkit. 

What else are we doing

The answer to this question is usually “applying for grants”.  We’ve put together a good set of ideas over the summer – and if we get them or not I’ll do some more public write-ups of what we think the direction of travel is. 

But for a quick taste, we’ve got pitches around:

• A big revisit of WriteToThem – and how we pivot that into solving some of the big democratic problems of the current moment (getting the right message to the right place in a layered democracy). 
• Getting good at public education through TheyWorkForYou — we have the potential to add a lot of value beyond just republishing debate transcripts, but need to redevelop the annotation and glossary tools from earlier in the site’s history for the modern era.
• Making Parliament work better — there remains very basic “this data is in a PDF and doesn’t have to be” work to be done, that can improve not just outside understanding of the process, but provide more tools to people working inside Parliament. 
• Better digital tools and transparency for citizens’ assemblies  — how do we take the same “improve transparency/improve efficiency” philosophy and apply it to deliberative approaches?

Less developed, but in the works:

• House of Lords: not going anywhere anytime soon  — but is also unpopular. We want to get better at presenting how it works and applying pressure to perform well, while contributing to the picture of evidence for reform. Some tools we have for the Commons can move across well to the Lords (eg registers of interest), but what special approaches do we need for this large appointed house?
• Mayoral scrutiny: there’s wide acknowledgement of a big scrutiny gap here. We have some ideas on how best to support this – but also an awareness that the tools of TheyWorkForYou aren’t quite right to deal with what is less “one institution”, but one among many in area governance. 

I am once again…

As ever, if you’ve read this far, and you’re not a monthly donor to mySociety,  would you consider becoming one? There is even an anonymous form on that page to tell us why you don’t want to, which is always helpful for us to understand more about. 

Related, but if you are someone (or know someone) with lots of money  — we have really clear plans of how we’d make use of it in a wide range of areas!

One of the reasons we do this work is because we don’t think there’s a more efficient way of improving UK politics/democracy than making TheyWorkForYou (and friends) better. Obviously it’s our job to make that case well, and I’m always happy to hear from people.

Image: Marko Blažević

There’s a lot in the news right now about the Register of MPs’ financial interests, where MPs are supposed to declare all extra income and donations they receive.

For years TheyWorkForYou has republished the register and made it easier to see changes over time. But there’s a lot more that can be done to improve this information and get a better understanding of the influence of money in politics.

Our WhoFundsThem project is going to do the digging into this information — creating summaries and publishing what we find in a clear and accessible way on MPs’ individual profiles on TheyWorkForYou. 

The three key questions for us are:

• Is everything being declared?
• Is what’s being declared clearly understandable?
• And, is what’s being declared acceptable to the public?

To answer this we’ve made a set of 32 questions we want to answer for each MP: we’ll be pulling on the Register, Companies House, MPs’ websites and parliamentary debates.

Our team of volunteers will be working together to answer these over the next few months — giving us new information to share with the public on TheyWorkForYou. 

If you think this work is important and politics should be more transparent, then we would love your help — can you donate today?

DONATE FOR A TRANSPARENT DEMOCRACY

Thank you for your support!

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Image: Thomas Kelley

In our new WhoFundsThem project we are making summaries of MPs registers of financial interests to add to TheyWorkForYou. We want to take these existing disclosures and add context to make them easier to understand. To do this, we are taking a hard look at how all the existing disclosure processes work (and when they don’t) to understand how we might best apply pressure for improvements. 

One of our motivations here is that we think the rules about what MPs can and can’t do should be led by public expectations. To reflect that in our work, we’ve put together a literature review of the current picture of evidence around how MPs’ financial interests operate, and how these are perceived.

We’ve published this review online, but here are some quick thoughts I’ve taken away from this. 

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There’s been a big shift in the role of MPs from 40 years ago – in practice and in public perception, being an MP is a full time job. There is some nuance here in public perception: while some professions are more approved in general (doctors/nurses), generally as the pay or involvement goes up, the work is considered less favourably. 

There’s too much focus on the problem of second jobs being a distraction for the MP, and not enough on the problem of privileged access to Parliament for those who can pay for it. We should be asking questions about when MPs are selling their access rather than expertise. This encourages paying more attention to written questions – where MPs have a privileged ability to get answers to questions (and there’s indirect evidence this has been happening as part of some MPs’ second employment). 

We need to care where donations come from, rather than being too focused on what they were spent on.  A general throughline in the discourse is catching when people are benefiting privately from their position (e.g. receiving gifts) – but there’s also the situation that private donors are supporting the public work of politicians (for instance, funding researchers in their offices). With a “follow the money” hat on, this should be seen as an investment in relationships with politicians that might pay off later rather than being purely public spirited. 

We need to be aware that transparency in this area has been a hedge against more substantial reform (e.g. disclose bad things rather than stop doing bad things). This compromise position has usefulness for both sides. For those who want stricter rules, it encourages politicians to have one eye on public opinion through disclosure requirements, and generates a regular series of news stories helpful in future reform. 

But for those opposed to stricter rules, transparency can be framed as approval – where the electorate is argued to have endorsed MPs’ choices. Conversations become about if the rules were followed rather than the underlying issues, and when the regime is only half-heartedly supported, non-disclosure can be common (meaning that scrutiny falls more on those correctly disclosing rather than those who do not). 

In general, we see increasing the transparency and getting the most out of the information that is available as the tool we have been given to improve the situation. But we shouldn’t lose sight that transparency is a means, not an end in itself. 

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From this work, we’ve created a set of questions that make sure we draw out important aspects of the register. Next week our volunteers will start to answer these questions. 

These questions cover all sections of the register. We’re asking volunteers to help us understand which industries are showing up in MPs’ registers, and whether they are declaring an interest in debates and questions when they’re supposed to be.  We’ll compare the Register of Interests against Companies’ House with support from new data from Any One Thing, and we’ll get volunteers to give MPs’ registered interests and overall transparency score. The process will also include a right of reply, so MP’s can respond to the summaries we write. 

We do this work because we think it is possible to make politics better from the outside. Through combining the effort of volunteers with the lever of technology, we can make a real difference in how things work. 

If you’d like to support this project – please donate today.